All the News That’s Fit to Print

The big news from the Billy Whiskers Café, on Saturday, came from a breakfasting group of pilots. One regaled all present with his tale of losing power on take-off and somehow landing his plane backwards. After he had paid his bill and departed, Karen and Rick, the owners, and David and I debated whether by backwards he meant literally tail first, or if he had somehow managed to circle around and land in the wrong direction on the runway. Either way, he claimed to have ripped off his flaps on a barbed wire fence and had clearly earned the tee shirt he was wearing that proudly proclaimed DEADSTICK.

Meanwhile, the big news on Big Hill is all about the sonic boom caused by a meteor. The Earth annually  goes through the Lyrid meteor shower, a debris field left behind by the comet Thatcher. This meteor was big as a VW bus and traveling at 33,000 miles per hour when it crashed into our atmosphere, setting off an explosion equal in force to 3.8 kilotons of TNT, or about one quarter the energy released by the atomic bomb that fell on Hiroshima. No wonder our house seemed to lift off its foundation! A 6-year old child who saw the fireball while out playing described it as a big, beautiful bird, a red one, with lots of rainbows.

News, however, that pieces of the meteor hit Big Hill are unfounded, or at least unsubstantiated, as yet. My friend Marianne, her husband, Jake, and son, Michael, were inundated with Forestry and fire trucks, these agencies suspecting that their house and propane tank had been hit, as they had just lit off big burn piles when the boom sounded.

Marianne, who lives about a mile away as the crow flies, called to reassure us that all was well, which was a relief, because they live in a little paradise. We had just been to visit them the day before, in their late 1800’s home, surrounded by old fruit trees, verdant gardens, a koi pond and pens for a wide assortment of birds, including chickens, turkeys, geese and ducks. Marianne sent us home with three dozen fresh eggs and a bag of freshly-cut asparagus, while we had brought them a jar of our raw honey.

This is how life on the mountain goes. We all pursue our separate passions and then have the joy of divvying up the results. Plus we keep our ears to the ground and warn one another in the event of fire, suspicious characters, or in this case, falling, exploding space debris.

The weird synchronicity was this: David and I had just been to our attorney, on Thursday last, to update our living trust. As we sat in the waiting room, we chatted about how one never knows when one’s life will end. “Yes,” I said, “who knows? We could walk out of here and get hit by a meteor.” I’ve been working with the idea, generated by quantum physics, that thought takes form, and really watching my thoughts and the things they have the potential to create. If this meteor was an indication, I’m progressing with this practice nicely, if a trifle erratically.

The final bit of news is that I just today received my first royalty check for Commune of Women. It was a goodly sum and made me smile. After years of writing with no payoff but the sense of, as my mother used to say, being weary in well-doing, actual cash generated by the process seems genuinely miraculous. So I’ve decided to think about this more. A 3.8 kiloton explosion in my bank account wouldn’t be hard to take. I’m invoking the big, red, rainbow-trailing Bird of Prosperity. So stay turned. If your house jumps on its foundation, you’ll know I’m succeeding!