* The tree trimmers have gone, leaving much open sky viewing.
* Our furnace has been inspected and is ready for winter. He was the first person since last year to enter our house. Perhaps another year before anyone enters again.
* To facilitate tree cutting activity I removed dividing fences. Think I will not put them back.
* Tell me, Atlas. What is heavier:the world or its people's hearts? Howling at the Moon Suresh
* Ruminating about the differences between diary, journal, and memoir.
* "Writing became for me a way to prove my existence." a 12 year old Sierra Leone soldier.
* You lay life on a table and cut out all the tumors of injustice. Marvelous. Ah, but cutting out the tumors of injustice, that's a deep operation. Someone must keep life alive while you do it. By living. Isn't that right? Doctor Zhivago
* The season of soft paws transferring dead, crunchy leaves from out to in, the sweeping of them from in to out.
* The newly painted shed glows in the dark.
* "So many things to wonder." The only movie in which I can bear to watch Adam Sandler, so much do not enjoy him. Maybe the uke helps.
* A new showerhead.
* The dog sat on my glasses. You do not want to know.
* I got a haircut. First since Feb.
* The ruffling sound of a dog rearranging the bedding (mine).
* A trusted vet who diagnoses using an email photo.
* "You have Grampa ______'s nose." Looking at the small screen at the bottom, by golly, I do. He had his mother's and she had her father's. Did her father have his mother's?
* "Don't put off 'till tomorrow what you can do today." What?? Putting off is my favorite thing.
* Forgiving, mostly dead people, helps me breathe more deeply. Still living people have the chance for, "I'm sorry" still. Yom Kippur next week.
* I have been sitting in quite dark rooms lately. And quiet ones, also. This began several months ago not to conserve electricity especially but just as a happening one night. I put down a book, switched the light and just sat. My arid eyes accustomed to the dark until I began to distinguish shapes. I have thought that one has finally come home after a new move when the mover-in can walk around in the darkened house with no clothes on and not bump into things like great aunt Harriet's prickly sideboard or, lets say, the sleeping on the floor dog. That night I just sat, enveloped in the gentle hum of the air purifier and, since it was rather late, the quite nice lack of traffic noise. I did not mentally list things to do on the morrow. I did not really think about anything. Have you ever done that? Just sit?
* As the punkins pile up in front of stores I begin to wonder as I masticate (I had to look that one up to make sure I spelled it properly.) "Am I eating the last watermelon for 2020, the last mush melon?"
* Summer chores have melded into autumn chores. I painted 2/3 of the shed yesterday. 'Desert Glow' Lovely to view in the falling snow.
* I was quite embarrassed the other day when my usually excellent sense of direction failed me. Truly, I navigated Paris without a map. Perhaps it was the excitement of having my trees trimmed and the wondering of how in the heck it would be accomplished. Anyway, I went to a door I thought was that of my across the fence neighbor to get permission for the trimmers to attack their limbs which overhang my trees and (blush) it was the wrong door. I nervously bounced through my litany of why it is a good idea to trim, the man signed and I tottled on home, pleased with myself. Fifteen minutes later he appeared at my door saying that really was not his tree but belonged to someone further west. A few days later the blush went away and I was ready to sally forth to find the correct door. I was saved from expedition when I heard the sound of my across the fence neighbor dishes clanking through her open kitchen window. Yooohoos. Introductions. Signing. Completion. I was speechless from admiring her dangly earrings and wondering how she puts on her face mask. Trimmers will come in a month.
* My father's older brother was a plumber in a small town. He disproved the saying that a cobbler's children always go shoeless and barefoot because his house was perfectly plumbed. Visiting every June was a hot, humid trip with the added indignity of being dragged around for exposition and display in front of relatives and people I had no interest in and seemingly nothing but blood in common with. (I wish now that I had been more interested in them, but, kids, what can you do with them!) Dinner out was the MO because his wife did not cook. To her credit, she worked the books for the plumbing business so probably after a day fiddling with numbers cooking was not so much looked forward to. After a day of people pleasing a tidy up for me was necessary before dining out and my uncle had plumbed a claw foot bathtub as a second wash up place to get visitors into the restaurant bound cars faster. He put it in the just barely able to stand up, angled, slope roofed attic. A window beside the tub presented a treetop bathing view. The uniqueness of the tub, the attic, the view and the at last I get to be alone by myself relief tended to slow my ablutions so that I was always the last to hop into the car as it pulled away from the curb. This timing was unfortunate because that meant I had to ride in the backseat behind my uncle with my window up and closed to avoid the tobacco juice which he periodically spit out of his window. Everybody else dibbed the good seats.
* Every morning a circus arrives at my house. Well, I've never actually been to a circus but I am a well read circus attender. Dogs. Dogs which seem to have multiplied overnight. I do have just two but their stunts and enthusiasms of mornings lead my eyes closed brain to believe in overnight exponential multiplications. Anticipated food seems to be one element of their enthusiasms. But, what can explain their excited cavorts in dashing out to the wet and cold? At some architectural epoch narrow hallways were drawn. I walked through many old narrow hallways in Scotland so there must be a long history to them. I write of passages so narrow that a short armed woman (me) has not enough room to angel stretch her arms owing to the bumping of walls. (My short arms challenge knitting patterns.) I live with a narrow hallway. Thus, my litany (do you have morning litanies?) to avoid trips sounds "Outta da way", "I'm walkin here.", "Watch it! Watch it!". And that is just on the tottle to the dog grub. I keep the litanies clean owing to the idea that I endeavour to present a dignified, cultured presence to my lodger. I think I have fooled him. So. A circus every morning.
* Confession: I have a not cheap subscription to a British magazine because I enjoy the smell of the pages. Okay...the pictures are purty, too.
* The city shrouded in gossamer.
* Standing at the window enjoying the dampness patterned on the river rocks I notice a sparrow calmly, discretely bobbing about finding breakfast.
* Dampness patterns on a grey weathered fence.
* I crawled into bed at midnight mourning the loss of a face brush that I bought in 1982. Sometimes it is the smallest losses that pause us, that trip us up. Such a frivolous thing to miss! How silly to be distracted by a hairy thing the size of a golf ball. But..but. What it had lived through with me! When thirsty at 3am I tottled to the kitchen and...there on the counter was the face brush! Disheveled woman seen dancing in the kitchen.
* A cricket finds a place in the bathroom to escape the cold and snow.
* A soft warm bun as incentive for leaving the warm house early.
* Inhaling fresh, cool, smoke free air for the first time in weeks. Thank you snow and rain. Thank you for the promise of continuing precipitation for the next day or so.
* Pulling my quilted vest out of the trunk. Putting it on though it is unwashed from last spring (do not tell my mother!). Where were my thoughts then? How much have they shifted since?
* Hot tea, hot tea, hot tea......
* Ready to choose punkins to line up on the porch.
* A day with nothing scheduled.
* As the darkness visits I sing, as they used to say, at the top of my lungs:
When the skies are a bright canary yellow
I forget every cloud I've every seen
So they call me a cockeyed optimist
Immature and incurably green.
I have heard people rant and rave and bellow
That we're done and we might as well be dead,
But I'm only a cockeyed optimist
And I can't get it into my head.
I hear the human race is falling on its face
And hasn't very far to go,
But every whippoorwill
Is selling me a bill,
And telling me it just ain't so.
I could say life is just a bowl of Jello
And appear more intelligent and smart,
But I'm stuck like a dope
With a thing called hope,
And I can't get it out of my heart!
Not this heart...
Thx R & H
