I'm writing to say that I've decided to discontinue my blog. This will be the last post. It's just getting to the point (something that I have sensed for a while) that it's counter-productive, as I move forward and take other steps in my life. A friend suggested that I not abandon it, that I simply choose other things to write about -- but I don't really have anything else to write about, not here, not in this form, anyway. So, rather than simply discontinue it without a word, leaving you wondering, waiting when I'll post next -- this will take the guesswork out of it for you. Thank you so much for reading. If you'd ever like to get in touch, then please send me a message - you know how to email me. Thanks again. Love, Belle

Hi sweetheart, up in the aerie, doing battle with weeds some of the day, also finally planting seedlings of zinnia, cosmos, and nigella (I don't even know what the latter looks like in bloom) into the raised beds, which also I weeded. So - no workout today - though surely weeding counts, that's fine -- I don't mean to be so abstracted & decadent. The fittest I ever was, physically, was the summer in my teens, that I spent as a chambermaid in Ogunquit. Stripping beds & cleaning baths every day -- the weight will just drop off, and beautiful muscle tone form.

I'm in a bit of shock at the moment -- oh, I'm fine, it's just turned me a bit cranky -- it seems that an American nun with a fine mind of her own, who ran afoul of the Vatican recently -- isn't the only one. A "friend" of mine who, it turns out, is also of the patriarchal, hardline, fanatically religious set -- has visited my blog of late, and it seems actually reading a few of my posts, as opposed to onanistically landing on it via searches of his own name, which is his usual. Oh well, the guy --- in a land far far away -- is a fragile sort -- and now I'm sensing that perhaps some friend of his, is the one who has played some mischief.... oh who knows, it's just a bit of a shocker, for me to be denounced, as possibly having a porn addiction, and is L'fer behind it, and stuff like that. Jeez. Oh - the latter, right there - probably shouldn't have said that.

And the stupid thing is -- or not stupid - but the truly upsetting.... this "friend" of mine from one of those lands, where the sun never sets, not far from Russia, where the sun rarely rises --

Sorry, darling... I have completely lost my thread, because this silly contretemps has vexed me

***
Mostly I'm thinking about someone I've just met, and it was just electric.

I've pulled my ad, and quit responding to a few stragglers... oh truly, I feel telepathic sometimes -- one can tell energy - or lack thereof - coming from someone, even on the 'net.

I think of coyoteman, and his wise counsel to me, and his beautiful life
and of the lovely brave man I went to the movies with last week, at the Quad

I'm not addicted to porn, and I'm not 'looking for mister goodbar' - a seventies reference

but I really enjoyed those kisses the other night
that was something wasn't it -- you?
once every random hundred, or thousand years,
to be able to gaze at the sun like that
and smile, and laugh, and hold the gaze, and kiss some more
because the Transit of Venus, that rare celestial event,
happened around six p.m.
just around the time you and I had the urge to flee the sunlit room-
isn't it just too public in here?
and so we took our drinks and settled on the couch
and -- perhaps at the precise moment when Venus was transiting the Sun --
someone kissed someone
I hardly know who started it
and then we stayed, Venus transiting
the Sun shining
oh my

so anyway -- it wasn't 'porn addiction'
as in the eyes of some love and sun starved fanatics
in Northern Europe
God what a drag that set is
I really feel for the Greeks
so - the book got thrown at me -
by some patriarchal --- oh, ugh...

I'm glad you enjoy my blog
and here comes the sun now, shining

yes - I am grounded,
I weeded, I vacuumed, I've written this piece

my session with the toys didn't go well
no, not because I'm obsessed, or addicted
but because I wish to bestow very real kisses
on you-know-who
and that's a HUGE distraction
from run-of-the-mill-whatever porn

No, I wish to kiss you, big time
with all that that means
the way we did
that time
in that place that wasn't -
but you thought, with all those antlers
was like an Adirondack lounge

Hello darling, up in the aerie, the sun is shining, I'm in a top, braless, and panties, having skipped a more targeted, abstract workout with bands & weights, in favor of bending, stretching, and stooping to weed portions of the garden, including the "woodland" border, where the spreading perennial groundcover, sweet woodruff, with its cheerful star-shaped foliage, mischievously ignores the vast brown weed-strewn patches, and jumps birch-log rails, into the lawn, insistently wishing to cavort with the barely-mown grasses. So I did a bit of disciplining of the gallium -- well, not really -- I just adjusted the birch log divides so as to form a barrier - for the time being anyway - between the exuberant ground cover & the outside world. In other areas, such as a little path between either half of this perennial border, I summarily scooped up big handfuls of the sweet woodruff, and roughly dug it into upland bare patches where I hope it might adhere.

