Environmental Romance Part Ten

WARNING:  Don't even think about reading this installment 

unless you have read the foregoing chapters

numeros uno, dos,  tres,  cuatro,  

cinco, seis, siete, ocho y nueve!

A challenging piece of romantic literature

such as this will leave you hopelessly lost

without the proper framework.

Flora: An Environmental Love Story

By: Laraine F. Eddington

(Best read aloud with expression by candlelight)

Installment numero diez:


What Albert, the seeing-eye goat saw was a man… a real man, nothing like the pathetic squishy mulleted lump lying duct taped and helpless on Flora’s cabin floor. The real man’s manly shape filled the open door way; a shape formed of muscles molded miraculously over a symmetrical framework of bones made strong by years of copious calcium intake and clean living. It was shape held together with sinew as strong as piano wire, a shape encased in skin that bore the flush of outdoor living and good health. The gentle forest breeze blew past this man and the scent it carried into Flora’s delicate chiseled nostrils whispered, “Conrad is here…and he smells just as delicious as ever.”

“Conrad, is it…could it be…” Words failed the gentle Flora, and her fair complexion paled into a hue more akin to organic skim milk than 2%.


“Flora!” He spoke the name with reverence, regret and the timbre of his voice reverberated through the timber of the forest. Never had a name been spoken with such meaning; regret, devotion…longing.


Flora took a tentative step toward him, and then turned away, her slender hand nervously touching her swanlike neck. “Conrad, it has been three years. I thought I’d never see you again.”


“I had to stay away Flora, I couldn’t bear to see what I had done to you”. The words were torn from his throat like a strip of wax under an overgrown eyebrow.

Flora turned back toward him, her feathery black eyelashes sweeping fruitlessly over her beautiful, sightless eyes. “Oh Conrad, When my eyes closed, my heart opened; and I really began to see.”

Wendell came to, finding himself bound and gagged on the Flora’s sustainable bamboo floor and began to wriggle like an earthworm on a hot sidewalk. Albert clicked clacked to his side and lowered his shaggy head, tickling Wendell with his wiry goat whiskers. Wendell sneezed behind the duct tape that covered his mouth and Albert licked his face in an accommodating way.




“What do you mean Flora?” Conrad took her arm and led her out the cabin door and to the porch swing woven of willow wands by the Sightless Brothers of the Forest. “What did you see without eyes that you couldn’t see with eyes??” The swing rocked gently under their firmly formed fannies.

Flora sighed, and her breath tickled Conrad’s neck, making his well shaped adam’s apple bob like it was in a tub of water at a Halloween party. She continued “When I could no longer see the sunset, the eyes of my soul finally opened to the miracle of memory.” Conrad’s eyes smarted and he brushed at them with the back of a lightly furred knuckle. Flora’s honeyed voice continued. “When I could no longer see the mighty Ponderosa pines I finally heard the song the wind makes through the boughs.” A sudden gust through the treetops seemed to accompany her words.

Conrad took her in his arms then, and there was no need for words as Flora’s tiny frame melted into him like she was Jello and he was a Tupperware mold. As Conrad’s gently parted lips met hers a conduit opened between them and thoughts intertwined as freely as the nectar of their saliva.


Albert the seeing-eye goat watched the two lovers rock and kiss and rock and kiss until he grew bored and went back inside to gnaw on Wendell’s savory Walmart sneakers.


Dusk had fallen and it was getting chilly before Conrad finally spoke, “My darling…there is something I want you to see.”


To be continued…possibly only one more time.

Environmental Romance Part Eight

WARNING:  Don't even think about reading this installment

numeros uno, dos,  tres,  cuatro, cinco, seis y siete!

A challenging piece of romantic literature

such as this will leave you hopelessly lost

without the proper framework.

Flora: An Environmental Love Story

By: Laraine F. Eddington

(Best read aloud with expression by candlelight)

Installment numero ocho:

Flora’s nose woke her at the usual hour. It had been three years since the tragic day that had changed her life forever. Three years since she had been blinded by a steel button popping off the sculpted chest of the mysterious Conrad Conrad. Three years since the speeding button had pierced her left emerald green orb and then ricocheted into the right emerald green orb. Three years, but it seemed three lifetimes.


Without her former twenty-fifteen vision, Flora was no longer able to keep perfect time by gauging the path of the sun as it rose in the morning and fell in the evening. Instead, she had learned to compensate by developing her other senses; telling the time of day by the fragrance of the desert sage, released in scent increments when heated by the rays of the sun. As black lashes swept open like feather dusters over Flora’s stunning, but sightless eyes, the subtle scent of sage gathered in by her delicate nostrils told her it was 6:00 a.m.

Albert’s hooves tickety tickety ticked—across the piny planks of her forest bungalow. As Flora sat up in her bed and stretched her graceful limbs, he nuzzled her; not realizing that he was the luckiest seeing-eye goat in all creation. “Well Albert, what shall we have for breakfast? Albert did not speak—because he was a goat, but his liquid eyes watched adoringly as Flora dressed, slipping out of her silk camouflage thermals and into a dainty linen shift woven from the golden flax that grew in her garden.

Flora was proud of her organic garden, which flourished next to the quaint cottage deep in the forest where she lived among her animal friends. Since her hospitalization, the Sightless Brothers of the Forest had taken her under their wing, giving her solace and providing her with 

Albert, her seeing-eye goat. With Albert at her side, Flora was able to continue her rambles in the forest without fear of getting lost or stumbling into a den full of hibernating black bears. The Forest Service had assigned her new duties, because when fate cruelly took away her sight, it had compensated by investing Flora with an extraordinary perception, the ability to sense when lightning was going to strike and start a forest fire. With Flora as an early warning system, forest fires in the Tonto National Forest were down 53.2%. (It could have been 100%, but the Forest Service firefighting union wouldn’t allow any more layoffs.)


Flora was brewing a cup of wildflower tea when she heard a muscular rap on the door. It was a manly knock, not the meek sort of tapping required of a Sightless Brother of the Forest. A warm flush radiated from her darling belly button down to her neat ankles and up to her sinuous neck. In spite of an attempt at self control, her thoughts sprang like a bounding deer over a fence to Conrad Conrad. She hadn’t seen him since the button incident…come to think of it she hadn’t seen anyone since then…but every time she heard or smelled something manly, her thoughts careened madly back to him…that man…the one who had brought her nothing but trouble…nothing but heartache and blindness.


Knock, knock knock. The pounding was more urgent. Flora’s hand flew to her golden curls, traced the outline of her cheek. How she wished she could look in a mirror! She took a deep breath and Albert let out a goaty baaaa as he tickety ticked beside her. She did not open the door, but called through the crack, “Who is it? Who is knocking at my cottage door at such an early hour?”


The voice that answered seemed strained and unfamiliar when it came, but the answer was the one she had been hoping to hear every night as she thrashed from side to side amongst forlorn dreams in her lonely bed in her solitary room.


“Conrad” the voice said. “It’s Conrad.”


She threw the door open…and didn’t see anything, because she was still blind.


To be continued…