Image credit here.
I wrote this in Fall, 2013, while slogging through my therapeutic writing about the infamous Summer of 2012 and its aftermath.
My brain is fully of heavy thoughts, and it is time to take a break.
I thought it would only be fair to devote a page to Petunia, a crucial but heretofore overlooked player in that summer’s drama. Who the heck is Petunia, you ask? Why my old pink laptop, of course!
I am writing on her at this very moment!
Incredibly, she is still alive. She still boots but her disk drive is broken. Her backup service has inexplicably failed. Several of her programs have mutinied and refuse to run. I have repaired her frayed cord twice—once with blue painter’s tape and now with purple duct tape. (She says the latter is much cooler.) She peppers me with countless error messages each day but I can see that she is trying to hang on for my sake, and I appreciate her for it.
Though Petunia should be past menopause by now, she still overheats and shuts herself down about every 30 minutes. But take heart! I am close to perfecting the solution. As I write this, she is propped up on my daughter’s pink and green polka-dotted eraser (It should come as no surprise that she is please with my choice.) and a packet of wooden chopsticks I found in the utensil drawer. She is being ventilated by a fan sitting on my big yellow Langenscheidt dictionary, which is in turn sitting on the white plastic Ikea chair across the kitchen table from me. It is October, and I’m getting a wee bit chilly….
I could use a cup of coffee but then I’d have to unplug something.
I am not making this up.
This is part of The Story of Hanna. For the previous installment, click here. For the next installment, click here.
Family Rules 