dragonlady7

I went outside this evening, into the cute little backyard of Dave's mom's house. There was a night-blooming cereus about to bloom, and I watched it and watched it, and went inside for ten minutes, and when I came back out it had already opened. Three blossoms. Apparently they open very fast, so you can watch them. I've been trying for three days, and have missed them every time. Oh well.

I was outside just before sunset, and the sun had come out from under the clouds and was lighting up all the green leaves with gold, and the air was very clean in the way that it is just after it has rained, and the new pavement was wet and grooved under my bare feet, and the flowers were all blooming and the air smelled very fresh.

And I missed the house where I grew up. I miss going barefoot all summer long. I miss having three sisters so that life was almost always lived in an exuberant and noisy crowd. I miss all the multitude of pets (at one point, three cats, two dogs, fifteen chickens, two horses, six hamsters, and three goldfish shared the property with six humans) and the fact that there was always someone else home and doing something. I spent long years sitting alone in my room, but I was never really alone-- there was always something going on, somewhere, and the sound of the table saw across the driveway or the conversation in the next room was all the companionship I needed.

I got quite homesick, and so I went through my iPhoto library and found all the pictures I could of Melrose. The old green farmhouse (now painted blue) on the dead-end dirt road (now paved) across from a cornfield (now soybeans)... that now has three cats, no dogs, and only Mom and Dad living in it. (Though, my littlest sister is home for the summer.)

I put my favorite 90 photos of home into a folder, and will autogenerate a webpage later once I've organized them into some kind of order. I should trim them down but I'm a terrible editor. If I worked for National Geographic the damn thing would be 400 pages long, because I can't reject a photo.

(Update: Here's the link to my photos of home.)