Me: No drinkable coffe.
Pam: Not enough sugar for her iced tea. And homemade ice cubes are really getting tiresome.
Both:
1. We want POP. What's weird about this is that neither of us are huge pop drinkers. But we're suddenly dying for somethng brown, sweet, cold, and fizzy--and we're willing to drive the 30 mile round trip in order to get it.
2. Delaying a Major Bodily Function for 3 days may not be the wisest idea.
3. We really should let our families know we are still alive.
We write all morning, then pile into the car, roar out of the cow pasture, and drive in the general direction of the nearest town, searching for a phone signal along the way. My cell phone bleeps in and out of service. Whenever I do get a signal, there's no place to pull over (seriously, these are country roads with no shoulders and certainly very few driveways). Whenever I do manage to pull off the road, I immediately lose the signal.
We finally stop at a "house"--quotes used because, seriously, this is exactly like a scene out of Texas Chainsaw! Tiny beat-up house, clothes hanging in the front yard, chickens scrambling around, junk cars piled up on one side of the property and a trailer with smashed-out windows on the other. Tires. Oil cans. Broken fence. Toys. VERY. SCARY. After making brief calls to our families, Pam snaps a picture of the house as we roar away. Hopefully it turns out and she'll send me a copy to post (hint, hint).
We find the town (after asking directions from a guy who I promise will one day show up in another one of my books--scraggly beard, missing teeth, glasses held together by a bandaid...oh, wait, I think I already used him, haha--and omigod! A Dollar Tree AND a Krogers right next to each other! Quite possibly the only two stores in town.
Most Significant Purchases:
1. Three jugs of BOTTLED WATER
2. A one cup coffee maker
3. Sugar
4. Ice
5. A white plastic pail to replace our makeshift peebucket
6. Two ice cold Cokes
Squealing with delight, we grab our Cokes, fly back to the car, pop 'em open, pour 'em down our throats and then sit there enjoying our simultaneous oral orgasms.
NOTHING HAS EVER TASTED THIS WONDERFUL!
Then we drive back to the cabin (before dark, thank Dog) to make coffee and iced tea We place the new pail on the back porch. Just in case.
And then we write. And brainstorm. And write some more. Because it's (naturally) raining by then, so much for a campfire or cooking out over the grill. Pam heats up some delicious goulash on that sinister gas stove, we eat dinner, write some more, then sit on the porch listening to the owls and coyotes, and one damn cow somewhere in the distance that just will not shut up. She sounds so sad. We talk about everything. About everyone. About books we've read. Stories we've written. So many stories we still hope to write
What I learn: I can sit in the same room with another person and write, as long as that person is Pamela. Yes, I'm easily distracted. But it's fun! Not annoying. And if we get stuck on a part of our stories, we put our heads together and bounce ideas. Khyr needed to kill someone. Shawna needed closure. Khyr needed A Reason. Shawna needed one crummy line to make everything okay.
We work it out.
P.S. # 1: Although we've asked each other several times Hey! Can you smell me? and the answer is always no, we decide to risk the snake and hit the bath house.
No snake. It's relatively clean. I wear flipflops to ward off plantars warts. I take advantage of ther drain and running water to, well, you know...
However, we do lock ourselves in. It takes Pam five minutes to figure out how to pry open the door while I hover and moan and wring my hands. Honest to God it's the longest five minutes of my life.
But my hair is clean. This makes me happy.
And my revisions are nearly finished. This makes me even happier.
P.S. # 2: We also discover a second cabin on the other side of the bathhouse. We let ourselves in and discover it's much, MUCH cleaner. Obviously we were put in the wrong one by Mr. ATV who had admitted he didn't know which cabin was ours.
But we are already settled in. We've grown attached to our Little House in the Big Woods. The second outhouse, however, is nowhere NEAR as nasty as ours, i.e. you can't see the $hit from six feet away. So we make plans to use it if, ya know, "push" comes to shove...
No comments:
Post a Comment