for you alone

Today was a lovely day -- I had a few precious hours with Katie, who is in Des Moines for a wedding this weekend. I stole her from her husband and we went to the Cheesecake Factory, which is just as bad and annoying here as it is everywhere else; we had sickly-sweet mojitos as we discussed life for a couple of hours, frequently interrupted by a waitress who seemed to want us to leave even though the other hundred tables were empty. We also spent a lot of time browsing through the racks of Sephora, lured to our doom by the siren's call of products that claim to fix your every woe. Katie and I enjoy getting together every few months and pointing out every product we've bought in the intervening timespan and upselling each other on unnecessary cosmetics -- with the result that I walked away with a dry shampoo and a couple of samples of GoSmile, and she purchased my favorite eyeliner brush from Benefit.

But while the conversation was excellent and the hour-and-a-half drive back home was made much more fun with her company, and while we topped off the evening with the world's best takeout pizza from a convenience store in our county, the highlight was the gift she gave me when I picked her up -- a signed copy of Fabio's romance novel 'Pirate'!!! It's supposedly Fabio's romantic fantasy, brought to life by some hack of a romance novelist, and the inside is 'autographed' "To you alone - Fabio". But the previous owner of this book actually got a real autograph from Fabio at some point, making this a priceless treasure.

I started reading it tonight, and it's truly, laughably bad -- Fabio's character (Marco Glaviano, a Venetian privateer who lost his father to some 'Spanish whoresons' in the Inquisition and is hellbent on revenge) rescues some twelve-year-old girl from a Spanish attack in the Caribbean, is attracted to her innocence, and takes her to his island to raise her with his pirate band, a plethora of loose women, and his young black cheetah whom she names 'Pansy'. It's all a little creepy, since they spend far too much time dwelling on how young, pure, and innocent she is -- including a scene of Fabio's character brushing her hair. But then she is suddenly eighteen and has decided she has to marry him, at which point all hell breaks loose (and I took a break for the evening -- if I put a romance novel down before midnight, you know it's not that good).

If only I had Katie and some other friends here, Iowa would be the best place in the entire world. The months of May through September make up for the bleakness of winter, and June in Iowa is possibly the loveliest thing you can ever see. Today was a case in point -- while it stormed this morning (but not nearly enough to damage all the cars we moved last night), the clouds cleared by afternoon, and we drove back home amongst the gorgeous green splendor of an eighty-degree summer day. I left Katie's house around nine and drove the rest of the way home in perfect twilight -- the time of day when all the lightning bugs (or as non-midwesterners call them, fireflies) come out to play. If you know my affinity for sparkles and glitter, you could guess how I feel about lightning bugs -- they seem to skim over the tops of the fields as though all of the plants are twinkling in the night, as though the earth is covered in tiny winking diamonds. Granted, when you hit them with your windshield they leave a streak of luminescence that is nearly impossible to clean up, but they're gorgeous enough that I don't mind the inconvenience.

So it was great to see Katie, and I'm looking forward to spending another month here -- June is one of my favorite times to be here, with the wild roses in the ditches and the lightning bugs flitting around everywhere, so it should be good. Now if only I can finish my romance novel, I'll be in good shape.