only on vashon – the weekly rundown 04/30/21

It’s dandelion kicking season! The bridge repair is done, so we can finally reunite with our loved ones on the other side of Judd Creek.

A cooler of drinks spilled along the road early one morning, and someone cleaned up the contents and left the cooler by the side of the road. Group members worried that teens would see this as free iced tea and come out at 8 a.m. to steal someone’s refreshments. Others said the teens would be too busy tagging and busting mailboxes to steal someone’s soda from the side of the road. We need to have more faith in our teenagers. I’d bet they have the time management skills to swing by and pick up the cooler on their way to graffiti the Lisabeula port-a-potties.

A group member reports that a dog with a shoe took himself for a walk in Burton. This post had me wondering for hours- was he carrying the shoe or wearing it?

Fireworks have been banned for unincorporated King County. We are fuming at the loss of our freedom. We as Americans have a right to get drunk and accidentally burn our neighbor’s house down and also inadvertently cause a devastating wildfire that, due to the fact that we’re an island, would be difficult to escape and invariably kill loads of people. How dare the county oppress our god-given right to explode combustible material that scatters errant sparks over the dry forest and leaves bits of plastic in animal habitats? Well then, we’re just gonna shoot guns into the sky on July Fourth, because America is all about the freedom to destroy, not the responsibility to maintain. 

Some say they’re happy because the sound of fireworks can be distressing. Others responded that if you want quiet, you should move to a city. Rural areas are all about the noise. We have fond memories of the family patriarch shooting bears in the middle of the night. 

In wild animal news, seagulls are dropping clams everywhere- even on the tennis court, which makes for some extreme games. And there are loads of pregnant deer, many of whom give birth to twins. I remember years ago when a big chubby deer slept in my backyard for two days. She disappeared for a week, then came back with twin fawns. We named her Reme (because doe, re, me). 

Someone is looking for a kombucha mother. I think… I think that might be me? I’m not a wine mom or a coffee mom, but I sometimes get a rainbow kombucha from Thriftway. Wait, I have just done research and discovered that a kombucha mother is a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. Come to think of it, that pretty much describes me. I have often suspected that my purpose in life is to be an ecosystem for my microbiome, and that all the human stuff is incidental. 

Shots rang out in the middle of the night. Maybe it was fireworks? Maybe someone was shooting a bear? Or perhaps they were shooting fireworks at bears as a celebration of freedom (the shooter’s freedom, not the bear’s). 

Finally, an islander has giant bubble wrap rolls for sale. Let’s buy them and stomp on them in the middle of the night to scare away bears.

Author: Anna Shomsky

I'm a former teacher and a data engineer living on Vashon Island. My writing has appeared in Five on the Fifth, Women on Writing and on the Post-Culture Podcast. I wrote and produced the radio show Whispers of Vashon for 101.9 KVSH. I’ve had short stories published in the anthologies Island Stories and Chicken Scratchings, as well as through the Open Space Literary Project.