Hello darling. Up in my friends' aerie study. I started this post about a half hour ago and was so exhausted I just couldn't get it going, so overtired (waking from a nap) that I started feeling emotional in that fretful way. But then I got an email back from the friends in whose apartment I'm staying, instructing me on where to find the key to unlock the padlock to get outside to remove the wind chime. So I just did that - and it completely lifted my mood to sit at the top of the brownstone with the sun in my face, warming my face and body (not that it's cool out, it's that the radiation felt so therapeutic), sipping from a glass of wine, observing the gorgeous cedar deodoras that D and I planted in 1990 that are now as tall as the brownstone buildings - 35 feet or so? I sat on the south facing window ledge. From way downstairs in the garden a little white dog looked up at me and barked, the guy who bought our apartment had a date, from what I could see a soignee young woman in a pretty black spaghetti-strapped dress and flipflop sandals, I guess it was her dog. Up one of the cedar deodoras stepped a bird, making its way up to the top as though the tree were a spiral staircase. I couldn't make out what it was: woodpecker maybe? a jay? But it delighted me.

The reason I was physically exhausted (besides just waking) was that I was out and about quite a bit today. Before nine this morning I walked up to the Heights and took the IRT to Christopher Street/Sheridan Square, wandered around the Village (so glad to see that the Three Lives bookshop is still around, I had wondered), threading my way down MacDougal alongside Washington Square Park (the coffee and breakfast sandwich crowd waking up all along, such a nice hour), zigzagging from Bleecker to Sullivan to who knows where else, winding my way through Soho - just for the walk, get my body moving (idiotically I'd become obsessed with my post yesterday and ended up staying in all day) - then over the Brooklyn Bridge and down the leafy brownstone streets back to the apartment. By this time I'd received a reply from my friends regarding the wind chimes. They'd put them up as "a personal buffer against all the annoying barking, singing, drumming, etc." and would unquestionably miss their sound, but yeah take them down, which I set to do right then except that the gate was locked. So I emailed them again - where's the key?

Then I changed into my swimsuit and walked down Clinton to the beautiful Red Hook pool, an expanse of azure waves and vast blue sky - a wonderful sense of blue marble openness and a lovely crowd. On Labor Day it's the weekenders and die-hards (the manic types letting off steam in early summer having long grown bored of the pool). I swam 14 lengths, got out, and basked in the sun for a while, reluctant to leave especially this very last day that the pool's open this season - denizens waxing elegiac. It felt so good to get some sun (and god knows, Vitamin D) on my skin. I thought I might try for another 14 lengths but didn't have the energy after all that walking. I went back to the apartment, picked chicken right off the bone standing in the kitchen and spooned butternut squash puree out of a container (unseasoned - but it had the texture and flavor of ice cream! and so healthy!). I showered and washed my hair and soaped myself with that lovely verbena soap, and then I lay down and read some critical analysis of E.D. (I used to come at poetry from a not dissimilar perspective - but now I'm on the other side, hard for me to read analysis like that anymore - I enjoy it, yet don't wish to become self-conscious myself in any way; anyway - being creative, and being analytical - two different not entirely compatible modes in the same person, not at the same instant, at any rate.) On the whole public/private question of my occasionally ribald (though not ribald enough lately - see - I am getting self-conscious) I would say that after a couple of afternoons of watching youporns many months ago I concluded (and felt emboldened) that whatever I might put down that might be deemed as naughty and "private" would seem innocent and charming in comparison to a lot of what's out there that I'm hardly even aware of. Not a manifesto, exactly...

So here I am typing away madly, wishing not to edit this right now (perhaps a tweak or two in the morning). I will send this off to you with very many kisses, and go back to the southfacing window with my glass of wine. Love you, darling. Hope all is well with you. XOXOXO