Hello dearest, up in the aerie, windows shut against the chill, an in-between time as summer slips into fall, many flowers still in bloom - clematis, pale pink roses, clouds of white & lavender asters, burnt red sedum - even as trees, leaves no longer brilliant green, seem to mellow, age, turn gray. The house seems unusually still and quiet sealed from outside sounds. I had stepped out earlier, took a walk around the garden, spritely Gwynnie gamboling and darting madly in front of me. Crickets were invisibly ringing, a summer sound, but they're still around. Our garden is so overgrown I felt like a wild woman. I have mixed feelings about the garden. It needs to be better tended, paths better defined and maintained. And yet I like the meadow aspects, such as what in summer seemed to be simply thick weedy brush, turning out to be stand after stand of billowing asters, a pleasing airy effect, nice cut flowers for vases too.

Miniature zinnias, salvia, and a sprig of wild aster hold court on my desk.

My sweet, how are you, you feel a little unreal to me today, so distant in that parallel universe, lodged in a different cell of the honeycomb. I saw your name on a 'cc' list today, on which my name appeared too, which gave me a start, I don't think I've ever seen your name there before... yours was several lines up from mine, which was buried in the middle... we're far apart, disconnected, as that, a couple of names on a random list (to me). You received the same message - perhaps you saw my name, Georg Friedrich, and contemplated it too.

I'm letting myself freefloat in this peaceful quiet, trying to figure out what comes next, what to write. I absently place my hands, palms up, beneath my desklamp, and regard my palms illuminated, every line, every whorl, the finest patterns of not just fingerprints on the pads of my fingers, but grains of patterns extending down each one, and even if I don't wear any rings, each of my fingers is ringed in three places, and in between grained like planks of wood. And there are strong lines in my palms, and finer ones, and a background web of tracery. I can see why people would wish to read meanings into palms - I wish to. On either palm I have a strong equatorial line - above and below jutting electrical seemingly random crosscurrents of lines. Somehow, as in the palm-sized list of cc's on the email, I imagine myself below the equator, and you above it, and forever there's that divide that separates us. And yet the lines, though severely bounded by the lateral bifurcating crease, imprinted deep over time (by evolution) by my hands' ability to curl closed, fingers wrapping like dusk to close light off from the canyon of my palms - those lines connect, cross the jump, some of them at least. Or there's a route one might travel, if one wished or needed to, to get from below to there. My hands are as old as time, old and memorious as an elephant's hide. (My hands are small, quite nice, in other, more worldly respects.) My palms aren't flat. A well forms when I cup my hand. I can sip water from it, and have in the past, and surely some very ancient ancestor, and not just on a camping trip without a mess kit, crouched by a creek bed, thirsty, and availed herself - technologically inept, as always, she without the handaxes (perhaps) - knelt at the creek, and didn't see her reflection in the water, not yet, but dipped her hand in the running stream, cupped her hand, whose creases folded origami-like into a 3-D wonder of its own accord, and brought it to her lips. Narcissus was out there somewhere, chasing deer around the forest with his fellows, while Echo, in awe of her own palms, still wet from the flowing creekbed, wondered at the lines, and if Narcissus was planning on coming home that night, or what. He seemed as far away from her as those strange creek-like lines that jutted north, above the line, towards her fingers, while she, regarding the southern hemispheres of palms, closer to her body, could only be grateful that despite that great divide there was a closed-circuit connection between them.