Hi darling. What an hour for you to be up, I can't imagine, or maybe I can. I'm glad springtime seems to have arrived in your parts, 50 and sunny I read. Extremely hot here today, well into the 90s. Spent much of the day driving up and down Route 9 and 9H between K'hook and Hudson, or so it seemed. The library has a program where you can borrow a pass to a number of regional museums. I was hoping to snag the pass to the Clark Art Institute (in Williamstown) and go tomorrow, but someone beat me out by five minutes. Just as well - under the rules I would have had to go today and return the pass tomorrow. The pass for "Mass Moca" (Museum of Contemporary Art) was still available. Long story short since the library doesn't open til noon Sundays - and the museum is a good 1-1/-2 hour drive away, I was able to persuade the librarian to let me check out the pass at the very last moment today, so that we can leave in the morning.

I feel the need to write about something other than what stage of undress I'm in, what's for dinner (leftover salads and grilled chicken), how hot it is, what chapter of whatever E.D. biography I'm in, and how I ended up at the supermarket no fewer than three times today due to lack of organization. Call it summer doldrums. Maybe I should give your camp manager a holler for some organizational pointers.

Darling, darling, darling. All day long I think of you, you are never far from my thoughts. Isn't that crazy? Yes, it is. I mean, I think of other things too, and observe, and go about things. I went to a farmstand north of the library and as I parked the car to go in and get peaches, I saw a tiny mouse scurrying out of there into the blazing sun. Astonishing sight, really. I wasn't the slightest bit skeeved - it was as cute as a chipmunk, but it was a mouse. I have another reaction entirely when I see one (usually deceased) in this Halloween house. (Nature is a haunted house, I read today of an E.D. poem). This house is haunted with mouse corpses, I believe.

So you see I think too of things other than solely you, the benefit I suppose of my great education, an ability to - not compartmentalize exactly, but to hold things in mind simultaneously.

This afternoon I made up a homemade soda concoction of raspberry syrup & seltzer. I refreshed my glass, took it with me in the car, and picked up D just now - he asked if it was rose! Not yet, but you know - tastes pretty similar. I guess I like icefilled, bubbly glasses of berry-tasting pink drinks, rated G before five, R afterwards.

How in the world are you faring, my love? I think of you - well, I don't want to torture you, but for example I know that you like to drive - can you ever drive where you are? I just hope that someday, someday I get to hear an account, preferably while in your arms or at least in the same room with you, but with our track record I certainly don't get my hopes up. Your next book contract - and not to rush you - a memoir perhaps? Or perhaps, I can hope, you're keeping a scrupulous diary of your expedition. Let's see, I look to a great diarist, Witold Gombrowicz, a Polish expatriate who on the eve of WWII found himself in Argentina, whereon he faced a question later (or perhaps earlier) similarly picked up on by Louis Armstrong, because the cruise liner that might have returned him to Poland was due to set sail in the morning - should I stay or should I go?...
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Monday: Me.

Tuesday: Me.

Wednesday: Me.

Thursday: Me.

Friday: Josefa Radzyminska has magnanimously provided me with a dozen or so issues of her News and Life [Polish emigre publications] and, at the same time, I have been able to get my hands on a few issues of various Polish newspapers from back home. I read these Polish newspapers as if I were reading a story about someone whom I knew intimately and well, who suddenly leaves for Australia, for example, and there experiences rather strange adventures which are no longer real because they concern someone different and strange, who can only be loosely identified with the person we once knew. So strong is the presence of time on these pages that we respond with a hunger for directness, a desire to live, and even an imperfect fulfillment. But it is as if this life were behind glass -- removed -- everything is as if it were no longer ours, as if it were being seen from a train.

If only one could hear a real voice in this kingdom of passing fiction!...

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Monday: 39 and overcast.

Tuesday: 39 and overcast.

Wednesday: 39 and overcast.

Thursday: 39 and overcast.

Friday: Belle has magnanimously provided me with dozens of posts of her news and life...

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Darling love, Factchecker will be over maybe, or maybe not, to put in all the italics and accents graves and agues or whatever they're called in Polish, that are required. For now, please content yourself with very many kisses and so much love, my dearest, from your loving Belle. XOXOXO