Dear love, peaceful hour, afternoon tipping towards dusk, sun fading, light flattening, after straw and gold all day, to monochrome shades of black & white. Flowers from the garden - as are these - are especially precious, summer paddling out, receding in the distance, or maybe it's us paddling towards the icebergs. This time of year, inbetween, one glimpses both, as if setting off from the southernmost tip of South America, where it's summer, for Antarctica. Is that why, in stores, September outfits are sometimes in shades of black & white, as if to offer counterpoint to the change of seasons, with its brilliant colors in some senses - flowers blooming, foliage blaze coming - but still this palpable sense of the earth tilting, paradoxically, in the northern hemisphere, closer to the sun, which means that days (like the fashionable off-white pants I'm wearing, cropped just above the ankle) become in tiny increments, then inexorably, colder, and foreshortened.

Ah, my dear, so that's my little take on what it's like to sit here at this moment, 6:28, thinking of you (the whole day through) and tapping, typing, across the universe to you. I had a nice day, off-kilter though, in that I felt the urge to put together a morning post for you, which took a while, so most everything got delayed, including my shower & getting dressed. But by one it was done & "in the mail" with sufficient postage

(as was, at the same time, by different mode, a package to My Friend, kindly dispatched at the post office by D, containing a 2012 calendar of Hudson River Art paintings, a year's worth he can puzzle over in Finland, along with a little note with birthday wishes scribbled on the back of a recycled Swoon daily dinner menu ("Maine Peekytoe Crab Salad") He can puzzle over that too.)

Actually, it was a lovely package I put together for him. I even giftwrapped it, in decorative pale silver-and-lavender paisley-patterned paper - the lovely Olana shopping bag, which sliced open and cockspatched like a hen, formed just nearly large enough a sheet to wrap the cellosealed calendar. There was just a little gap at the top - but M.F.inF. - once he unties the bit of iridescent pearly curling ribbon that I unearthed from a bag of Christmas wrap, and took pains to take scissors to & curl - and then sealed it with a gorgeous Olana sticker - it was a lovely gift. My ambassadorial gesture, as a not-so-ugly-American, towards maintenance of peaceful Finn-American relations. Are there any issues? If there have been, perhaps akin to running my fingers over the tape as I wrapped the gift, they are cosmically smoothed over.)

and then my day proceeded apace, sorta kinda, like a deadheaded train doing little local runs (e.g., between Stamford & New Canaan) before being pressed back into service on the main line for the evening rush all the way to & from Grand Central.

Which is to say, that I got back on track after a profligate weekend, and did a workout, to Charlie Rose, and was thrilled to hear everything Simon Schama had to say, he makes the utmost perfect sense to me, his animated and devastatingly astute take on the current political state of affairs in our country. He spoke it, in his own way, as I myself see it, as this fundamental divide - the Tea Party wants nothing short of getting rid of government altogether. Schama is much more eloquent on the subject than I ever could be, but I felt just so gratified to hear his voice uttering just what he uttered, and not just on the pages of Salon (as great as Salon is). I mean, to me it symbolically seemed to signify that his point of view is gaining - as well it should be! - mainstream, establishment even, traction.

And after all the leg lifts & stomach crunches and the rest, I showered, and went downstairs, and lunched on the rest of a broccoli-rabe/turkey sausage pasta I'd made yesterday and warmed up for lunch for D, and then I went for a walk, and lay down for a nap, and got up again and organized a mixed salad and made dressing (as at Christmas! your Nigella laughed to remember as she shook the jar of honeycup mustard by the kitchen window), and went out to fill the empty birdfeeders, cats & chickens following me -

and that's about it darling
which brings me to this moment
there was only one thing that I didn't get to today
but it's okay, there's always tomorrow
and I've had so many wonderful impressions & memories & abiding thoughts of you all day
I was quite wakeful in the early hours overnight and it was such a comfort to think of you, wrap my arms around you, in an erotic way, sensual certainly, oh I don't know, just the two of us on a chilly dark night in a bedroom finding warmth & comfort in each other's arms, not necessarily, at that hour, the most goal-oriented intense perspective, far from it
not "cozy" either, exactly
we could luxuriate in encountering each other's skin and forms even as, at that stranded hour, one or both of us were much too tired to do anything about it, not anything organized that is
but still that silken touch, skin to skin

ah! sweetheart: I describe an hour - not the one, now, at 7:10, I'm in
can't do anything about it
the darkness, here, is chaste
golden afternoons, whatever the weather, when I have the house to myself
ablaze