Two days of not going out made me realize that not-going-out is important. It was a thing I felt strongly in the whetstone tulies down south, but it’s just as important up here.

Back there, it was a mile to the rudest stop for jug water, five miles to any kind of meal ready-to-eat, and fifteen or twenty to shopping for groceries or most anything else. That made it easy to stock up and stay in for a week or more. Here, most things are available within a mile, and it’s easy to slip out for a few, especially instead of cooking and washing the extra dishes.

I intend to discipline myself better on that score.

During the two days, I bombed through the rather short podcast treatment of the revolution of the colonies, and began the far more involved revolution in France a few years later. Near the beginning of the French revolution, the King was forcefully invited to move from the palace of Versailles to the one called Tuileries. I had always sort of unconsciously assumed that this was where the slang of “out in the tulies/toolies” came from. But I was wrong. Tuileries was in fact in the center of Paris, and it was Versailles that was out in the sticks.

Tules is Spanish for marsh plants, the kind found, felicitously, in a cienega, and sometimes specifically means ‘bulrushes’, recalling the kind of cienega where Moses was found by an Egyptian Princess.

Living in the tulies, however, is a state of mind, rather than being based on how far you have to go to buy anything.

A state of mind, that is, if you let it be.