As I mentioned previously, I’m going to be doing a speed writing event on the weekend that ends with MLK Jr Day, and I invite ye all to come along. I’m going to write about 12,500 words a day from Friday Jan 17th through Monday Jan 20th. You can set more modest goals and only participate a few of those days if you please. Fiction or non-fiction is fine. Post in the comments or elsewhere with links in the comments, or be shy / inviso and just mention your word count when you get to resting points. I’ll read yours if you read mine; critique can be as baby-gloved as you please. Holler in the comments if you want to join.
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My husband is poor folks like me, but a lil’ less so. No homeless shelters, but there were shitty apartments and shotgun shacks. As a child he used to live on this one narrow little street in Fife, close enough to major roads for major road noise, across the street from a scrubby field of bullshit. There were rats, the floor was uneven enough to watch a dropped pen roll away from you. But unlike an apartment, you get your own garden space, which is nice for people like him.
For as long as it lasts, because nothing lasts for the poors. I dearly hope this condo is end-game for us, but if life goes one way instead of another, a mortgage default, and we’ll be lucky to not land in the streets. Everything up to this was an endless string of shoddy apartments jacking rent through the roof, jobs changing cities, shit forcing us to move every few years, up and down the I-5 corridor. The shotgun shack of his childhood was given up, and apartment life resumed.
His mother has always been a nervous driver, and prefers familiar back roads to busy thoroughfares, so she’d drive past the old house unnecessarily every time we drove back from Tacoma to Federal Way. I ended up seeing the house a few times, until it was bulldozed by some new owner to do some kind of bullshit. Probably the demolition was the right thing, but the moments leading up to such an event are like The Pit and the Pendulum for wildlife. Interesting flora and fauna grew there in the absence of human occupation, and now they are dead and paved over.
Very near that house, on that stretch of road, is the only place I can ever remember seeing a california quail in the wild. California quails are named after the state where i was born, and they are cute as hell. That wacky flipped-over plume on the head is iconic. As I recall it now, I used to have a quail among my stuffed animals. I don’t remember what I named it, but I thought of it as being a girl – even though it had male markings. Trans rights!
Drop all your cool quail stories in the comment section. This post needs more birds!
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We owned a house in the Eastern Sierra Nevada (California) for a few years, that backed onto national forest land, and we had a resident quail family. It was absolutely adorable to see them over the spring and summer, traveling across the yard in a line, Mom leading, chicks following, and Dad bringing up the rear. In the spring, the chicks were little balls of fluff, and gradually grew to resemble their parents over the summer and fall.
The last year we were there, there weren’t but a couple of chicks. Perhaps not coincidentally, that was the year that a fox took to scratching its back on the gravel driveway occasionally, rolling happily with feet in the air.
yeah, they are, unfortunately, a total food animal. gotdam marshmallow peep lookin emeffs. i’d pop them in my mouth like candy if i was a dog.