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My dearest, back up in the aerie at the end of the day. I spent quite a while on my post this morning, too much time. It wasn't that the post and photos took so long to put together, but that I then became obsessed with trying to find an image of a Louis Comfort Tiffany stained glass landscape... I was the Richard Dreyfuss of obsessive google searches, trying to find just the right image, and what was it that I was trying to express with it anyway?

I finally gave up, and launched the post, which I could actually have opened the virtual window and tossed paper-plane style in the a.m. after all.

My dearest, how are you? I hope you've had a wonderful day, despite somber cast and overtones, yet here we are, all these years later, transformed, aren't we? I feel that I am. Maybe not precisely by that day, though it was certainly a turning point looking back, but in the intervening years things have certainly grown, changed, developed, shifted for me.

Anyway.

So I did finally find an image, and had plenty of time to contemplate it while I sliced and diced vegetables for Sicilian Spicy Chicken, an enormous vat of which sits on the stove. It comprises seasonal produce I picked up the other day at the CSA (veritable recipe kit of eggplant, tomatoes, peppers), along with browned chicken, capers & olives, and glugs of hearty red wine.

Then I spent an hour prepping & slicing a $6 carton of red peppers for the freezer. My word what a tedious task. Darling, you should be proud of me that I didn't hit the bottle right then at quarter past three, so boring was it. That carton was big. It yielded two huge bowls of sliced peppers, packed into numerous little plastic containers and stuffed willy-nilly into our overstuffed freestanding freezer in the laundry room. I'm ready for the Rapture, and if others aren't, I could probably whip up a feast.

I sat Vermeer-like by northfacing kitchen window slicing & dicing, radio off, so was in contemplative silence, and found myself considering the beautiful Tiffany stained glass image, words I'd written this morning, and a photo I took a couple of weeks ago from the car as it was moving (don't worry, D was at the wheel). I thought of E.D., and thought that she would have liked L.C. Tiffany's rendered landscape very much. Perhaps she didn't go for church decorations - but she knew a heavenly room - that they both had in common. As I perused image after image of Tiffany's art, I was struck by his transcendentalist vision - he postdates E.D., but I see the affinity - his expressed vision of the sublime, as seen from behind windows, and through them...

Dearest, sorry, I'm just musing over these connections, in neither a scholarly nor particularly poetic way. Perhaps time will work its magic, and other associations will form. But here they are set down, pinned like butterflies (stained glass monarchs are around these parts just now, starting their migration to Mexico), and sometimes in my fantasies I imagine myself likewise pinned, exquisitely, beneath you

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image:
Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933), stained glass window (1905) [commissioned for the music room of Rochroane Castle, a Gothic Revival mansion built 1902-1905 (now demolished), Irvington-on-Hudson], Corning Museum of Glass, NY

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This beautiful window is all that is left of the castle...

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Earlier... diffuse light had gleamed palely behind them, black leaded trees silhouetted against a lustrous band of stained glass fire.