Morning all. We have a whopper of a sentence to start with on this Friday the thirteenth. I can’t remember where I picked it up. I tend to copy down random sentences throughout the year and then drop the card into a box. Then at the end of the year I shake the box and randomly assign the sentence to a day. There are a bunch of short sentences because I like the open ended-ness of them, but there are some longer ones. A sentence only comes out of the box when I assign it a day so this could be several years old. Also if I can remember where I picked up the sentence I often drop it back into the box for later until I forget it’s original context. I know, probably more than you wanted to know. So let’s just set the timers and see what we come up with.
I will admit I wasn’t sure where this was going until I neared the end and then I started to see it. I will be taking a few minutes to jot down some notes before moving on with my day.
Friday, March 13th: The fields of red and purple flowers stretched for miles, their heady fragrance filling the air.
The fields of red and purple flowers stretched for miles, their heady fragrance filling the air. Dana took a deep breath and felt a little light headed. She looked over the fields. The red and purple fields were neatly divided. Red fields to the left to the road, purple to the right. Dana wasn’t sure what the red was but I knew the purple to be lavender.
The family, she was told produced lavender commercially. She theoretically knew that somewhere someone had to grow lavender. It was used in many things. It just somehow never really impinged upon her thoughts. She always had a plant or two in her garden growing up. Each summer she would sit with her grandmother in the yard and weave little lavender wands to hang in the back of her closet.
She knew of course it was raised commercially for all sorts of things. Some would use the actual plant things like wreaths or stuffed pillows. More often the plants would be taken in, harvested and then their scent extracted. She supposed that was why she always thought of the scent as being bottled and not as a field. It seemed to belong more to the chemical factory than the plant kingdom.
Yet, here was a vast field stretching along one side of the road. Dana looked to the left. The red flowers were lower to the ground than the leggy lavender plants. It had a wealth of greenery below with the blousy red flowers almost hovering above the green. The car was going too fast for her to attempt identifying them.
‘Not that my botanical skills are up to much,’ she thought. While she had fond memories of the family garden, the lavender wands they hung up in the closets and tucked into drawers as well as the well-stocked pantry made from items grown in the back yard each year, it had been years since she even thought of it.
She lived in an apartment now, six stories up from a sea of concrete and asphalt. Her home had windows that didn’t open, air and temperature controlled with buttons and scents of her own design, chose for her air freshener to suit her mood. Admittedly lately her apartment was more or less where she slept these days. What time wasn’t spent in the office was spent in airports, on planes or in rental cars along major highways.
Occasionally there would be some nature beyond the perimeter of the interstate that she could see in the distance, but she was usually either too tired to notice them or too focused on something else. She promised herself vacations. Time off. Sleep.
She promised herself all sorts of things from yoga retreats to a few hours in an isolation chamber. Anything to keep her going until the end of this merger.
This merger, she was certain, would be the death of her.
It would be a massive enough task if it was just merging two separate companies. That she was certain would be a dream task compared to what was going on. Instead of just the two companies merging they were also taking on parts of seven other companies. With the recent change in regulations, other companies were merging and reforming, divesting themselves of entire divisions while adding new ones. The company she worked for, Halogen, Inc was swooping in to collect what it could. Admittedly many other companies were doing the same. At the moment, she was one of the people doing the swooping.
“The end is in sight,” Dana thought. So was the end of the drive. She almost made it up to the grand house that was now more corporate headquarters than private home when she heard the first gunshots.
Ten til Midnight 