Good morning darling, beautiful early morning, delicious to slowly wake, pull up soft covers, savor the coolness, shut my eyes, listen to radio on low, drift from song to song, fall into evanescent dreams, surface with thoughts of you, reach for a pillow, put my arms around, yeah you, you're the color of the sun

Hours earlier, around three-thirty, I awoke and felt sufficiently energetic to go outside in the hope of glimpsing the Perseids. (The peak was the night before, but it was overcast, just as well I slept through.) I didn't see any meteors but am glad I stepped out all the same. It was pitch dark, I didn't have a flashlight (not on this lark, I'm not prepared for emergencies either), I didn't want to trip over the garden hose, or a cat, or - lately - one of the neighbor's four peripatetic egglaying chickens that keep Papillon-style finding a gap in the fence and wandering over to the frog pond marsh where our cats, incredulous, regard them with seemingly benign curiosity, grateful, possibly, that the chickens eat tics so that the cats don't have to be Frontline'd. Also, we ran out of cat food yesterday, the four cats had a tribunal and I kept them from laying siege on me by treating them to bits of roast chicken - so our cats, confronted with chickens - live, thinking poultry on our side of the fence - may have collectively decided that they prefer them roasted.

I adjusted my eyes to the dark. Gwynnie and Claire, the bonobo girls, were dark shapes on the driveway. They were so incredulous and overjoyed that I was outside at that hour (or any hour) that they started rolling around, wrestling and making out. It was a mild clear night. I stood in my light robe and looked up at the vast heavens and the grainy Milky Way and necklaces of starlight all around, constellations I can recognize even in a groggy state - Big Dipper certainly - and I thought of you way over there under the same firmament that hasn't - what with lack of astronomical twilights - had a starfilled sky all summer, but perhaps wondrous compensations such as Northern lights and the sound of the lapping sea. I thought of you as under the same canopied heavens and sent you all my love.

I love standing outside in the pitch dark and looking up at the gable-roofed house outlined against the sky. It's an old house, built 1885, and there is something so timeless it. My sense of scale shifts. I'm aware of myself regarding it, the house whose gray aluminum sided exterior is indifferent at best. By day I don't like to look at it. In fact I don't like to be out on the exposed driveway during the day. It's too bright and sunny, very harsh. Last night I thought of E.D. and how she used to garden at night. It's viewed as one of her eccentricities but it makes perfect sense to me; the night, with mild temperatures, starlight, and maybe moonlight, is so gentle and enveloping, easy on the skin, on the senses, on one's nerves, optic and other.

On a dark night the specter of the house magically transforms. It is beautiful, reduced to elemental shapes, like a child's drawing, or a folk art painting, or a neatly constructed origami structure, ingenious, ingenuous sharp angles and simple folds, upstairs windows faintly aglow.

I spent some time on my slow computer, and also at the library, trying to come up with a painterly image to include to illustrate what I see in my mind's eye. Google: Hopper house night sky; Magritte house night sky; then DiChirico; then, haplessly, Balthus. In the end I couldn't find the right visual - perhaps if I get a decent digital camera nighttime shots will be possible, though I don't expect miracles - a scene such as that might have to be painted. Here then so I've tried, my darling, in so many incorporeal words.

I imagine that you must be on your way back, the beach vacated for aeons again once more, and I wish you a wonderful journey back. All my love, as always, dearest. And darling, if you liked the Bringdown (I imagine that was you), here's another Bob Schneider song, 40 Dogs (Romeo & Juliet), that KZE played a little while ago that I just adore. If it had played that afternoon on Warren Street - well, I would have blogged about that. The sound quality is way better in this particular video.

You're the color of the moon, you're the color of the night... I can tell you where we're gonna be when the whole world falls into the sea we'll be living together happily...