My dearest, good evening, kissing you hello. No fireworks tonight, I don't think (okay you can stop reading if you wish). Feeling a bit beat, but in a contented way. Trying to figure out what to write to you. Dora would love to meet you - but only if it's you, or you.  (Email me if you're serious, Mr. Rochester - which I know you're not - I just hope it's not a stalker.)  It turns out there's a video relating to when Pablo met Dora. Maybe I'll take a look at it at the library, where downloads are way quicker. Though I long ago quit listening to any music there - I had no idea that earphones were quite so porous - apparently I had offended some Minuteman and the librarian had to come to my carrel and tell me to turn the music down. Talk about feeling embarrassed - for all I let it hang out here, as Belle - oh that was me, in person, rockin' out to Stella the Artist in what I thought had been relative privacy. Ah well.

Heavenly aromas just now, wafting up the stairs. A second pan of stuffing that I'd made last week, with leftover creamed onions; a baking sheet with halved butternut squash; a tin of roasting beets. Warm, savory scents - ah, Ruth R. would do it justice I know, in the sensory description department.

Oh sweetheart, you've lifted me too - don't you know? Will I see you, I wonder, before the year is out? I'm not exactly on tenterhooks... letting it flow, see what happens...

The supermarket roses are opening up nicely, reminding me of the time I had with you this morning - let's see - when was that? I had quite a full busy day, actually, though it was all around here. Edited yesterday's post (I like the poem that emerged - is it a poem? I guess it is. Or a prose poem. Or a short story in abbreviated notes). Responded to a friend, about possibly getting together this weekend for a 'plein air' writing session. Made breakfast for myself, a one-neighbor's-egg-omelet with a bit of cheddar, folded into last piece of multigrain, toasted.

I was dying to spend moments with you, but the kitchen was a mess, and I needed to set out to make my annual post-Thanksgiving Mulligitawney Soup, from turkey stock that I boiled up the other day from the carcass. So today it was a matter of making the soup itself - with a base of pureed garlic & fresh ginger seasoned with hot curry powder & cumin, to which I added chopped onion, carrot, quartered potatoes (gotten to in time). I didn't follow my handwritten notes very carefully - and was shocked at the potency of the soup when I tasted it. OMG! The original recipe, from a Gourmet Magazine from the early eighties, called for not 5 cups of turkey stock (that I had, twice that probably, plunked cheerfully into the pot) - but another 18 cups of stock on top of that. Yikes. That did throw off the seasonings. No matter. I departed company from the original and both thickened & thinned the soup out with a large container of pureed butternut squash.

Somewhere in all that the process also involved putting the soup through the blender, in batches - which was not unlike the Mr. Bean episode where he paints his one-room apartment. I cannot figure out how to secure that blender right on its base.

I set it all going, the soup that is - and once the seasonings & ingredients were corrected it was great - and I left the kitchen a mess, it was around eleven, so mild & sunny today - stunning. The house is warm even without heat. And so I lay down and... eventually it all worked, and we came...

And then - it was just so positively summery - I probably should have showered but thought no - let me go down in my altogether and clean up the kitchen. It was such a delight to be in the sunny warm kitchen in the buff, unloading the dishwasher, loading it up again with pots and dishes, giving the sink and stove a good scrub...

No In Treatments I'm afraid - so I did all this basically to my own music, because I didn't even have KZE on all that loud

I completely got into it (especially since I hadn't showered yet - which would be my ultimate reward) and on my hands and knees washed the kitchen floor, and then a sticky-bug-juice area by the plants in the solarium - where I completely dreaded - since I was in the buff - that at that moment some random stranger might come knocking on the door. But the new bras and panties that I ordered yesterday, along with a couple of paperbacks I'll wish to have signed next Saturday evening, weren't yet due to arrive, certainly not today, and so I had no fear that it would be UPS or the postman.

The whole washing the kitchen floor bit was to C.R.

I am a strict recorder.

And then I did a workout to Anderson - still in the buff, in the balmy (not gray at all) aerie, and D came home for lunch and declared the curried soup delicious

And eventually I went for a walk, after some other business around here, laundry - I don't know - who cares?

Oh yeah, filling bird feeders... because I was trying to get myself out for a walk.

Which finally I did, at dusk, on these dark roads. At all of a bit past four...

And now I'm back, and feeling happy, and thinking of that Joan Baez cover of the song If I Wrote You -- indeed

And I'm so happy
I had to tell you

I'm really glad I don't live in Brooklyn anymore, because - and I'm not talking about the unused Steinway - I can be, in my moment, loud ---

xoxo dearest
launching this confetti bomb of impreciseness
into the charcoal night sky
the festooned shards of color
will just be one great big cheerful delightful --
oh come here you