C is for Cacophony

We live on a hobby farm. That’s a farm that doesn’t seriously try to make money or make any attempt to apply for government farm subsidies. Money goes in but it never comes out. It’s like owning a boat, but with goats.

The countryside of Central Florida, where we hobby farm, has its own special sounds and smells. I like to call it the cacophonous order of freedom. We live outside the city limits, limits being the optimal word. We live in the county where the rules are different, options abound, and the sound of gunfire is frequent and non-threatening.

“Why is the dog hiding under the dinner table?” I ask.

“The neighbors,” a grand boy replies, “they’re shooting at stuff.”

Everyone tilts their head—some to the right, some to left—to listen. Sure enough, the sound of blam, blam, blam drifts through the dining room windows.

“Ahhhh . . . target practice.” It’s a consensus.

The smell of smoke accents the sound of gunfire. We all breathe deeply. “Ahhhh . . . Mr. Medina is burning stuff,” I observe.

Sandhill cranes bang out their hollow drum call as they sail across the sky. In the cow pasture behind us, coyotes send up their primal howling. A lone cow, possibly in labor, bawls out her distress. The air boat guy two properties down, fires up his airboat, sending a bratty, screechy whine spewing across the neighborhood.

Children yell and shout and yip from the “talking tree.”

By the by, the talking tree is not a tree that talks, it is a tree where you go to sit and talk to your buddies, thus, the talking tree.

Our dog barks at something only she can see or hear or smell.

The wind sets the leaves to trembling and skittering in the golden light of a dying sun.

The sounds of sirens and traffic are intermittent at best and act as a counterpoint to all the rest—the cacophony of the countryside where we live.

But now that I think of it, isn’t a cacophony a discordant collection of jarring noises?

Answer: Yes!

So, I’m going to change my word. It’s not a cacophony at all.

The sound of air rattling past Maple leaves and rushing through Spanish moss mixed with the perfume of smoke and colored with the shrieks of laughing kids and the bleating talk-talk between mother goats and their babies isn’t a cacophony at all.

It’s music.

Linda (All Ears) Zern

B is for Bask

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B is for Bask

When we bought our house in Central Florida, the former home owner handed me a long, slender strip of wood with a bent coat hanger hook stapled at one end.

He said, “This is your snake stick. You’re going to need it.” With that, he and his lovely wife climbed into their RV and roared off into the Florida sunset. The snake stick is designed to humanely lift cold-blooded snakes off the handle of the garbage can—a handle that a human might be about to grab with his/her bare, warm-blooded hand.

I didn’t even get a chance to thank him for my new snake stick.

And I should have. Thanked him. Black snakes patrol the foundation of our home like North Korean soldiers looking for random American tourists or Christian hikers. They bask—to expose oneself pleasantly to warmth—in the sun on my walkways. They drape—to fall or hang in loose folds—themselves in the branches of my hedges. They shed—to fall off—their skins among my sunflowers.

They make me wet—tinkling urine out of fear—in my pants.

Not that I’m anti-snake. I’m not. But dang, is there an animal on the face of the earth better at the “gotcha game” than the cold-blooded snake? I think not.

How many snakes, you ask? Approximately twelve dozen or one really busy one. I’m not sure.

What do they want, you may wonder? Lizards.

Florida is awash with creepy, crawly types, and I don’t just mean the massage parlor boys. Lizards dart, whip, creep, flick, and crawl all over the screens of our porch. Our snakes have developed an interesting lizard hunting technique. They slither along the base of the porch and then leap straight up to pluck distracted lizards off the porch screen. True story. I’ve seen it. Our snakes can leap—about as high as a couple of chubby toddlers stacked one on top of another.

Snake stick? You bet. I carry it with me when I stroll through the pasture or feed the chickens or breathe fresh air. I worry that the snakes will mistake me for a porch screen covered in lizards. It might not be a rational concern, but it is real.

Today, I smacked a lizard off the back-porch screen, sending it flying into the yard. It hit the ground, gained its feet, and blazed its way back to the safety of the porch screen. A wily black snake gobbled the lizard up inches from safety, and now I’m going to have to continue to feed the foundation snakes or they’ll break into the house and punish us. I know it.

It’s not a rational worry, but it is real.

Linda (Snake Skin) Zern

      

A is for Ameliorate

WRITING MY WAY THROUGH THE DICTIONARY:

A is for Ameliorate

I don’t know anyone who isn’t writing a book, who isn’t thinking about writing a book, who hasn’t already written a book, or having written a book isn’t now planning to write My Book, Part Two—Cash, Check, or Charge.  All of which is wildly exciting—also bewildering. It’s a brave new book-writing world.

Guttenberg would be proud—also bewildered, I bet.

I’ve written a book—of course—well ten books, actually. One of which is a middle grade, soft cover, work of historical fiction called MOONCALF. It’s literature. It contains no sex, drugs, wizards, or rock and roll. I made $1.68 cents in royalties last month, and I’m competing with 700,000 other titles in my category on Amazon.  I have twenty-one EXCELLENT reviews on Amazon and only one of them is my mother.

The problem with everyone writing a book, including my poet house painter, is not the competition, but it’s the sheer mathematical mass of the competition. It’s like being one oat in a silo of oats or a jet liner at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Tricky. Very tricky to get noticed.

A writer friend of mine suggested paying for and participating in a Book Blast to ameliorate the trickiness of being one book in the flood of one million plus titles published each year.

I did this and wrote the check.  Please don’t ask me what a Book Blast is, because I still don’t know.  I think it’s when your book title gets tweeted by a trillion people hoping to win a free _________________ (fill in the blank.)

It was fun.  I got lots of strangers wanting to be my tweety friends and email pals.

I also got promptly hacked, causing my new email, tweety friends to send me messages alerting me to the hackage. They were very nice about the hundreds of posts advertising weight loss products that appeared to be coming from my fat bottom. They said, “Hey, you’ve been hacked. Fix that would you.” It wasn’t a request.

My book, MOONCALF, was not mentioned.

And so, I ameliorated—a word meaning to make better or improve—the problem of someone pretending to be me by changing all my passwords, ninety percent of which I’ve promptly forgotten.

No worries. I press on. My next book Healing the Strandline (third in The Strandline series) is a young adult romantic prepper action adventure that will fit nicely into the already over-crowded young adult romantic prepper action adventure genre.

To ameliorate the potential of being crushed under the endless weight of vampires, shape shifters, and death game players, I plan to keep my characters naked for the entire book as they fly from spot to spot while hanging from their own personal drones.

No, I don’t. 

Someone’s probably already written that book.

Linda (Better Now?) Zern