My dearest, wondering how you are, where you are, what you're doing, hoping you're having a nice time. I'm doing fine, in a mellow, quiet mood, back now from a walk. Laid low much of the day, it was quite hot & humid, the sun too strong for me. Made minor edits this morning on yesterday evening's post. I re-published it and received a puzzling error message which I disregarded, not realizing til minutes later that several paragraphs had gone missing - and I had no backup. I spent more time than I liked trying to recreate the lost lines. Not many, fortunately, but I had been fairly pleased with the post (except for its need of a bit of tweaking) and so it was distressing to lose any of it. Recreating the missing section wasn't easy, a brain/memory challenge - fortunately I could remember most of it. But it was an entirely different process from having written it in the first place, when it flowed right out of me, in the cadences that came. This morning, instead, in stumbling fashion, 'words came halting forth,' to borrow from an Elizabethan sonnet, by Sir Philip Sidney ("Loving in truth and fain in verse my love to show...")

Most of the day I lounged around the aerie and upstairs rooms. Started to read the Sewall Emily Dickinson biography, a used copy, de-accessioned from the San Diego County Library, bar code sticker & library card pocket still attached to the frontispiece - small world, that that particular volume should now sit on my desk in Hudson, NY. Read more of the Rebecca Wolff novel, beautifully written, and which resonates with me, this sexual coming-of-age story of a sensitive, intelligent, precocious yet naive child-woman and her enthrallment with an enticing, predatious young married couple, newcomers to town. I took a fitful nap, checked headlines (can't do much more than that as have read 17 of the monthly allotted 20 articles that the NYT allows for free). The day felt like a lackadaisical waste, much of it, I couldn't seem to get myself going. Then finally around 4:30, as the sun's glare softened, I forced myself to tidy the kitchen, fold laundry, water the garden, fill the bird feeders. And I went about the garden with snips, gathering bouquets for vases now placed all around the house. An earthenware jug filled with long woolly sprigs of faded lavender, sitting on the raised brick fireplace hearth. Twin mixed bunches of lavender, fragrant buddleia, pale cascading hosta bells, and single deep-rose echinaceas, set into a pair of identical mustard jars, one in the solarium, the other on the kitchen table. I love French Pommery mustard, delicious & worth seeking out - which I have done in the past, on occasion, on one of my wonderful adventurous Manhattan treasure hunts - mainly because when the mustard's done the jars make wonderful vases (and as I glance in front of me at my desk, pen & pencil holders). If I wish to give someone a casual present of garden flowers - I like to give it to them in such a jar, theirs to keep. The jars are plain blanched ceramic, simple and seemingly ordinary. Flowers look lovely in them.

And on my desk before me is another miniature Redon, sprightly nosegay of several kinds of zinnia (I love that flower, variegated & cheerful in its way as tulips - is there such a thing as zinniamania?), light & dark pink roses, cosmos, and airy spider flower - an effusive party-colored spray of pinks and violets.

And now you've lit on that charming theatre poster of Peter Pan & Wendy, and I'm looking at the post again which I'd forgotten all about, and downloading the embedded youtube of Windmills of My Mind. I do love that song, I was thinking of it just the other day. Ah, but in what context - that, at the moment, eludes me.

So no big revelations today, darling. Thinking of you, so happy to connect with you, soaring.

Many kisses.