My dearest - how are you, where are you? Missing you, would give anything just to be able to have a conversation with you, gauge you. A peaceful hour after a blessedly rainy day, I so enjoyed it after all the heat and sun. For the first time in weeks I'm back in jeans and a long-sleeved blouse, with even a cotton sweater draped over my shoulders. I've owned the pullover for many years, twenty or more, and never really wear it - it's too impractical, being pure white. Plus it only gets play between Memorial Day & Labor Day. When it's usually too hot for a sweater. Which limits the subsets of occasions that it ever gets retrieved. But today was just such a rare day - perfect summer accessory (more that to me, than cozy ole sweater) for this drizzly cool day.

The computer hums and whirs, outside birds tweet and tutoyer, traffic on the highway rolls by in audible serenity. Dinner will be angel hair pasta with pesto sauce that I whipped up from CSA basil. What else is new? In a mellow mood, perhaps reflective of the weather. Had a wonderful moment with you this morning, so effective, it just sets the day going right, when I can get myself to just that point - and that's it, then I'm off & running. I had this crazy notion that if I could give E.D. a single present from our time - I know exactly what it would be, with proper accompanying unguent. And I (as I'm sure you know) don't mean this in some salacious, cheap way. No, I really think that she would find it a powerful aid in achieving her transcendent states. Then again, I get the sense that perhaps she was quite adept or sensitive even without.  It's I who has needed the aid, and am blown away by the end result, in which truly the whole universe seems to split open & swallow me whole for several roiling seconds.  But this morning along with it came severe leg cramps - paralyzing me with pain in tandem with bliss. Ah but I made the bliss count, and it did, and then somehow unpretzeled my seized limbs. I should be glad I wasn't swimming, say in Carly Simon's old pool, which once I did with 1.0 late one summer evening, 35 summers ago, when I was much younger & more limber.

***
Dearest, are you smiling yet? I'm cracking up myself, at my own loopy jokes. Yeah, that really was her old pool, from when she was a girl, publisher's daughter, spending summers in North Stamford. 1.0's house was nearby, and his family were friends with the then-current owner, an elderly genteel library administrator as I recall, the Simons by that point long, long gone. I recall attending a gathering there one afternoon, the ceilings were very very low, it was a venerable old house - 18th century maybe, with later additions, and the room that I remember possibly older than that. Of the pool I remember next to nothing, except being in it in summery country darkness, in the cool water, just 1.0 and me, in the sweetest completest privacy (one of the rare occasions - owner away - that we didn't have to fear that someone would come busting in on us), fireflies lighting up the night here & there perhaps, stars up above dazzling, moonlight shining on the lapping ripples of the elegant sunken pool, and 1.0 and me alternately laughing & being intensely serious as we figured out doing it for the first time ever underwater, with the sound of traffic on the Merritt, very near the house, rolling soothingly distantly anonymously obliviously by on the way to who knows where in the sylvan darkness.

And are you somewhere, if not at this moment then later this evening, in sylvan darkness? I hope so, dearest, I know how you love the outdoors. Let's meet up you & me, I'll sneak out of my cabin, you'll figure some way out of yours, we'll douse ourselves with bug spray and you'll bring the torchlight, and shine it as we make our way through the buggy verdant path, that looks overgrown and safe in daytime, but at night is full of mysterious rustlings, tangled wilds rising up startled like deer in headlights - no, that's not true, the vegetation is indifferent, it's just that there's so much of it, and bugs dancing all around, and occasional fireflies, and some frog croaks, and another in another invisible corner amens in response. And we'll make our way to the lake, and step onto the wooden dock that juts out over the dark water, the torchlight you carry lighting the way to the end, where we sit down. You shut the torch, and we dangle our feet in the water. All is dark around us, and we, accustomed to the single beam of light that guided us here, are momentarily blinded by undifferentiated blackness, but now, as our eyes adjust, you and I are dark featureless silhouetted corporeal shadows facing each other, our voices murmuring, the cool water slapping against the wood piers, our feet submerged, finding each other's feet. We put our arms around each other and you kiss me, and I say, you know this reminds me of a time I skinnydipped in Carly Simon's pool, and you murmur in my ear as you begin to explore, I remember that story, what was it like, show me...

***
image:
Georgia O'Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), Pool in the Woods, Lake George, 1922, pastel, 44.45 x 71.1 cm., Reynolda House, Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina