Dearest love, it's been a beautiful day but it's very warm and humid, and I'm sitting here topless in my filmy skirt reminding myself of a Gaughin, albeit a literary-minded middle-aged one sporting readers. I inhale my fingertips - they smell pleasantly of lime juice. I just made a fresh salsa, inspired to do so by cilantro from the CSA the other day. I missed on jalapeno pepper (brakni mnie - darn!) but the salsa is delightful - made with a quart of varied teeny tomatoes from a farmstand - some the size of jelly beans, others larger and pear-shaped, not quite ripe, others luscious plump grapes. I chopped up the mini-tomatoes, along with a clove of garlic, a sweet white onion, cilantro, EVOO, sea salt & pepper. I bought a fresh bag of tortilla chips today - but this salsa will also be a side to what promises to be a delightful dinner tonight: grilled lamb, farmstand corn, grilled zucchini and carrot - grilling caramelizes carrots & brings out the sweetness.

Darling - how are you? and where are you?, I wonder. My imagination tends to over-interpret (ya think?) but I feel concerned and think, oh darling, when I receive a page hit via that Francis Bacon stylized painting of the paralytic child. I'm not quite sure what to make of the image - to me it signals psychic distress. And I can't help it - I suppose it's here that I'm 'crazy' - I imagine that it's you, signaling to me your state of mind - only what state of mind is that, exactly? well, distress, not feeling comfortable in one's body, deformed, not whole...

Maybe it wasn't you at all, perhaps it was an entirely random page hit. I do give myself reality checks such as that.

The light is fading, and so am I. I hear cicadas. D just came home. I prepped the vegetables for him to grill and he just yelled up the stairs to say that one of the carrots - which I left untrimmed, two roots spirally intertwined & fused along their length - "looks like an erotic sculpture."

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I attended an artists' open studio afternoon at the local international arts gallery, and snapped a couple of photos, and am studying the program guide now in order to try to give proper credit to the artist whose work I snapped - but I can't figure out who it was.

Holding my hands to my face - still lime on my fingertips. The Miss Dior at my wrists is gone, after a lot of running water, rinsing vegetables, watering plants. There's fragrance in the crease of my elbow, still - I just checked. And M. Gaughin might not find my form objectionable, or perhaps he would, I don't know enough about his biography to know. I think my shape is not unlike those of the lush dark beauties he painted. Though my coloring is distinctly northern. Spread of humans about the globe -- huh -- .

My dearest - I hope this post finds you happy, and having a wonderful time wherever you are

XOXO

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P.S. A bit of light housekeeping, to follow up on links I promised in recent posts. The new novel I'm currently reading and greatly enjoying is The Beginners, by Rebecca Wolff. The author lives almost directly across the river from where I live, and I heard her read from her book in then-galley form at a delightful literary reading & wine-tasting in town a couple of months ago (as mentioned in my blog post, here).

The very insightful & illuminating analysis, of E.D.'s poem "I heard a fly buzz - when I died," that I mentioned the other day, can be found here.

image:
Winslow Homer (1836-1910), The New Novel, 1877, watercolor, Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, MA