Rafe's bobsled run

***
Late afternoon, gorgeous clear light fills the aerie like a swell of music, I am filled with a sense of wellbeing being out of the woods with this cold, grateful to be up & about, back to my usual puttering and routine. I even felt up for a walk with weights earlier, though it was hard going at the conservation area, the path is barely trampled, and the snow is knee-deep. But a walk was imperative. I was afraid that on top of the flu I was going to get fat, not having walked for three days - the longest gap in working out since I started 2-1/2 years ago.

Dearest at the north pole, I wonder where you've gone, what a time of year to be there. Well, as always with you - don't ask, don't tell, so I won't, but I look forward to your candlelight in my window again, sometime soon, and at any rate hope that things are going well with you.

No big post today, I'm dancing in my seat to the radio right now, happy to be feeling okay and enjoying the sun and a glass of rosé. Experienced my first King Lear of any form yesterday evening, and made it through even with a lingering cough. It was a time-delayed semi-live HD telecast of a National Theatre production, starring Derek Jacobi. Much of it washed over me like oceanic waves that I didn't quite understand, including the who, why's, and wherefore's of some of the characters. I really should have read a plot synopsis before attending - ah well, working my way through one now, after the fact. I don't have much to say about the production, except for its dazzlingly executed on-the-mark perfection in every respect, and even if I didn't understand the plot, experiencing the wash of Shakespeare's startlingly poetic, economic, riddle-laden sonic language, wave after extravagant wave, cascading over me as if I were a mouse listening from below the cliffs of Dover - fantastic.

Oh, it's Friday night, darling, what are you doing I wonder? The light is so golden & beautiful here it makes me feel truly hopeful that spring isn't far away. I've received an invitation to catsit in Brooklyn the third week in April, from the Tuesday before Easter to just after (or thereabouts - the dates aren't fixed in stone). I've pounced to accept, it's a rare treat, and I haven't been in the city in ages - when last, exactly? A while - last fall, when I took Emily to the beach, or no - there was a weekend trip after, when I craved lobster roll.

Why is there such a fascination with my "it would have starved a gnat" post from last September? Yes, it was a good post, and I suppose it might resonate with some - as it did - with me - when I wrote it, of myself. But all those hits on it, from a host of countries around the world - I'm inclined to think it's all the same person. You? I don't know. Ah, all these mysteries. Does it matter? I suppose it doesn't really make any difference from where I sit.

I like my post from yesterday - not my prose, so much, except that there was a windmill in the 1904 Peter Pan poster (I find that poster so charming!), which led me to think of one of my all-time favorite songs, Windmills of My Mind, which I'm quite sure appears in a French film I have on a video cassette somewhere, Umbrellas of Cherbourg, with Catherine Deneuve. I was searching online for a version that approximates the one that I hear in my head (some dream version of its own), and the closest I could find was the Thomas Crown clip. I have enjoyed looking at it again today. The imagery is so beautiful, McQueen soaring in the little yellow plane (reminding me of Le Petit Prince, a book I never could, decades ago, get into, so it's not that I'm trying to play that card). I'm very afraid of flying (or have been, maybe I'm less so now), and sometimes I get vertigo seeing images from high-above, but I enjoy that clip, McQueen soaring, the little plane wheeling and dipping.

Honey, I could hang on here forever, I really could, which is why I wish we could be together so we could just chat aimlessly, and kiss, and listen to music, and share a bottle of wine, and watch the sunlight fade - it's just gone momentarily golden and intense now, as the sun gets set to set - and then we could go on and on as we please and no one, hearing my speak, would accuse me of being prolix, though of my kisses that could be another story but no one ever complained.

Loving you very very much. Yours, Belle

XOXO