Sunday,Sunday

Low tide day......herons slo'mo'ing across the exposed tide flats. A scent of 2nd grade turtle bowl wafting upward from the sun exposed bay bottom.
I am procrastinating once again. Drinking coffee and thinking about what I "should" be doing. This is a well crafted game. It consists of a persistant internal dialogue of things I "SHOULD" do. I watch myself stubbornly resisting my "shoulds" like a recalcitrant child. I sip my large cup of strong coffee, I play at the computer.
I am now taking my blood pressure twice a day and keeping track on my computer. I never imagined I would be a silver haired woman with her own blood pressure monitor. Somehow, from Haight Asbury to here has become a blur of time and sound. That reckless, anti-establishment dancing girl with hair down to her butt; the 94 pound bundle of political activism who provided an endless source of parental angst and despair while blithely committing overt and covert acts of civil disobediance, now sits in her cliff top duplex looking out at her world which presently includes ownership of a personal blood pressure monitor.
I now have a career working in a field I could never have imagined my counter-culture self in: however, the pay is more than I have ever made, with benefits. ( Because I am single, my annual salary still does not place me in the "median average income" for my part of the country).
Although, my less than "median" wages have allowed me to rent this spacious duplex with a view of the water and the mountains. I have, for the first time in my life, two bathrooms, a dishwasher and a new car. My car even has a garage where it rests while waiting for me to arrive with my little "beeper" which signals it to unlock it's doors and welcome me with a blink of it's lights. It never fails to give me a little shiver of delight to see it's shiny automotive self patiently waiting in the gloom of the garage. This happiness comes from years of driving mechanically marginal vehicles. I have now allowed myself to stop fretting about arriving at destinations and believe I will be able to get home without having to push my car, or swear at it, or cry because I may have to hitch a ride with a serial killer-lunatic.
This all seems ridiculously extravagant considering I have lived in places which are smaller than my garage. I lived with 4 children in a house heated with wood and only one bathroom. My children put bricks on the woodstove at night before bed, then would wrap the heated bricks in a towel and carry them upstairs to their unheated bedrooms to warm their toes and sheets while they slept. I have a fireplace now which I use to burn pieces of mail I don't want marauding gangs of identity thieves to pluck from my trash. It seems ridiculous to have a fireplace, there is no place for a woodpile, no place for a well worn stump to serve as a chopping block. I no longer have my favorite little "lady" axe. ( I spend sometime wondering when or where I let go of it; or how I decided a tool I used and relied on to help me provide heat for myself and my children was now expendable.)
Unable to picture the time and place of its departure from my life, I take a large sip of coffee and continue my proscrastination game.......