. . . . .

In this picture: a butterfly, a spinning top, a sea star.

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Also: grocery shopping in town has changed since Super Walmart went up over the summer. The first three packages of chicken breast were bad when I bought them, I noticed when I opened them and smelled the turned meat. I returned them to HyVee where the workers stood around quietly waiting for customers. I was the only one in line on a Tuesday after-work evening when the store is usually crunching. The dates on the milk were all old.

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Also: I've filled eight garbage bags with clothes that must go. Including the size 4 crushed velvet dress from the eighties and its shoulder pads and the cutoff pinstripe denim Guess overalls I wore in high school. I have 4 empty bins now and a 5th full of hangers. Changed my mind on a pair of over-sized brown trousers, pulled them out of the pile, pulled them over my hips, and found the silver pendant and chain I lost months ago and mourned (also from my mother) in the front pocket.

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Oh, and I would run my three miles--I trained all summer, I'm ready I tell you--but it's either pouring and storming outside or the steaming heat is so thick I couldn't breathe or move my legs the last two times I tried. It's like running in a jacuzzi. You people who poke at me for going to the desert all summer: this is preferable??

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There is only one way of never receiving anything but good. It is to know, with our whole soul and not just abstractly, that men who are not animated by pure charity are merely wheels in the mechanism of the order of the world, like inert matter.

~ Simone Weil

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