Irises in the Rain

I was pleasantly surprised this morning to see white irises blooming next to the Holy Road Barn. Maybe I should have expected them - they are a spring flower, but I think they bloom earlier than this. Regardless, they are lovely. I can't bring myself to pick them - maybe tomorrow for the Wednesday potluck.

There's not often much to say about my days in the Holy Road House. It's writing each morning, work for the house and coop in the afternoons, and a lot of that work, like today, is repetative and hardly interesting enough to talk about, and the result, like my story drafts, are often not ready for prime time. Nonetheless I made good progress today on readying the Tumbleweed Cabaret web site for Lizzie and Baba.

I don't know who's coming tomorrow for the potluck, but I'm going to prepare something special, something other than soup or stew this time. Something interesting.

Here's the second of ten exercises:

II.

Martin la Folet turned his face to the wind and sniffed. Rank, he thought, as usual. One would not want to go there. He quickly banished the image of the docks and their rough company that formed in his mind – he'd left all that and he preferred to think of the waterfront and the ocean, if he thought of it at all, as a foreigner might: simple romantic scenes of pleasure and indulgence painted in cooling pastels. It was as if he had never been there, really, a neat trick of the mind if one simply chose to look at it that way. The past was the past and long gone, and this was now, a new day brimming with opportunity. Martin stepped smartly in his new pointed leather boots toward that part of the city which was now his destiny. Without turning his head, he glimpsed another businessman, like himself, who was surely admiring this tall well-turned young man in the new suit, dark hair neatly cropped, thin face with sharp nose facing straight ahead as he walked crisply toward the Evans Imports Co. office building in the heart of the city's commercial district.