Dear love, back from the CSA farm where I suffered for beauty in the form of mosquito bites in order to pick flowers while I still may. This is the buggiest year I have experienced in my life, there has been so much rain and damp. So much so that in the solarium a bloom of shadowy black mold is erupting on a wall - there's no leak, it's from all the moisture in the air. The fridge isn't running right, condensation forms and drips onto the shelves. D doesn't think it's broken, just that it can't handle the relentless humidity.

Still, it was a nice day, the sun came out from time to time, including at dawn, fiery behind the massive twin oaks across the road, and I might have snapped a photo from the juliet balcony but it's a bad vantage point because power lines insanely crisscrossing all over the place inevitably ruin an image and without photoshop I can't get rid of them. And I wasn't about to go out in the driveway in my underwear half awake wishing only to rise slowly to the surface of my day with sips of hot coffee.

There was a wonderful haul from the CSA, I enjoy the ritual of going around the bins - today earthy dark beets, green beans, amberskinned onions, a head of boston lettuce (pristine & buttery - my favorite), arugula, a sheaf of swiss chard, tomatoes, an eggplant, and a head of garlic. And a basket of beautiful tiny hard brown pears that I've placed in a bowl, for now for decoration, but actually they inspire me to try my hand at a French frangipane tart, pastry base spread with almond cream and sliced pears arranged on top. Pears & almond are a sublime combination. I think I have a recipe someplace from a French intern of my acquaintance from many years ago now - wow, 10! she was just a kid then, and is probably married with children now. She had made one in the kitchen of the family where she was staying, and it was one of the most incredibly delicious pastries I've ever had. Well of course the French do have that knack. Her recipe was quite involved - before I keep going on about it let me look around for it. I know that I had it, at least at one time...

Dearest love, are you swimming towards me? I wish you were. Your Gioconda dreams of water towers... What would I do without you? You carry me through a day, through all my days as they pile up in succession, as I head towards you too my love, like a cutter breaking through ice, thinking of you and knowing that you think of me. A glimpse of heaven darling, the two of us swimming towards each other, somehow.

At the farm was a tiny dead bird in the flower border as I stepped. What got it, I wonder - West Nile, or a farm cat? It was touching to see the unexpected corpse, eyes closed, wings tucked in, lying in repose among bobbing stems of delicate lavendar scabiosa. As I snipped blooms it did occur to me to wonder the journey the creature had taken, in this increasingly paved over world hostile to birds, that found this exquisite little flower border - and lost its life right there. So I hope, in some sense, it died happy - I know that sounds absurd, but on occasion I see the most extraordinary butterflies or impressive grasshoppers in the most inhospitable places, such as the supermarket parking lot - and there's nothing I can do for them of course, except to mentally beam at them, get out of here! the conservation area, and the river aren't very far away! But think of the enormous distances those tiny bird or insect wings travel. I mean, I'm so much bigger than them - and how many miles, even if I were perfectly fueled & rested, could I reasonably walk? And these creatures, some of them - not just Olympian individuals but whole species - do these vast biyearly migrations to and from Mexico, South America, the Caribbean, up to Canada. So - yes, I wondered a bit about this tiny gray just starting to decompose feathered body, at rest on a flower bed.

On my way home I stopped by another farm that still has some ears of corn for sale, so I bought four, two of which we'll have with dinner tonight. The corn fields are flattened, flooded in places, and so vast. I felt very small in this beautiful panoramic landscape at its furthest extensions bounded visually by mountains. It's a soothing landscape, though - I suddenly think, by contrast, of a trek I took across a crater in Volcano National Park on the Big Island - strange surreal scape that made me feel very nervous (also because the sun was sinking, and the dark shadowy edges of the otherwise lit vast pockmarked scorched field were forbidding silent remote and lonesome to the extreme). And I was heading back to such an edge, to climb back up from the crater, emerge back up into the safety of the sulfurous parking lot...

But I digress. I don't remember birds there, in that strange other planet - that crater I mean - right here on earth. Actually that whole park is a trip. And there are birds there, and new life, as well as sculpturally desiccated volcanically ruined vestiges, such as of highly expressive dead trees still standing. It was a long time ago, my visit.

So today, too, on my way back home, after the stop for corn, I drove along an isolated rural road, and one of the yahoos zoomed up behind me from nowhere and tailgated, and I just kept rolling along - but then braked hard because there was a little creature in the road - a chipmunk maybe, though I'm not sure. So I put on the brakes (fortunately I wasn't driving fast at all, maybe 35). And yahoo behind me slams on his brakes to keep from hitting me and then leans on his horn. So yes, dear reader, I gave him the finger big time and yelled a couple of times (could he have heard me? I doubt it) don't tailgate me, don't tailgate me. Possibly there was an adverbial swear word in there, but honestly I don't remember. Maybe not. I was trying to keep it simple. Don't f'ing tailgate me.

So I don't know if the chipmunk or whatever it was made it or not. I don't know that I hit it, but the jerk behind me may well have. He turned off the road pretty soon after - so what was all the point of being on my rear - what a jerk.

Anyway, that's that darling, a few little impressions picked up from my day. I hope you've had a wonderful day my love, and are looking forward to a weekend, one in which you manage to get in whatever it is you'd like to do. I have one to look forward to myself, a writing workshop tomorrow morning, on the grounds of a Persian-inspired estate...

Love you, my dearest, have a wonderful wonderful evening. I will think of you, and look out, as always, for your kisses.

xoxo