Good evening, darling. In a quiet reflective mood, well-suited to coping too with today's heat & humidity, my body doesn't wish to be anything but still, quiet, movements measured. Feeling "liminal," again. The light is shrinking, clouds perhaps are building towards storms later, but for now it's expectant - or no, not expectant, quite heavily oppressively still, the torpor between things, signaling change, the pregnant caesura between alternate states. Skies seem perceptibly to be darkening, I could go for a storm, the release. I had the car for a bit this afternoon and drove to the library, returned books, the biography of Picasso, the volume on Dora Maar, the odd account of the Svengalian attorney who presided in macabre cruel fashion over the ancient Duchess of Windsor. I retained the James Lord memoir of "Picasso and Dora Maar," the title a bit misleading, because it describes the unfolding of his own love (despite his open homosexuality) of Dora as their acquaintance developed into friendship and otherwise evolved.

At the library I picked up a book that I had reserved last week, a title I'd come across somehow in my online travels (and have forgotten now the impetus source that caused me to log onto the mid-Hudson system, look up the book, and reserve it). It's entitled - well, no, I won't spell it out, simply to avoid people landing on my blog uselessly - a link to the title is here. The title sounds salacious or like a cheap self-help psychological advice book, but it's actually a very well-written, philosophical meditation. It's making me feel all the more liminal and between things, uncomfortably conscious of my own failings and shortcomings, my neverending way of always falling precisely into the cracks. I'm not a Young Wife - nor am I an Old Mistress. I've been a wife for a very long time. I've never been a mistress. But now I feel myself to be a mistress - only it's completely virtual. And it's not even entirely exclusive - I'm sort of a mentally two-timing mistress I'm afraid (with occasional fond thoughts of a third who'd once made a strong impression on me). It's ironic to me that I find myself in this uncertain choppy waters stage in my life, right when so many others (happily so, I'm happy for them), committed partners for years and decades many of them, are leaping into the ocean waters of marriage - right when I'm having the most trouble with mine, at my age, and after a 25-year partnership, in a deeply existential sense. (No wonder when I blurted out to the nurseryman whose expertise I had complimented in my blog - I wished for him to be able to enjoy the nice things I'd written about him, but at the same time didn't wish for him to use it as advertisement, just for his own enjoyment - well, no wonder in this particular climate that he was taken aback at the very least, and perhaps very strongly disapproving when I clumsily mentioned the nature of my blog, that it's the way I communicate with My Friend - my extramarital friend.)

Ah, thunder is rumbling now, and the aerie is quite dark. I hope the power won't go out.

I like what I'm reading of the Wife/Mistress book so far. The title is titillating, but really it's just sober advice - be your own woman, don't lose yourself in trappings, explore all parts of yourself, don't shut parts of yourself off. That is advice that this Old Wife might give to a Young Mistress, for that matter...

All sound advice, very feminist, in a way I like & respond to, as a woman - be yourself and really only in that way can you be loved, if you don't demand being loved, that you're just so naturally fully realized & expressed in your way that you become loved... I'm putting it very clumsily - yet again -

Here's a lovely quote from Montaigne, mentioned in the early pages: "We sought each other long before we met... We found ourselves so mutually taken with one another, so acquainted and so endeared betwixt ourselves, that from thence forward nothing was ever so near to us as one another... Being begun so late, there was no time to lose."

And so my partner in my longstanding institution of marriage will be grilling tonight, and he bought me a camera today, which I will devote time to figuring out tomorrow, and which I officially regard as my birthday present, case closed.

It's so funny how our relationship has changed - for many years we were each other's best friend, lovers, partners, loving companions. So different now, and yet we co-exist. We never had children - our marriage was joyful and playful - as though we had been merely lovers, which we weren't just that, we built an economic future together, etc. I don't know. It's just funny how it's all flipped around now, his head is in a different place, and so is mine. Things aren't so bad - in fact they're improving - he's very busy with work, and he seems to thrive on it honestly, I think he's gaining a lot of self-confidence, maybe for the first time really in his adult life. As a result he's a lot easier to be with, and he's very kind to me these days, and tries I know in his ways to make me happy. But - the playfulness between us is gone - and I don't see us getting it back -

I don't know. Darling, I'm not even tired - just feeling between things as usual, and wondering if you're back across the pond (or not? I thought that was to come to an end) - and well, I'm glad that we can provide some joy, fulfill aspects of ourselves, encounter the "other" in each other and in ourselves - I'm very happy for that, and honestly it helps keep me going, and perhaps this is what I do, I just write about this stuff, connect with you, my muse, my male muse - because artistic "process" is a strange thing, and I seem to require one, that's how it works for me, I always was a letterwriter, from a young age - and so

Many hugs & kisses darling ("Old Mistress" frowns upon use of 'darling' - no wonder why I'm feeling a bit chastened - but it's what I got --- Master)

love, Belle