Good morning dearest. I feel so much better today than I did yesterday, light years. I got out at 7:30 this morning for a walk, before it gets more hot and humid. I felt despairing at first and had a good cry (nothing like a private sob in the great out of doors) and walked and did arm exercises and kept up the pace and did my large looping figure 8 around the park and by the time I reached the end I felt much better. It was beautiful at the conservation area at that hour, in the midst of the midsummer rattle of cicadas, chirping crickets, and birdsong. I reached a lovely spot where goldenrod, not yet in bloom and drenched with dew, stood glistening in the morning sun, a field of shimmering diamonds. It was so crystalline as to remind me of winter, and I imagined soaring over a dense Scandinavian forest, evergreen treetops brilliant with freshly formed ice. Returning to my car I stopped at the kiosk by the parking lot and a posting behind the glass caught my eye, a nicely-written essay about the geology of the place. The geologist described a point I'm familiar with, a 200-foot high bluff overlooking the river and wetlands below. He wrote that many millions of years ago there was a lake at that spot, as well as a massive glacier further north, and it's not that as the lake receded it exposed the high bluff, it's that the tremendous weight of the melting glacier pushed the earth's crust up from below. I don't usually think about the dynamism of the earth or of geological time - not as it relates to around here anyway - but as I stood there reading, the description conjured such a vivid image of the earth shifting, rolling, rising and being molded and sculpted - I felt as though I was on a boogie-board trying to keep my balance just thinking about it, and the Lyle Lovett song, Natural Forces came to mind.

I rode across the great high plain
Under the scorchin' sun and thru the drivin' rain
An' when I set my sights on the mountains high
I bid my former life goodbye.

An' so thank you ma'am, I must decline
For it's on my steed I will rely
An' I've learned to need the open sky
I'm subject to the natural forces
Home is where my horse is.

Now I'm up in the aerie with a great cup of coffee from a cafe downtown. We've been out of the "good stuff" the last few days, just really wretched supermarket stuff, and I simply don't want coffee if it's not going to taste delicious. (I believe that's what got my day yesterday off to a bad start.) I am in such a good mood now (and nothing hurts!) that I can see myself making cole slaw today after all. Let me get right down to it. Later, darling.