kiwords

Last night I stayed up waaaaaay too late, finishing Bastard Out of Carolina. Ok, I don’t want to give away anything to anyone who is considering reading it, so I’ll try to be careful. Suffice to say it ended horribly. Brutally. The final scenes were so graphic and disturbing…this one’s gonna be with me for a while.
It’s not that I mind graphic, disturbing scenes in a novel. I dealt with the beginning of The Lovely Bones without too much trouble. But B.O.of C. I finished with a shudder. I threw it in the corner and pulled the cover over my head and tried to get those images out of my head. As a mother…and a daughter…
I had nightmares. Actual scenes-from-the-book nightmares. I woke up this morning with stinging eyes and a headache. And I still couldn’t get the flavor of that ending out of my mouth.
The boys had the day off from school. Fall break, so they lazed around and played with neighborhood kids. It was nice to be home, but not doing school, and I devoted my morning to cleaning up the spots the mouse had been. (I haven’t seen any sign of it, and I’m sure it’s long gone. Really. It is.) So I pulled pots and pans out of the cupboards and ran them through the dishwasher and sprayed down the insides of the cupboards with bleach water. I’m telling you, the little vermin really grossed me out, and I was taking no chances. I scrubbed and tidied and slowly my world came back into shape. But things weren’t really right until I went out to the garden and collected the very tail end of the tomato and jalapeño harvest. I filled up a colander with brilliantly red tomatoes and firm green commas of jalapeños. When I ran them under the spray of the kitchen sink, the water beaded up on their brightly colored skins and it looked like a gardening calendar. Max helped me make one more batch of blazingly hot salsa from the garden, and the world seemed right again.
I gotta stop reading so late at night.