An endearing malapropism of my mother.

When she asks me about what exactly I’m studying so much with the one foreign language that I’m studying a lot for dual citizenship purposes – I honestly have been studying for more than an hour a day during certain stretches these past number of months – I tell her that it’s not really related to anything that anyone would know and that it also doesn’t have borrowings like from Latin, so almost all of the vocabulary is completely unrecognizable and unpredictable, and so I’m just memorizing thousands and thousands and thousands of new words, otherwise you can barely navigate texts or interactions at all, without that fundamental base of knowledge.

“So you’re really starting from Ground Zero, aren’t you?”, she’s like, trying to understand.

Spring habits (2 of 2): Sleeping.

As I’m getting ready to go to bed, there’s alerts on the radio about severe storms sweeping through the area, and it seems that they will be doing so all night.

So, when I go to bed, I don’t turn on my humming noise machine that I always have on.

Instead, the rain falling on my roof suffices for white noise to help me sleep, but also without that noise machine, I’ll be able to hear any tornado sirens all that much more easily.

Spring habits (1 of 2): Cleaning.

When the temperature first sharply gets warm, the concrete pad on which my cottage rests is still cold, and that difference in temperatures causes huge condensation on the white ceramic tile that is my floor throughout the entirety of my house, and you can see little pools of water by the corner of your bedroom at night, and behind the furniture you can see like how the settled dust there is now almost like a mild little muck, from how it united with the standing water.

So, as part of spring cleaning, I pull back all of the rugs and furniture, and mop everything up with rags wet with water and Dawn dish soap, to clean out the muck and any mold or whatever that might have started to grow there.

. . .

(“I hate that,” my one [younger] [plumpish] [hair streak-dyed] [mid-Southern] coworker is like, when I tell her about the sludge-formation at my apartment, and it turns out that she’s had places where that has happened, too.)