Hello dearest love, kisses hello. Up in the aerie, my mind awhirl with sensations. I should have done a workout (... for I have sinned...). There, that's out of the way. My ankle is sore, a little bit. I lay down for a nap, fell into a short deep sleep. Woke under the covers thinking of you. Earlier in the day I thought of you in similar circumstances to fantastic effect. Monstrous. It just rises out of me, the moment it does. For a moment, before the gigantic inversion, I felt like Anna K. I lay on the covers in an old Perry Ellis black wool coat with a faux-fur collar. Quite an elegant coat. I wore it to work in Manhattan for several years, back when I was in urban planning. A couple of winters ago it became the pelt I wrapped myself in when I took to sleeping in the solarium next to the radiant warmth & orange flame of the pellet stove.

There is something positively radiant about the quality or weight of that wool. I could use an extra blanket on my bed, a wool one, and there isn't money for one (or there is - but I just spent it on a new blouse & bag & shoes for E.D.'s birthday soiree - one must suffer to be Belle, of course) but as wacky or even kinky as it seems I pulled this old romantic coat out from the downstairs closet and brought it upstairs. And am glad I did. It's a well-coordinated room - nice bedding that goes with the antiqued yellow wall color, and a few modest wall decorations, such as a wooden board painted with a pair of cats (for a while referred to around here in hushed tones as The Kimble - a piece of knock-off, mass-produced wall art I'd found on sale in a Vermont shop many years ago), and a dark wood frame matted with a patchwork cloth print - in which I've placed an image that involves a patchwork quilt hanging from a line.

I digress. So - a very pretty room. But D never got around to the storm windows, and so it's quite chilly & drafty. And it's pretty - but not cutesy-pretty. It can afford a touch of austerity, or a wrong note somewhere. Or a clashing item. And so - in lieu of a cozy "perfect" wool blanket --- serving as a throw is my old Perry Ellis funereally black coat, with its funnily-draped shoulders (there was something odd about that cut) - but the coziest, warmest, loveliest spread of warmth on my person late at night while I sleep, or mid-morning, as I lie awake, my white body in black wool, thinking of you. To very great gargantuan rising out of the very depths - it amazes me every time, the involuntary aspects - and then I lie spent, throbbing, pointed -- utter miracle.

Dearest love, here's a kiss for you sweetheart, one of 52 I might bestow (scattered not evenly, but with certain strategic concentrations, of both yours & my liking) about your reclining person - and I imagine in a couple of weeks I'll increase it to 53...

Darling, I would like you to know that your prudently (against pneumonia) wool-coat clad paramour is also quite the Thanksgiving cook. I made onion-mushroom-sausage stuffing; cranberry-orange relish; crust for an apple pie that I'll finish tomorrow; and pizza for lunch - topped with seasonings (stolen) for stuffing, supra. We'll have a ton of food, and I wish we were entertaining loved ones - friends and family (ah, now I think back to that afternoon that you all descended on that surprise visit). There's more food prep tomorrow, we do that much of the ritual... and then it's blessed leftovers for the week to come, hardly any cooking from scratch at all...

Oh sweetheart, here's another kiss, oh grrrr....

I've been looking at a W-S catalog that came in the mail. That is, Williams-S. I won't be buying anything from it at all, but I am finding it an inspiration for some cooking & baking endeavors in the coming weeks... such as, perhaps, a German Chocolate Cake. Do you love cake? I love cake. I hardly ever have it. I hardly ever bake it. But I just might attempt one, now that I have this glossy image, for the holidays. And how about in the hors d'oeuvre department, tiny meatballs? or fine cheeses of all sorts? or tiny savory puff-pastry whatevers? This catalog is a keeper, til the new year...

And in other W-S news --- this time William Shakespeare --- yesterday at the library I picked up a book that was propped up enticingly - at my eye level on a painted bookcase - in a mini Shakespeare-themed display of recent books & videos. (I had gone to the library yesterday, with a sense of frustration - books I wish, suddenly, to read - weren't available - Speak, Memory, by Nabokov (I've reserved it from another outpost in the library system); a treatment of E.D. (Maid as Muse) I haven't yet read, along with the Scandalous Life tome - neither of the latter of which are in the Mid-Hudson library system at all. I scrabbled together paper & pencil from the cozy library front desk, googled the titles, and requested them from the head librarian, who said she would order them. The first I wish to read, I told her; the second, a friend urged upon me. And then I left the doorway of her tiny cubicle of an office, not without noticing her stapling my little note on - on what exactly? - reading my words, "How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson's Life and Language," and then - with reference to the other title - A Scandalous Life. To which I swear I saw her throw her head slightly back.

It's so quiet here where I am, my darling, and yet my mind is brimming over a bit - I can't quite manage all the proper links this evening.

But to just slightly go on, as to lay down the thread, I started this book that I pretty randomly picked up off the shelf, and have begun to read it, with great enjoyment and delight - it is a dip into this wonderful writer's mind... how he, with a fine scholarly background, found himself viscerally engaged with reading Shakespeare.

I've only read the first few pages so far, but adore reading the voice of a kindred spirit. He's like a natural blogger, with his exuberant & personal writing style. I supply my own links, in the sense that, as I read from the hardcover (wonderful achievement, truly!), he mentions Shakespeare Sonnets - 44 or 45 - he himself can't remember which, or maybe it's both. It gave me occasion to look up both 44 and 45 - and they were news to me, I'm sure I haven't read them before, or if I have, then without their registering...

Darling, seriously, signing off now, this endless knitted scarf has gone on too long. Love you deeply, madly

my ever-present absent one