Hello my love, hello darling. I'm glad that was you, as I came to realize, and not Dick Cheney. I had a few paralyzing moments there fearing that this housewife had accidentally fed into the consumerist culture by extolling a brand new dishwasher. Then again, if it was Mr. Cheney - oh the thought is just too horrible to contemplate.

Of course it was you, dearest. Let me take a metaphorical dip in that lovely if treacherous swimming hole up the road. I returned there the following day, by the way, and the first thing I saw as I pulled into the dusty gravel area - a huge red sign, posted high in a tree, that read "NO SWIMMING." The "NO" was underlined, which for me removed all ambiguity. Had it gone up since I had swum there bucolically the noontime before? Had I simply missed it then? I'm so glad I did, because your water nymph would not have been so blissed out if she'd had any inkling that she was breaking the law. That's all I need, is to be hauled to a town hall justice (the elected justices are not usually attorneys) because I broke some silly ordinance. But I am disappointed that in this area of beautiful water, rivers, creeks, swimming holes, and the like - I am having a hard time finding a nice place to take a leisurely dip. As I said the day before, what if the world were organized around such simple pleasures? Wouldn't that be wonderful?

Spent much of the afternoon vacuuming and dusting the house, in advance of heading down to the city tomorrow afternoon (I'll be there through the 12th). I've been blogging so much about E.D. that I haven't told you how busy I've been putting up all sorts of farmstand produce for the freezer. In recent days I've pitted and quartered a carton of plums, and roasted and spooned out and packed into containers a half-dozen enormous butternut squashes. That's it? Wow - one sentence to write - and an enormous amount of work to accomplish, preceded by a bunch of hemming & hawing. It is all very time consuming, though I did enjoy the pitting plums part, red juice trickling all over my hands and gothically down onto my forearms, lasciviously incarnadining my fingers. I sat at the kitchen table in my dainties, working the fruit, listening to radio, halving each plum along its natural crease, plucking out the pit (imagine - well over a hundred plums, each lifted from the dusky carton, washed in cool water, opened, each with a single seed), and placing each into a large beautiful dark red ceramic bowl. As I sat listening to music and to crickets and birdsong by the open window and musing of you, time passed and the bowl became piled with pitted fruit and the colander of washed plums mercifully emptied, balance of scales shifting, and I dipped my hands deep into the bowl heaped with glistening fruit, depths the color of Heade'ian red velvet only wet, and intoned in orgiastic release, ohhh grrrrrrr.

Ohhh grrrrrr, darling. So very many kisses - remembered, looked forward to.