Monday, November 1, 2004

Lately I find my days' activities inverted. Predawn summer mornings offered the glad accumulated cool, the brightening air, back-step hums sipping ice-cold orange juice while my leaping four-legged brethren competed for locusts in the damp grass. As we move prematurely winterward, now, I'm finding it far more economical (it's true!) to huddle under the covers until the sun hits the windows sometime after 8. Morning fires in two stoves, or even one, become unnecessary in rooms thus warmed, and I greet the day in a body whose bedclothes-elevated core temperature sustains me for hours. The same excess of glass that renders this house all but unlivable in summer now serves as its furnace on days when the sun burns through the cloud cover. Sleeping late, then, I get less "morning work" accomplished, but I find my evenings correspondingly enlarged. I'm more alert for the extra a.m. sleep, and the early dark confines me, forcing me back to the page. Having morning'd here an hour or two with hot coffee, I'm back on the writing bed the last three or four hours of my day with milk heated over the one brief fire I need to make. I can read or take a swipe at some ideas before drowsing off to its hypnotic flicker. *** My shipment of (very) cheap remainders came today. Imagine my glee. Spread across my bed just now are the bright, oversized Dalai Lamas of Tibet, The Master Book of the Water Garden, and Spirit of the Earth (South American cooking); the compact and elegantly designed Nothing Left Over: A Plain and Simple Life and Practicing the Perfections of the Heart: The Buddhist Path of Kindness; the blatantly low-caste Palmistry Revealed, the relatively pedestrian Teewinot: Climbing and Contemplating the Teton Range (the Tetons take my breath away), and the volume that most excites me, Landmarks: An Exploration of Great Rocks. A hopeless Capricorn, I've been sketching an essay on minerals as mature counterpart to the overwrought juvenilia of my soil piece, and expect Landmarks (by David Craig of Umbria, by way of Aberdeen) to contribute a good deal of background and more than a little motivation in that direction. *** Here are some quotes I've swiped from Ann Zwinger's Shaped by Wind and Water, a volume in Milkweed Editions' "Credo" series, which I didn't include among the foregoing titles (even though it arrived in the same box) because I am so envious and small. (She writes extensively about cooking on a woodstove, I see here...) The meaning of a word--to me--is not as exact as the meaning of a color. Colors and shapes make a more definite statement than words.... I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way--things that I had no words for. --Georgia O'Keefe In the end I want to be remembered as someone who loved well; this earth, all of its inhabitants, and this life. I want to have somehow made a difference to those whose lives I've touched and who have touched mine. I want to be remembered as someone with vision and compassion, humble and helpful. I want to be remembered not as the singer, but as the song. --Beverly Graham If we have ever regarded our interest in natural history as an escape from the realities of our modern world, let us now reverse this attitude. For the mysteries of living things, and the birth and death of continents and seas, are among the great realities. --Rachel Carson *** On the bed, as well, as we approach 10 p.m., RuthApricot and ClaraPiff engage in an orgy of mutual face-licking, purring in harmony; Ted sprawls, deeply unconscious; Apple fidgets and snores alongside him. At my elbow as I write, Greta--ever apart--coils tentatively, one surly eye half-open, huff at the ready. She stayed by me all night last night, a first in our year-and-a-half relationship. She's changing, too, I think. Or else she intuits something's up with me. Clever girl. 10:42:40 PM    comment []