Hide and Seek

On the road from Lowlucken's Organic Farm, March 10, 2010

We are all playing hide and seek with Real Life. We talk of jobs and appartments as if they were secrets, speaking in whispers so that it can't hear us. We respond to job postings on the sly.  We worry about What Next in moments stolen from our schedule, while tossing under our the covers, where we think it can't catch us. That is why we travel so much, piling quickly into the van, hurrying and stumbling over each other so that real life won't notice our departure. He has agents everywhere, in glasgow and across the UK. His network spans continents and his welldressed agents operates without remorse. We can't stay too long in any one place lest they catch us.

Most of us, if caught, would quiver. Would blanche and admit lingering insecurity and try to patch up the the accusation (spoken with the familiar jocularity of an old friend) that we had been avoiding it. But Mia would laugh. Over her two years off, she confides, while sapping and blacksmithing and milking sheep, she has earned not a handful of dollars. But she has earned milk, good goatsmilk, and according to Mia she would take goatsmilk over dollars any day. So Mia would laugh at real life's boned face in its  black cowl, and into it's hungrylooking fingers she would place a glass jar of fresh milk.

Me, I try to extend a friendly hand to real life even while trying to escape from it. Knowing that with his mutts nose and falcolns eyes he will track my trail eventually, i try to blackmail the blackmailer. I do dishes in hosts' houses, even when our hosts have a dishwasher. (Real life admires goid work and clean bowls). Laundry cures the blues, and sometimes I treat myself to a good dose of making sandwiches. I stuff three foiled bundles of pita, peanut butter, and apple slices into my backpack: sandwich security. Should real life come busting into our van, I will give him a sandwich, my offering, and he will not hurt me.