I like heart.

Heart's been done, I'm pretty sure. I vote green.

We have done heart, so green it is. Thanks, people.

Official drabble announce-y thing:

Challenge #68 (cooking) is now closed.

Challenge #69 is green.

Kristin - really? Or is it fiction? Do you guys not do Home Ec at school? 'cause if not - wow. Bless you.

I just checked the thread and laughed a lot that my little throwaway drabble got you all talking so. Hee! Yes Fay, 100 percent true. It happened when I was 22, no less. We had home ec classes in junior high, but the ones in high school were electives. I did takre several parenting type classes, but alas no cooking ones. Truly it should have been mandatory. What I didn't say in the drabble was that, eyes streaming from the onions, I finally called my mom, sobbing. After she stifled her laughter she said, "Oh Kristin...I've failed you." She still feels guilty about the fact she never taught me to cook.

Superstition

It's the colour of jealousy: Green-eyed envy, dissatisfaction with your own life, your own arrangements, the dancing little devil of wanting what you can't have and don't necessarily deserve.

It's the colour of money: Greed, that hard crusty bitterness, avarice's maid of honour, the moneychangers in the temple.

It's the colour of bad luck: No green at a wedding.

I look at my wedding ring, the emerald that warmed his skin and mine. I look at it with my green eyes.

I'm jealous of nobody. And the ring has been there for nearly a quarter century.

Green? My favourite colour.

My eye has grown used to what the desert calls green, a faded, greyish, yellowy sort of green. Even where stupid people drown their lawns in precious water, the green seems hollow.

The pictures from my home in Pennsylvania baffled me at first. Had I used a filter? Was it cloudy that day? Had the photo emulsion changed?

No. Green is dark, thick, rolling for acres under the summer sun in a land where water flows without need for a name. I miss green. I would like to go back to that land in the end, to feed the green.

Very nice.

Connie, I definitely hear yours. I'm sitting in Indiana, looking out the door at lush green yards -- everyone is complaining about how brown they are -- and in eighteen hours I'll be on my way to the desert and the gorgeous faint hints of green that mean the plants that look completely dead are actually thriving. Well, technically on the way. By way of a freaking water park, and a couple of towns.

Oh, and Susan, I need your snail mail. I thought I had it but can't find it. I'm so sick of being on the road. So can you send it to my profile addy?

Insent, Liese.

Got it, thanks, Susan. Your brochures will hit the mail tomorrow.

From One Island to Another

It was the third leg of a 28-hour trip. Confined to the inside of that silver metal tube, hour after hour, with only brief stops to refuel where we might be allowed an hour to desultorily scan the duty free shops for gifts left me feeling cheated of the experience of landing in new countries: nothing I could touch, taste, smell or hear. Only the meager view from the window before landing. Yet, even today, there’s one I’ll never forget. So many shades of green, I thought we’d need new words for them. But, really, we already have one: Ireland.