Daily Archives: October 26, 2024

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If I were your child

Living in a town of 9000, now 10,000, I did not feel that my children needed cell phones. They could walk home from school. It is reasonably safe, though I knew too much about local use of heroin and methamphetamines to believe that anywhere is completely safe.

I spoke to a friend from high school in the early 2000s. He asked me to text him my address.

“I’ve never texted.” I said.

“NEVER?” he said.

“Nope.”

“Haven’t your kids taught you how?”

“My kids don’t have cell phones.”

Long silence. Then: “If I were your child, I would run away.”

I laughed. My son got a cell phone when he headed for college and my daughter got a track phone, ten dollars a month, in high school. Calls and no texting. My son ran away the same way I did, as an exchange student. He went to Thailand at age 16 and was on the Maylay Peninsula, two years after the tsunami hit. His first comment calling home was, “Mom, the world is a really scary place.” Going off to be an exchange student is a fabulous way to run away, because you learn tons and come home.

My daughter had one friend who she would go to sleep over in her teens.

“I don’t want to sleep over any more.” she said after one night.

“Why?” I asked.

“She is up texting and by midnight she and friends are having arguments by phone and she cries. I want to sleep.”

Don’t leave the phone in the kids’ rooms, parents. And don’t have the phone in your bedroom either!!!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: texting. With music: https://youtu.be/hkmZGh9DQZ4.

The photograph is Studt’s Pumpkin Patch and Corn Maze again.

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Black cat

Sol Duc is pretty happy to be home, even though we do not have a cat door. The yard does not have a secure fence, the road is fast and busy for here, and anyhow, birds.

A black cat for the season, lit with purple, to go with the pumpkins and orange haired nightmare goblins and completely insane speeches and advertisements. Eeeeee, much of it is way more horrific and terrifying than any costume, not just black on the outside, but charred all the way through.

In the photograph, Sol Duc is in the radiant sauna. She approves of it. I am cold here, not because it’s much colder than Grand Junction, but I’m not used to the wet any more. We moved here arriving on New Year’s Eve 2000 and that first winter just felt awfully cold, dampness through to my bone marrow. We were used to it by the second winter.

My pump is ordered and should be fixed next Wednesday. I have two friends who offered their washing machines in the interim, but it was the towels that cleaned up the mild flooding that I had to wash. I went to the laundromat with those.

Now, what shall I be for Halloween? I am invited to a costume party with prizes. The only thing that has occurred to me so far is to dress up as a mesa. I suppose the most horrifying costume I could choose is a political advertisement, ick.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: pumpkin.