Earth

I like it up here in the mountains, away from nearly everything. With the ultra-green of the pine trees pointing up at the cerulean sky. It’s a long way from everything, you can’t hear anybody’s music, anybody’s car driving along the road. And God knows there’s no neighbours you have to hear arguing.

I have to go into town about once a month for supplies – I haven’t worked out how to go totally self-sufficient, off-the-grid, crazy-hermit, and I’m not sure I’m totally ready to anyway. Every now and then I feel the need for some human company, to see a face or two that’s real and not digital.

But then I remember the glass table, and the glass hands… I think: crap, crap, crap, it’s just right there on the inside, sliding around beneath my skin, and even when I can’t feel it, I know it still wants to get out.

The gardening in soothing. And Oh My God, I have the hugest garden. Outside my little lovely cabin there is nothing but the endless flow of garden at all angles. I have vegetables planted in every-which-direction; there are fruit trees growing, and grape vines – thank you Global Warming, I could never have grown those up here without you – they’re all over the place, as far as the eye can see. I have chickens. I have bee-hives. Can you eat bees? I should google some recipes. Or wait, aren’t they full of poison? It’s peace and safety, and just in touching-distance of true independence.

It’s not completely safe. Last week I left my cauliflower patch and I came back to find it all turned ferrous and coper. The multifarious earth all hard and cold, all blended-in metals, striped and swirly. Maybe if I could come up with an explanation, I could sell some of it. But those cold cauliflowers, all grey and bronzed, inedible… That poor snail…

I don’t know why I do it, I don’t know how I do it, and I certainly don’t choose to do it. I don’t have much control – that glass table that used to be wood-and-plastic, the glass hands that’d been flesh – and I certainly don’t know how to do undo this shit. I just walked out in the morning to tend my garden I saw what had become of the cauliflower patch. It’s been nearly a year since the last time – those poor rusting pumpkins – but I have so much land, so much potential garden. So it’s all going to be all right.

I do miss my family. I wish I could go down there and join them for Christmas dinner one year and just hug the lot of them. But then I imagine where that embrace could go: me, like some cheap-ass King Midas, and the looks of horror on their faces, the way the rest of them would be backing away from me super-fast.

No, this is much better. Much safer.

I like it up here in the mountains, away from nearly everything.

picture credit/discredit: author's own work