Tag: porcupine hill

Mouse Lady

~ johnbrandall

I had another encounter with the mouse lady. Yesterday. I didn't realize it was her; that's how tired I was.

My dad and I were sitting outside, near the St. Francis Center entrance. A woman came out very straight-backed, serious air. She sat down and said, "I just wanted to see who was out here."

And we said, "OK, yeah."

She said, "It's not because I'm nosy. It's because I'm blind."

Blind? Hmmm. She didn't strike me as having a problem with her sight. She had no cane, no walking stick, no walker, nothing. She didn't reach about to feel for the chair when sitting down. I thought she looked familiar but I've been coming here long enough to where most of the people look familiar, because they are.

She remarked on how nice a day we were having, the weather. She asked where we were from. Not from St. Francis, she observed. And now I know where she was coming from, what she was getting at. She's a wasp. I'm a wasp. Her tendency is also mine. To be curious to a fault. To gate-keep.

"My dad's in Dammert," I told her. "We like to come out here for the view."

Then she started talking about wanting to see some of the area cleared. The vines, their tangle, the brush. This is the area you see when you look out, west, southwest, from the St. Francis Center entrance. My dad would start calling it Porcupine Hill. Why, I don't know. And he wasn't calling it Porcupine Hill yet. This was only April of 2024...


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Notes from The Shrine 2: Like It or Lump It

~ johnbrandall

Bob was talking today.  We were at the lunch table and I was telling my dad about getting a dentist appointment set up for him.

“What’d you say about a weapon?” asked Bob.  

I wasn’t sure what he might have heard so I said my dad and I were talking about teeth.  Then I was telling dad about taking mom back to the dealer so she could pick up her car once it had been serviced.  New brakes.  I guess it really doesn’t take that long.

Bob mused on driving, which he said he hadn’t been doing “for about a year now.”  I asked him what kind of car he had.  Or maybe, I wondered aloud, did he have a truck.  He laughed at that idea.

“No,” he said, he never had a truck.  “But who knows once the kids get their foot in there.”

“You never had a truck as part of your job?” I asked.  “Getting up on those poles?”

“That job,” he answered, “was a real pain in the ass.”

Bob was a lineman.  He worked for what then was called Union Electric.  He has spoken fondly about his job in prior conversations so I took this expression of displeasure as a reference to one specific job, some beef or failure or disappointment he must have had out in the field one week...


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