(no subject)
more people i've met in the last couple of weeks:
a teenage girl in the butterfly garden ticket window with unreal blue plasticine irises and dilated pupils that turned out to be contacts (freaky weird, like meeting a movie character).
aunt cherie, a short, thin, frail woman with a walking stick made out of a tall umbrella with a heavy base duct-taped to it, visiting the butterfly garden on a dreary morning with her niece, tall and squarely hefty with glasses and straight brown hair. both of them wore inverse outfits of lime greens and hot pinks, her niece the more conservative choices of slacks and a sweater vest, and she the more outrageous ones of a flowered skirt, a buttoned jacket to the chin, a sparkly feather boa winding around either side of her orange face, and, on top of her permed dark golden hair, the pièce de résistance, a flowered hat. she had magenta lipstick, lots of mascara, and a wide, warm smile of uneven teeth. she reminded me of an heiress, or a midget dolly parton, or a living munchkin - someone reenacting the self-conscious whimsy of a fern michaels paperback about aging southern belles, except that she seemed to maybe have the crisp accent of a ritzy new englander. she'd hurt her leg in a horseback riding incident. she bought another fancy tall umbrella that day (i opened three or four and twirled them for her in the cramped gift store) and a giant crepe paper sunflower (in a bright green color that she called "chartreuse," selected not because it matched her outfit but because its interior, a bright yellow, made the most sense to her; she liked our sky blue flowers too, she said, but their inside circles were a weedy sort of gray-green). the rain started beating down when they left, and her nameless niece held her arm all the way up the zigzagging path back to surrey hill for the next three-horse carriage.
a dishwashing, daydreaming asperger's boy who spends his mornings cleaning half-eaten food off green chinaware at one of the world's largest summer resorts, his nights playing card games and listening to good music with friends at the picnic table of the hotel's employee quarters (somewhere between an apartment village and a prison compound), and the main bulk of his life working as a deck hand on a tall ship in the lower peninsula's most northeast point, where he grew up with a schizophrenic father who tried to drown him in a bathtub at age seven because he heard voices telling him to take his son to jerusalem and commit suicide with him, and where his wheelchair-bound stepfather, a parole officer paralyzed in a bad snowmobile accident, taught him how to work on a seventy-six-year-old swedish wooden thirty square meter. (he has a beaten-up ditty bag full of sail-stitching needles and handmade wooden tools, and he wants to captain a tall ship of his own one day, but it requires a lot of knowledge - mathematics, navigation, plotting his own courses - and he has reading disabilities, even though his vocabulary is full of lovely words like "incursion" and "deviant." he also has a fear of heights, although he's found a way to overcome it, he told me one evening, balancing on top of the metal spine linking all of the monkey bars together: climbing up lots of really high places.)
a tall, paunchy man with a thin face, a tropical hawaiian shirt, and a large straw farmer's hat (big smiley faces drawn on the brim) who ambled into the gift store, looked around with his hands in his pockets, and, when he noticed us staring, asked, "anything i can help you with today?" fifteen minutes later, he came back in and left a smooth pebble on the open notebook that we use to record all of our sales. it said "GOD LOVES YOU" inside a border of swirls and dots.
a teenage girl in the butterfly garden ticket window with unreal blue plasticine irises and dilated pupils that turned out to be contacts (freaky weird, like meeting a movie character).
aunt cherie, a short, thin, frail woman with a walking stick made out of a tall umbrella with a heavy base duct-taped to it, visiting the butterfly garden on a dreary morning with her niece, tall and squarely hefty with glasses and straight brown hair. both of them wore inverse outfits of lime greens and hot pinks, her niece the more conservative choices of slacks and a sweater vest, and she the more outrageous ones of a flowered skirt, a buttoned jacket to the chin, a sparkly feather boa winding around either side of her orange face, and, on top of her permed dark golden hair, the pièce de résistance, a flowered hat. she had magenta lipstick, lots of mascara, and a wide, warm smile of uneven teeth. she reminded me of an heiress, or a midget dolly parton, or a living munchkin - someone reenacting the self-conscious whimsy of a fern michaels paperback about aging southern belles, except that she seemed to maybe have the crisp accent of a ritzy new englander. she'd hurt her leg in a horseback riding incident. she bought another fancy tall umbrella that day (i opened three or four and twirled them for her in the cramped gift store) and a giant crepe paper sunflower (in a bright green color that she called "chartreuse," selected not because it matched her outfit but because its interior, a bright yellow, made the most sense to her; she liked our sky blue flowers too, she said, but their inside circles were a weedy sort of gray-green). the rain started beating down when they left, and her nameless niece held her arm all the way up the zigzagging path back to surrey hill for the next three-horse carriage.
a dishwashing, daydreaming asperger's boy who spends his mornings cleaning half-eaten food off green chinaware at one of the world's largest summer resorts, his nights playing card games and listening to good music with friends at the picnic table of the hotel's employee quarters (somewhere between an apartment village and a prison compound), and the main bulk of his life working as a deck hand on a tall ship in the lower peninsula's most northeast point, where he grew up with a schizophrenic father who tried to drown him in a bathtub at age seven because he heard voices telling him to take his son to jerusalem and commit suicide with him, and where his wheelchair-bound stepfather, a parole officer paralyzed in a bad snowmobile accident, taught him how to work on a seventy-six-year-old swedish wooden thirty square meter. (he has a beaten-up ditty bag full of sail-stitching needles and handmade wooden tools, and he wants to captain a tall ship of his own one day, but it requires a lot of knowledge - mathematics, navigation, plotting his own courses - and he has reading disabilities, even though his vocabulary is full of lovely words like "incursion" and "deviant." he also has a fear of heights, although he's found a way to overcome it, he told me one evening, balancing on top of the metal spine linking all of the monkey bars together: climbing up lots of really high places.)
a tall, paunchy man with a thin face, a tropical hawaiian shirt, and a large straw farmer's hat (big smiley faces drawn on the brim) who ambled into the gift store, looked around with his hands in his pockets, and, when he noticed us staring, asked, "anything i can help you with today?" fifteen minutes later, he came back in and left a smooth pebble on the open notebook that we use to record all of our sales. it said "GOD LOVES YOU" inside a border of swirls and dots.