And then I did some major weeding -- of weeds, shallow-rooted but waist-high -- in the area of the Four Raised Beds, in advance of planting therein, seedlings of zinnia and cosmos that I started in trays from seed. I know the rabbits, gerbils, mice, voles, moles, and deer will thank me for fresh vegetative matter introduced into the fenced utterly permeable square -- the deer, groundhogs, and maybe hares too I suppose simply jump.

Through all of this I've been thinking of other steps for myself, as very wonderful men of my recent acquaintance have suggested to me... and I'm trying to get myself to it, but it's still a problem that I can't quite seem to solve... well fine, I might be in possession of some fine free-and-clear, or setting-me-on-the-road to such paperwork --- but if I'm homeless -- then what of it? I don't know. I completely understand the necessity, inevitability, the way this cruiseliner's been heading for a long time... it's still not easy.

And that's it, I'll content myself for the moment, as I sit here in my underwear, tapping keys, June late day sun blazing (oh that's a treat, after the week's chilly gloom), mowers in the distance going, birds calmly chirping. I hope all is well with you... I had a wonderful session this morning, horizontal, and my mental imagery had so much to do with the most mind-blowing kisses -- of which... it's just not the same at all, when you're in it, really in it, exploring... as watching some compilation...

xoxo
Belle

Back from the loveliest date, dreamy, delicious white wine in tall elegant stems, leather couch in a back parlor of a cozy wine bar, hung all around with sets of small antlers, and a few large, and even one or two deer heads, decorating the place in a vaguely - well, I don't know, not sinister, but in the dim light, as I looked around, there were an awful lot of small antlers hung like cameos or medallions from high up on the walls. What animal has such small antlers? I wasn't paying attention, I was much too distracted, sitting knee to knee, on this vast comfortable sofa in the dim recessed room where we could talk in private, me of my blog, us both of our situations, it was just too public, too open in the front room with the huge bar, with the silvered mirror scrawled over with the drinks menu, the bar still and empty and casual and elegant, with a view out ancient glazed wood doors, of a tree leafed out in light airy green and white - the only color, seemingly, at least as I recall it now, in this monochromatic space, with the delicious pours, and collection of antlers, obtained, as the proprietor told my companion, on ebay, from a collector in Austria, because the effect he was going for was of baronial or manorial lodge, only I kept feeling that perhaps, oh so deliciously, I was in Paris, Dora Maar for the early evening, of Hudson, in my elegant skirt outfit, bare legs, and sandals, listening to romantic crooning chanteuses on the stereo, as my date, all delightful conversation, hands and kisses, played Joel McCrea to my Jean Arthur, I kept peeling him off, only not too hard, it's just that I'd like to be able to return to this place again, sometime, in case things don't work out, besides, this is Warren Street, not Diamond, I murmured in his ear...

From the Mixed-up Files of Belle.... notes from my visit to the Metropolitan Museum last Thursday...
***
Friday, June 1, Brooklyn. Good morning darling. It's dawned a beautiful clear sunny day, cool and dry, and so it's blessedly still and quiet now, since I've turned off all the fans. I hear the faint twittering of Brooklyn birds singing outside, over the steady whooshings past of cars. I wanted to note more of my impressions of my visit to the Metropolitan Museum yesterday. I've been going there my entire life - my mother and I would take pilgrimages there several times a year when I was a girl, going by train from Stamford to Grand Central. It was about the only museum she ever took me to, besides the Frick -- usually we'd visit both the same day. So yesterday as I crossed Fifth Avenue at 83rd and approached the grand edifice, it was with a sense of proprietary, comfortable return to a familiar place that is always, as if outside time, there, that splendid earthly pleasure palace.

