Sunday

Often, while I'm away, I start thinking of Sunshine's family farm as being some sort of fantasy place. It's bucolic: mountain fields, ponds and shelves of rock dot the landscape. It often storms with showy electricity before settling into pretty lingering fog. In spring it explodes in flowers. It's brightly colored, upholstered, and scattered with interesting decorations. Bottle cap mosaics and painted gourds decorate the farmhouse, mannequins and decaying baby dolls sit here and there. Large paintings and collages with castaway AOL CDs can be found on nearby roofs and walls. There are small, year-round flowers cut from painted tin and larger flowers painted on little stands of satellite dishes. There are also the realities of farm life, of course. Even these seem whimsical to me: the history of tobacco farming, pastures lent for dairy cows and hay, beehives and honey, lopsided vegetable gardens. The fact is, looking at photos of the place, remembering spending time here, this farm seems to ferment mythologically in my mind. I begin thinking I'm enhancing things. I'm always surprised when I return to discover that, no, it's just exactly how I remember it. Today's waxing is brought to you by ladybugs, by the way. Any bug in sufficient quantity is considered a pest; yet ladybugs are so damn cute. Where I've lived, homes become infested with roaches, ants, or silverfish (one seldom worries about termites in rental property). Nasty, dirty-feeling creatures that creep and destroy wellbeing. But I recall that, instead of rats, this house has cute flying squirrels. When I spend summer weeks in the old smokehouse, I awake to hundreds of moths instead of hornets' nests. As I write this, I'm surrounded by spotted, harmless ladybugs. Even pests here are a bit whimsical, see; and will be, in retrospect, mythical. [Cavin]