Hello my love. It's 100 degrees in Hudson, and I've stayed indoors all day. I decided to give myself the day off from a walk and a workout, not wishing to deal with the sun and heat. But I found I had all this boundless physical energy. So I spent much of the day giving the kitchen a very thorough, all-too-rare complete cleaning. I cleaned the inside of the fridge, the floor beneath the stove & fridge, washed the floor, etc., etc. I did all this in the buff, and felt perfectly fine & comfortable the entire time, just moving about briskly, thinking my thoughts while scrubbing this, rinsing that. And actually before I embarked on that mad mission (seemingly so, on a day like today, but I felt fine) I did a bunch of food prep for what will be a delicious dinner tonight: chicken baked in a marinade of Indian garam masala spices, ginger, & yogurt; basmati rice; a cucumber salad dressed with plain yogurt, salt, pepper, & dill; and a small peach tart from the CSA fruit share last week - and tomorrow's another pickup.

It's only now that I'm really feeling the heat, now that I've had a cool shower, and toweled myself off, and spritzed on Miss Dior (ah!), and put on clothes, pink leotard tee & filmy skirt. It's very hot up in the aerie, hotter than the cavelike downstairs - and unfortunately the oven's on. I suppose my menu planning could have been better. No matter.

At least a breeze is coming through, rattling the wood blinds, tilted closed against the sun. Birds are at the feeders that I topped off. Probably we should have taken them down for summer, but I keep topping them off because I feel sorry when I see a little bird plaintively going at an empty feeder, and some of the birds are quite desperate about it, too tall for the bottom-most opening at which there might still be a bit of seed, they cling to the rim of the feeder from below, like swimmers hanging on to the edge of a pool; or they sit on the rim and lean over almost 180 degrees to get a morsel. So, yes - I see that desperate effort and my heart goes out - I go around to the back of the house with the sack of sunflower kernels.

Boy the combination of fragrances of basmati rice and peach crostata, and maybe the roasting chicken too - wow - amazingly wonderful. (Do you really think I'm a good writer? What would E.D. say to 'amazingly wonderful.' Like Lolita - bah!)

And I felt a need to edit this morning's post too, because I had like three 'impressed' and/or 'impressivelys,' not to mention two 'incredibly's, one of which got replaced with a 'notably' and the other with 'remarkably' - or some such - don't factcheck me - but that's the gist.

My dearest, where are you, how are you? I haven't gotten a response to a message yet, about an invite - well, who knows - I will try not to take it personally. There's a slightly paranoid side to me - how on earth would I ever explain anything, if I had to. Or perhaps the visit up North is all done and gone, all returned home without meeting. Which is fine, if that's what happened - I totally understand. I have found for myself (at least when I was a girl and took occasional week-long summer vacations at the house, spending time with my grandmother, and with my cousins) that that house is a little universe of its own, one enters its bubble, its rhythms, whatever's going on, and a day will flow from morning to night, interspersed with meals (kielbasa, sałatki, owoce), then before you know it it's the next day again, and the same routine goes on, as the 1960s brown analog clock with black hands, the one adjacent to the kitchen stove, hanging above the plastic wastebasket, that has marked time there for decades - since I was a girl at least, and now I'm nearly 52 - revolves silently around the hours.

I don't have synasthesia at all I don't believe - a coincident incongruous identification in one's mind of mixed sensory cognitions - ascribing colors to sounds, for example - I don't quite grasp it since I don't experience it. And yet there's something exquisite or excruciating or attenuated sometimes for me just picturing an hour on that particular kitchen clock - 'quarter to three' for example, in that cozy time-warp kitchen, the black hands at that balletic position signifying the timelessness of an endless afternoon; or 'ten after five,' that bowing of limbs suggesting that perhaps there's a train to greet, that someone's arriving home perhaps, that dinner comprised of a miscellany of pots on the stove is underway, and the light is turning golden in the west, along the avenue at the bottom of the driveway, and up here from the kitchen window, the sun is visible, a glow in the distance at the far end of all the neighbors' yards.

You'd think that I'm obsessed with those memories - I'm not, but they come to mind because I know you'll know what I mean.

So reluctant to let you go. And yet - I must.

My house is nice too. I enjoyed moving about it today, very much. Actually, I'm having a very hard time with the garden, it's so overgrown - lawn, privet - that I feel psychically encroached upon, dwarfed by the messy landscape. D's aware of it, he's working very very hard, I think somehow finally something 'clicked' with him, and he's on an upwardly ascending groove now, things are getting better (I just need to be dragged along I suppose, on some level, at this point). D has it in mind to hire two young guys he's acquainted with, who are hungry for work in downtime, to do some yard work for us. And the guy with the bulldozer came by one day on his own to survey the pulling-up-the-driveway job. He's thinking he can get to it in September, timing which D says will work with our finances too.

So honestly it felt really good just to stay in the house all day, even if all I did was give the kitchen a good once-over. Because sometimes the house - unfinished as it is - feels out of control too. But if it's clean - and clean especially during a heat wave - ah, then the living is easy.

It was just that little bit that I could control. That - and this post (maybe).

Signing off, my dearest, wherever you are, I hope all is well, all my love, many kisses,

one last squeeze
aarrghhh
xoxo
bye