Very dark skies this morning, so dark that I'd like to turn on the lamp but don't because I'm still waking up and wish to linger in a dream state. I've stepped to the window and looked out. It's puzzling why it's so dark - I expected a thick fog. But there isn't at all, just light, even overcast, pale at the horizons.

***
It's not like me to ever get excited about a machine but the new dishwasher is a marvel. It's so quiet that when I turned it on I had to lean in close to make sure it was running. It was like listening to a shell: from deep behind the smooth black surface emitted a soothing, oceanic sound, gentle swooshing and wooshing - chuk-chi, chuk-chi, chuk-chi. When I unloaded it later the dishes were very hot and dry to the touch, much hotter than with the old decrepit washer, much cleaner I imagine, much more so than I ever dared imagine... Earlier we had gone to the supermarket to pick up an unfamiliar product called "rinse agent" in advance of a properly executed inaugural run. "Don't just wash it - Bosch it," quipped resident Mad Man on the way back to the car. I thought that was very funny. You missed your calling I said, and he replied, no that's why they got rid of me in the end, I was too creative for them (he had input into catalogs and ad campaigns), I was always trying to suggest something new and original - bring in new customers maybe - and all they ever wanted was the boring same old and they'd stare at me like I was crazy.

***
Watched Mad Men, made cole slaw, trimmed basil, set up basmati, sliced cauliflower, carrot and onion for a curry with chicken, watered garden, read more Wineapple.

***
From White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson, by Brenda Wineapple, p. 181:

When he took his hat for the last time that day, he promised the poet he would come again sometime. "Say in a long time," she mischievously answered, "that will be nearer. Some time is nothing."

As usual she was right.

***
From letter from J to Belle, 29 September 2009

"I would like to see you again at some point, and perhaps more importantly, as you wrote in your letter, I wouldn't want not to see you again sometime..."

***

***
From letter from Belle to J, 15 September 2009

"... I go in circles thinking of you. Every day there’s a new angle, a fresh take, a different facet glints. I wonder how long this will last? I have a sense of (endlessly redounding) repetitions and recursions – my looping walks every day as the seasons unfold and change, the fractal patterns of nature I see everywhere now – in the intricately branched and berried junipers; the coastlines of clouds; perfect spiderwebs strung high in the trees; and carpeted fields of wild asters, goldenrod, and loosestrife, whose combination of vibrant shades reminds of the elegant plaid skirt I wore a long time ago, just this time of year, when I first met you.

I wanted to write to let you know this, and to say that I hope someday I’ll see you again. My feelings may not be a crystal brook, exactly, but they have settled, and one thing that remains is a belief that I will regard it as a deep disappointment in my life if it turns out that I never see you again...

***
Wineapple, p. 190

In the Spring of 1872, Higginson went to Europe, which he had long wanted to do. Depressed by [his wife] Mary's deteriorated condition, frightened by the sudden death of his brother Francis, disgusted by Newport's empty sparkle, flummoxed by Susan B. Anthony's arrest, and annoyed by the editorial change at The Atlantic, where a callow William Dean Howells had replaced Fields as editor, Higginson accepted an offer to sail with his brother Waldo to England for a two-month visit. His sister Anna stayed with Mary, Mrs. Hunt [Helen Hunt Jackson, close literary friend to whom Higginson was attracted] went to California: time, all around, for a change of air.

"I am happy you have the Travel you so long desire," Emily coolly noted on his return, "and chastened--that my Master met neither accident nor Death." Most of all, though, she wanted him to travel to her. "Could you come again that would be far better-," she observed, "though the finest wish is the futile one."

Resuming her role as Scholar, she again sent him poems. "To disappear enhances--The Man that runs away/Is tinctured for an instant with Immortality," one of them begins, her use of "runs away" rather than "goes away" suggesting that she knew how much she had drained his nerve power...

***
Wineapple, p. 192

Most of all she wished he would come back to Amherst.

And he did.

***
Chuk-chi, chuk-chi, chuk-chi...

Kisses, my darling.