My dearest, musing a bit this late afternoon, wood blinds up in the aerie still drawn but I should open them at this point to let in the slanted light, indirect and tolerable now at the end of the day. I wonder where you are. I think back to the phone call yesterday with my girlfriend of many years, trying to describe my life, my blog, the unspoken yet eloquent encounters between you & me. I'm sure I sounded like a nut case, I did to myself, a bit. It's very hard to explain, and I won't even try here, it doesn't bear up, nor should it - why dissect something so beautiful, that simply works? I know it brings me joy, and I sense that it brings you joy - and that's enough - no, more than that - it's a gift. Besides, as I noted to my friend, the irony is - well, what if we were to get together? I wouldn't write to you, and you might miss that, and I might miss writing - so maybe the whole thing really is about yearning & longing - no, more than that, we really are connecting, and life and circumstances otherwise intervene of course, and who wants or needs to upset applecarts that work on a different level - so let's dwell on this one, and so we do. My girlfriend listened & seemed to understand - I mean we're all adults here, past the half-century mark, we know the complications, the difficulties, the compromises. I told her that my life in many ways has felt intolerable, and that by writing every day, to you - I have figured out a way to make my life bearable for me.

And I've been musing about other things too (and yes, I have just gotten up and opened the shades, gray light filtering through offwhite slats on this hot summery day). In all my driving around rural creation on Saturday afternoon, I finally, for my first time, had a chance to stop into a place I've been aware of in the back of my mind, called Camphill Village. I passed by a wood sign that noted that its bakery & gift shop was open 2:30 to five, and I was near enough there, and twenty past two, and so I followed the signs - it's quite a circuitous route, with helpful signs at crucial junctions pointing the way - it was quite a few miles as it turned out from the first sign I'd spotted. But I'm glad I made the detour (I had the car for the day - why not? pounce!). I've only had the vaguest notion of the place, a vague awareness that it's a residential community for developmentally disabled adults, and that they bake hearty, whole-grain breads for sale, and in the past I've bought a loaf here & there when they're offered in a shop in town.

So I stopped by and bought a baguette and a couple of round beautiful loaves, buckwheat maple, olive-walnut. When I returned to my car I hungrily tore bits off and sampled them. Very hearty. A little too "serious" for my taste, with intense, earthy density, needed "leavening" somehow, and maybe I don't mean yeast (or maybe I do). Or maybe the bread begged for a thin slice of, say, local sheep's milk camembert, or a bit of butter. Anyway!

It's funny, yesterday my big cooking day at home, among my kitchen tasks I sliced up the round loaves into thin slices for the freezer, and made croutons with the baguette, tossing the sliced bits with EVOO & minced garlic, and roasting on a cookie sheet at the same time I was baking the spinach pie. And the flavor of the round rather stern-flavored loaves has grown on me, reminds me of cellophane-wrapped bricks of thin sliced German black bread that I've bought in European delis on rare occasion. So perhaps that's the way to eat these loaves, very thinly sliced - with perhaps some pickled or smoked fish, herring or salmon or whitefish, or a piece of good cheese. Though D has told me he likes the olive-walnut one with coffee, fortifying with his morning cup. Which when he told me that was part of my process of coming around to like the breads better, which now I do. And the croutons rock.

Anyway - I'm off my spiel here, D just came up & I thanked him again for the Emily frame & showed him my post. I was in the midst of writing/blogging yesterday when he suddenly came upstairs with the framed Emily, and I was so shocked, taken aback, that to tell you the truth, I didn't react very well - I didn't like it at first. I am a perfectionist, and this frame has been so long in the planning & making stages, with all of D's other work, of course. I wondered (still do, a bit) if the image shouldn't have been matted within a frame - D & I had both agreed that of course JP's signature would have to show, along with cryptic inked smudges like hieroglyphs at the bottom of the print... and then I'd forgotten all about that conversation, which transpired months ago. So when I saw - all of a sudden - the finished framed piece - D standing in front of me as my thoughts were, blogging, utterly elsewhere - I yelped.

But - not unlike as with the bread - it took me a while to come around to it, examine it from different angles, make my peace. I stepped around the garden today snipping a few flowers, snapping a few shots. I've had this stray teeny teacup & saucer floating around that suddenly occurred to me seemed to go (without being cutesy I hope) with Emily. And rummaging through my things, opening drawers, to see what else I might place on the shelf along with the framed portrait (but at the same time with an absolute horror of turning it into some kind of strange shrine) I found a sampler that I had embroidered as a girl, when I was in grade school. And I like that piece - it features an embroidered rose bush, and I've planted rose bushes all these decades later that remind me of the one I embroidered.

Anyway, this post is getting away from me and I wonder where you are, and how you are, and hope all is well with you, and very many kisses ---