The Isolation Journals - #108

 Prompt (from journaler Ash Parsons):  Your life might look nothing like mine but maybe you also feel that you lack the time, emotional space, or the presence of that saucy minx, “inspiration,” to write. Maybe you can’t sit down and write multiple pages or hundreds of words but I bet you can come up with ten images from the last 24 hours. Give it a try.

One of my favorite things is going back through my “Ten Images” pages from the last year and seeing what I saw. No matter what is going on in the world, within or without, I know I can find a home in these pages.

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1) A steamy, caramelized exhalation of summer's bounty, a peach clafoutis cooling and settling on the stove

2) Red solo cups in the street scattered by drunken revelers leaving the banger thrown by the Airbnb guests two houses down

3) The Nashville skyline looming large against a cobalt sky as I pedal down the greenway, sunlight glinting off the mountains of scrap metal heaped behind the concrete walls flanking the path

4) The stooped, angry old man yelling 'Aw, Hell, HELL' at the people leaving church on Sunday morning (merely a coincidence - we saw him on Thursday afternoon on a different street, yelling the same thing at passing cars)

5) A stout, iridescent jewel of a beetle, rolling a dog turd across the sidewalk like a burly, flannel-clad lumberjack rolls a log or a jolly, fat German man wearing lederhosen rolls a beer keg

6) The surprisingly revealing peach-colored housedress with the 1970s flower pattern that reminds me of a set of sheets my grandmom kept on the twin bed in what used to be my uncle's bedroom, that I wore for really no reason at all for most of the day on Sunday

7) A fat purple thistle in a field of wildflowers marking the entrance to a brief, underwhelming hiking trail

8) Two cats, one fat, one skinny, writhing on the floor bunny-kicking identical plush mice.  Their backs to one another, engaged in parallel but separate play.  It's progress.

9) My tiny workout buddy likes for us to color-coordinate our equipment.  She could have brought the red pipe cleaner, or the purple one, but she arrived with fluorescent yellow, obviously a deliberate choice.

10) The most divine of all sandwiches, the one I dream about when I wake up hungry in the night.  Crunchy peanut butter on wheat bread, layered with apple slices, liberally dusted with cinnamon, ginger, turmeric, and cayenne.  Packed in a to-go container so I could take it on a picnic.  Today I threw caution to the wind and added in a couple slivers of peach, and could hear the ghost of Kurt Vonnegut whisper, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."