Judy was out gardening, as she often is, a small local Filipina woman in her late 70s(?), looking under milkweed leaves for caterpillars (she has a screened-in butterfly birthing ward in her garage). Lamenting how few she'd seen lately, noting that where the leaves were chewed, lizards had gobbled up the little ones. She gave me a lovely purple flower, butterfly-pea, to put in water. Good for anti-oxidants. I stopped, said, you know I'm giving a reading today with Bamboo Ridge ("wass dat?") today and you're in one of the pieces I'll read. She looked at me quizzically. It was a walk I took with Lilith where we talked to people about Trump, I say. "Oh at first what I liked about him was he didn't say any bullshit," she said. I suggested that he was a liar. Oh they all are. And Biden! "He falls asleep. Why can't we have one young active type president?" She showed me some of her new flowers, the purple ones and the less purple ones. Said she's got Africanized snails. I suggested buying some cheap beer and letting them drown themselves in it, then found myself telling her about my other neighbor who picks them up with tongs and puts them in the dumpster. What I didn't say is that she's in the same Bamboo Rdige vignette as Judy. The pea petal is in a glass of water. I'm allergic to peas, but it shouldn't matter.
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