Questions Asked, Kindle, and Jim Harrison

Do You Take Showers?  We have an aisle shower in the van but we don’t use it.  We have wood cabinets that we wouldn’t want to get wet plus there isn’t a whole lot of room.  I might not be a girlie girl but I have a lot of bathroom stuff.    I have two bottles of shampoo – one is for grey hair and another smells like my chocolate soy milk.  I have three bottles of bath wash – Caress that is almost empty, Cherry bath wash and one that suppose to smell like mother earth.  Then I have the usual assortment of essentials needed for a shower.    I keep all of my bathroom “stuff” in a bag along with a pair of flip flops.  If we find ourselves in a place that doesn’t have showers then we take bird baths until we can shower.   

Do we have privacy?  The answer is yes.  We have a curtain that circles around the toilet/shower area.  That curtain is also used as a divider.  When I am staying up late and goofing around on the computer I can close the curtain giving mom enough darkness to sleep.  

How many people can fit in your van?   Robert and Hannah came by for a visit once.  We turned the driver’s seat and the passenger seat around giving them a place to sit.  So we have had two extra people in here.   I am sure we could fit more but why?

Do you have an office?  I turn the driver’s seat around and put a small table in front of that – instant office space. 

We also have a kitchen in the van with a small stove top and microwave.  In the back of the van are twin beds.  Of course they are not the usual size of a twin bed.  My mother and I are of an age where we are shrinking instead of growing which is a good thing.

We do get a lot of people who want to see the inside of the van.  Normally we tell them no or make up an excuse.  We don’t ask to see the inside of their home and would like to be given the same respect.  Yet there was that one time….  I stopped to fill up the tank and found out that I had to pay first but there wasn't a visa reader.  I wanted to fill up my tank and didn’t know how much that would cost.  So I sent my mother, my credit card, and my driver’s license in the store.  I figured they would turn on the pump if I gave them all of that and I was right.  While filling up the tank, my mother was talking to the attendant inside.  A nice young man with an interesting accent, I am not sure what country he was from but he was having a real hard time understanding that we live inside a van.  After paying for the gas he followed us outside to get another look and that is when I said “come on in and take a look around.”  He was a little scared about going inside so I told him we would stay outside while he looked around.  I also told him we were a little too old to be abducting a 20 year old.    He just stood in our little hallway, mouth hanging open in amazement, and he said “I could live in here.”

It took some adjustment to live in a van.  When we first started out we were like the pioneers in a wagon train.  We would go for a month then start getting rid of things.   We had to do that three of four times but we finally got a handle on things.  We have very little and we are happy.  The only time we get in trouble is when it comes to our books.  We are both are avid readers and we have a hard time staying away from books.

No, we will not purchase a Kindle.  I tried one and I hated it.  I like a book.  I like the smell, the texture of a book as much as I like the words.  When you are in possession of a used book little pieces of the previous owner linger… maybe an inscription or a bookmark.  Pages folded over, passages highlighted, remnants of a meal or a page sprinkled with coffee.    There is nothing like the smell of new book.  I like curling up with a book or laying it flat on a table.  A Kindle cannot and will not hold a candle to a book.  I also have a daughter, Hannah that is keeping my books safe and we add to her library when we find a book we really like.   When we meet up with Hannah in about a week she will have every Jim Harrison book he has written to add to the library.  Then I will work on find his books of poems to send her.

Life is good inside of our itty bitty house on wheels.

Barking
by Jim Harrison

The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn’t die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there’s no chain.

Marching
by Jim Harrison

At dawn I heard among bird calls
the billions of marching feet in the churn
and squeak of gravel, even tiny feet
still wet from the mother's amniotic fluid,
and very old halting feet, the feet
of the very light and very heavy, all marching
but not together, criss-crossing at every angle
with sincere attempts not to touch, not to bump
into each other, walking in the doors of houses
and out the back door forty years later, finally
knowing that time collapses on a single
plateau where they were all their lives,
knowing that time stops when the heart stops
as they walk off the earth into the night air.



Larson's Holstein Bull
by Jim Harrison

Death waits inside us for a door to open.
Death is patient as a dead cat.
Death is a doorknob made of flesh.
Death is that angelic farm girl
gored by the bull on her way home
from school, crossing the pasture
for a shortcut. In the seventh grade
she couldn't read or write. She wasn't a virgin.
She was "simpleminded," we all said.
It was May, a time of lilacs and shooting stars.
She's lived in my memory for sixty years.
Death steals everything except our stories.