The prairie wind is blowing again.  It blows and blows, the kind that makes you feel weary.  It is the kind that gives me a headache and the shivers, as if someone is going to walk over my grave soon.  So it feels so good to have a shower, washing off the layer of old sweat and grime.  I am clean once more, unencumbered, naked and pure.

I take out a bag of trash…old underwear and an old hair dryer.  The heat had somehow melted a hole on one side and I burnt a finger on the hot molten plastic.  Until then I was still using it.  How foolish I am to hang on to it when I have another one in better condition.  I take that as a sign to let go of the broken, misshaped and the dysfunctional.  But it is easier said than done.  So I MUST be alert and pay attention to these things before they bite me in the ass.

My mother use to tell me so many things….things that nagged on her.  She tells them to me because I’m her oldest and she needs to get things off her chest.  And when I said to her that she shouldn’t talk so to me, she said who could she talk to if not her daughter.  It was just garbage and for me not to mind and to throw them away.  That, too, is easier said than done.

But she did listen to me when I told her it was making me sick.  I am not getting so much now.  Chinese people are proud and private.  They do not like to air things in public.  They have to save face.  Something must have happened to me.  I am not such a good Chinese.  I am not saving face.  I am a stranger in a strange land.  I’ve discovered that I cannot go home again.

But I have found a new land of LOLL where each person takes care of their own trash.  In this land of mine, there is no history, no accounting, no envy, no accumulation of trash….Each day starts anew.  The sun still rises in the east and sets in the west.  And all is as we make it to be.