About My Bloomin' Insanity.

The seventies was a nervy decade of naïve optimism and can-do spirit. Everything was new: my marriage of barely eighteen months, a new baby (stop counting on your fingers--I said eighteen months), and the paint wasn't even dry on our new house. But it was the first and foremost of the three, my bridegroom he, the industrial engineer, and he of the pre-eminent left cerebral cortex, and he, the lover of all things calculatable, draftable, plottable, schedulable, and constructible--who smelled something on the wind. It seeped beneath the climate-sealed, caulked, double-hung, triple-insulated windows with UV protection. And it was not the enticing perfume of lilac buds drifting up from the South. No, he smelled swamp fumes. In what would be our yard. Tannic-colored slime oozed from the molecular breakdown of construction debris to include chunks of styrofoam, jelly donuts, Big Macs, cigar butts, and every other biohazard, save nuclear. With the gentle pitter-patter of acid rain, the final catalyst would fizz up the soup and out would crawl the Swamp Thing.

For my hard-hatted and steel-toe booted sweetie, such post-construction earth trauma is just an unforunate consequence--a mere inconvenience really--in the transition from blueprint to site completion. but not for me.
"Just when and who is going to fix that out there?" I wanted to know.
He shrugged. "The contractor giveth, and the contractor will taketh it away. So blesseth the name of the contractor--and I have blesseth them mightily in one context of another in my career."


Other books by Jeane Candido:


Julie,
Do you ever hear me calling you?
If it weren't for the sound of your name in only my mind, I think I would go mad at times. I just need to say it out loud, to know that there is somewhere else than where I am and that there is someone else other than filthy, chigger-bitten soldiers soldiers beside me and enemy in front of me...

Brent

ISBN:1-59092-113-5   $19.95


"The war's here. They mean to have secession and they'll use everything they have to make it stick. Lincoln's got Union troops in his dining room, and he's looking out his window at Rebels camping in Alexandria... The house is on fire." Nolan paused.
"Ain't that what you joined up for?" Quinton dared.
"I don't quite remember why I joined up. It was another boy and another time. It was like I was itching for a fight with a small man, one that I could beat up and put a finish to."

- Nolan Giles, Co. C.
Fourth Ohio Volunteers,
June 1861 on the train to western Virginia

ISBN:1-88357389-0   $14.95