I am at the farm and bemused. I was going through office stuff before attempting the drive back to the Emerald City. I toggled over to check my private mail as a diversion, and was stopped in my digital tracks.

A pal had sent a picture from long ago and far away and wondered at its provenance. I looked at it silently. The image shows two immensely dignified young men in front of a small frame house in a mountain town. One appears dressed for some sort of court appearance and the other does not.

I am one of them, and I marveled at the years between. Almost 40 of them, which stretched end-to-end is exactly the distance between now and then.

This morning I can be whoever I want to be, within reason, and it is a relief. I saw with surprise that I had a light morning on the schedule and intend to take advantage of it to clear up some backlogged projects and go back up to the lunacy in Oz after the traffic dies down.

The farm is a jumble of disorder, and is emphatically NOT STAGED for sale. Everything, animate or not, has a story if anyone cares to remember.

Not the same back up there in Never-Never Land. Unit 405 is now depersonified, except for the portraits of Sky Girl, who appears to have awakened to the possibility of something wonderful, and the China Girl, who sadly realizes that she is trapped in something that is not.

When I arrived at the farm, I swerved over to check the mail from the driver’s side window of the Panzer.

Something was building a nest and eating the mail when I pulled in to pull out the advertising fliers from the last two weeks. I got out my cane and poked it to ensure that the first thing I felt was not the Clarion-Bugle but the teeth of a voleor chipmunk.

I wheeled into the circular gravel drive and took a quick survey of the property. There was no storm damage that I could ascertain, and opened up the house and set up the computer to get current with the office email.

That was when the picture arrived, and that took me far away. I remember it as though the years had not fled of their own volition.

Scene: an old hard-scrabble mining town in the vastness of the Intermountain West, suddenly overrun by Beach people from California. In the living room of a cheaply-constructed rented condo, a group of young men, some in sweats and some in suits and Stetsons were contemplating dinner. The time is late afternoon and particles of dust dance in the bright thin light:

Muhammed: “Are we down to lard to put on the baked potatoes?”

Bonds: “We are out of potatoes.”

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com