The dogs are wondering what happened to my vividness, and so am I. Seems like this dumb cold is two steps forward and one step back — but that’s still progress. I also wonder at this point if it is a cold, with the inaccuracy of home Covid tests being the stuff of legend. And then I think, “Yeah, but all you can do in either case is wait it out.” Still it’s pretty amazing what our bodies do to get rid of something that doesn’t belong. This is war.
In my recent talk with the bot — ChatGPT — over writing a piece of dystopian fiction in which corporations and their machines take over the world and ultimately destroy human life, I wanted to talk to it about whether anything in nature — such as humans — could ever create something that was completely OUT of nature or if anything humans made would, in some way, always come to resemble natural forms and processes in the way complicated highway systems looking like — and operate like — an animal’s circulatory system.
It was up for the idea because it’s a bot, and it’s programmed to be up for the ideas humans bring to it. I suggested that even the machines of the future would ultimately evolve into something reminiscent of their human creators and that even the fact that the machines had killed all the humans was a very human behavior. The bot took this under advisement and didn’t throw out the idea because, well, it couldn’t.
That’s a story I’m unlikely to write. I have read and enjoyed science fiction since I was a kid, but it’s not my thing to produce. Putting the jig-saw puzzle of the future together in fiction doesn’t interest me as much as the jig-saw puzzle of the past. I guess the closest I will ever come to writing science fiction would be the Saga of Lamont and Dude which seems to have petered out after several hundred posts and Lamont dying and coming back as an albatross.
Speaking of the jig-saw puzzle of the past, this photo of my grandma came up today in my Facebook memories.
In this photo she seems to be filling a barrel from a well. The two draught horses will pull it back to the house so my grandma can (my mom told me) do her laundry.
Anyway, that’s how my mom explained it to me, but when I enlarge it, I am not sure. The photo is some 90 years old, and its events are already so distant to me that I, her granddaughter, have “no idea what’s going on.” You have wonder about the car — whose car is it? I know it wasn’t my grandparents’ car. Neither of them ever drove. What’s it doing there?
It looks like this was once a pretty nice farm — big, beautiful barn, not that old, nice tight, hen house. But there are fenceposts with no fences and boards lying around everywhere. Why? Some look to be impromtud walkways over seasonal mud, but that’s just a guess. There’s a wagon parked against the hen house. Even putting a story together around this one picture would be pretty difficult. I know where, though. The high plains of south-central Montana.
So, if my mom was right — and I suspect she was because she lived this — the fact that I won’t have a fully functional laundry room until week after next is no big hardship.
P.S. What I know about this photo for sure: The photo was taken during the depression. It was a drought and dustbowl in Montana but to a lesser extent than in Oklahoma and other places. I think high winds happened a lot, too (and still do). I suspect the farm was semi-abandoned, maybe taken back by the bank???? My grandfather was a tenant farmer, and he could’ve been working it (poorly) for whoever owned it. Their house on that place was half-log, half-sod. Awful. They were extremely poor.
“Summer is the season of inferior sledding” - Inuit proverb 
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