Nothing new, and no one has touched Momentum, the lawn book, the boots, the cornflower blue shirt –

- though inexplicably the plastic cup with plastic utensils has been taken.  Huh?  I was expecting to put that out with the trash tomorrow.   

    

I was thinking about my brother, Reverend Hugh, and how clean a cob of corn looks when he's finished with it.  This fact was almost a point of pride when we were driving through the States the summer I turned 13 and stopped for a few days to visit extended family in South Dakota.  I remember sitting at a long picnic table outside, eating watermelon and corn from the garden of these particular relatives, who were pig farmers.  In the middle of dinner, two girl cousins of ours that I'd never met rode up on their enormously pregnant pony. 

Up until that moment, I'd been going along with things pretty well - I'd been to, even lived in, the country before; I'd eaten produce out of a garden - but when those two girls rode up, it was like the planet shifted on its axis.  It was like finding myself on an entirely different planet.  Everything about it.  Having, owning a horse.  Having it be pregnant, which meant at some point there'd be a foal.  Then, you're hanging out on your farm and you turn to your sister, saying, "Hey, those cousins of ours from the East Coast that we've never met are at Aunt So-and-So's farm.  Let's hop on our pregnant pony and mosey on over there and see what cousins from New York are like."  And so you do that.  You cut across your fields and their fields.  You know the way.  When you get there, those East Coast cousins are shy and worried about your pony.  Thank god the oldest gets every kernel off every cob of corn he eats.  We can talk about that for a minute, admiring, before we're back to being shy, not knowing what these creatures like to talk about, amazed and skeptical when the grown-ups say we're all related.