By the time I left, two-and-a-half hours later, I was so filled with a dismaying array of disparate images from having seen a number of exhibitions, each wildly different from the next, that my immersion in all these images, colliding now in my head as I found myself in the peaceful reaches of the marbled Greek and Roman halls, was almost hallucinatory, phantasmagorical, as if I'd woken from a succession of very vivid vibrant dreams, or - the thought occurred to me - that I was here in a kind of palatial heaven on earth, with its superabundance, all collected under one massive roof, in room after capacious room, of the most remarkable beautiful colorful artifacts, relics, works of art, and treasures. I truly had a feeling of sensory overload, it was impossible to absorb it all.
***
(Also, I couldn't help feeling, perhaps a bit snidely and unfairly, that this had been a far more fulfilling, substantial experience than viewing the Cindy Sherman exhibit at MOMA the day before, which for its one-note repetitiousness and bleak cataloguing of the female subset of aging harpies, had left me cold -- I think there is only so much detached, vaguely mocking irony and grotesquerie that I can bear... an excess of it, so many of Sherman's works assembled all together, and to me it veers into parody, and self-parody. I had viewed the show with the benefit of a free audioguide, and when I returned it & got my drivers license back, the young woman clerk asked me, so what did you think? And I said that I found it a little too ironic and mocking "since I'm not at all like that" (which isn't strictly relevant, yet that was my reaction), and she responded, "Oh neither is Cindy Sherman, she's the nicest, most unassuming person you'd ever want to meet." Well, then that makes for a very interesting contrast right there, I replied. And certainly (I'm thinking now) Sherman has her place, but perhaps it's a rather small niche, and there is something "fashionable" about her work -- hip & cool on some level to dig her, and to be aware of her work -- rather than deeply-felt, that it's more in the realm of fashion & style, than of fine-art. I know very well that in terms of aesthetic critique, I'm way over my head --- so I will forthwith swim back to shore.)

***

Ceci n'est pas un Cindy Sherman

***
Ah, so back to the Shangri-la of the Met. My initial intention had been to check out the new Islamic, Arab, and Asian Wing, which recently opened. But on my way there I was immediately and delightfully waylaid by an all-too-tempting intimately-scaled exhibit, in a few small cozy rooms -- "Naked Before the Camera," which turned out to be essentially a charming collection of vintage cheesecake -- many 19th and early 20th century images of winsome damsels, and some exquisite male specimens too, posing in the nude in the early days of photography. So that was an unexpectedly naughty way to dip my feet into the lovely, shallower waters of the Met's vast ocean!

Then I wandered through the galleries that housed a beautiful and fascinating exhibition having to do with the geographic intersection of divergent civilizations - Byzantium and Islam -- in the Near East in the 7th to 9th centuries. A seemingly arcane subject, and I don't pretend to have absorbed it, or to have paid as close attention as the show truly deserved. And yet I was able to get a sense of it, and of a place and time so far away, and very long ago --- and usually I have no visceral grasp of that scale and vastness of time. For example, this past Sunday was the Pentecost, which as the Rev. M. explained to the congregation, commemorates the Church's Birthday, two thousand years ago. I sat at the organ, blithely listening, thinking, okay, 2000 years, nice round number – but I didn't "feel" it. But here at the Met were handwritten, in fine inked calligraphy, early Christian bibles -- and already then the Church was 600-700 years old -- imagine! Christ had died all those years in the even then distant past, and here were all these beautiful artifacts, and images of monks and of saints, and bibles, and religious imagery, all made devotedly by hand, in the furtherance and sustenance of Christianity and the early church. The scale of time eclipsed was suddenly palpable - and here we are in the 21st century, so many centuries later still. There was much beauty in that exhibition, and it was astonishingly comprehensive -- presenting artifacts from diverse cultures that flourished in Byzantium, not just Christian but Jewish as well; there was a room devoted to "commerce," and another that displayed ancient, fragile pieces of clothing; there were architectural details, beautiful mosaic floors -- there was a lot, and each detail so finely-crafted, and deeply-felt. Every object - from the most rare and sacred, to the most common everyday – was decorated and imbued with beauty. I couldn't help but contrast all these beautiful fragmentary relics, made in an age before machinery & mass-production and all the rest, with our own age. Are we worthy of this inheritance? The best our general culture today can come up with is a bunch of blank big-box stores and asphalt parking lots? What will generations ahead in the future see of our time? Have we squandered our inheritance? I know I'm being too bleak perhaps -- except that in that show I had the sense of all aspects of social, cultural, and religious life in that age, as partaking in the creation of beautiful objects and images -- there was a sense of joyful, deeply meaningful abundance.

My next stop at the Met was wildly different -- an exhibition that brought together a great many of the contemporaneously created late 19th and early 20th century paintings, that were collected by the Stein family, including Gertrude Stein, in Paris. I'm making a long story short, but they were great collectors and patrons, and bought and sold and traded paintings, and befriended artists, notably Matisse and Picasso. And that's where I encountered Bonnard's Siesta! One of the Steins had owned it for a time, a year or two – before trading it for a Gaughin and a Renoir. (I didn't make it sufficiently clear how rare this wholly unexpected opportunity for me to see it in person was -- it's on loan for this exhibit, all the way from Australia. I am so glad I got to see it -- and can only imagine my heartbreak, if I had subsequently learned that it was here and had missed it. So talk about total serendipity, for me.) Here was gallery after gallery after gallery of the most wondrous paintings -- it was all too much! Many Picassos and Matisses, and Renoirs, Cezannes --- unbelievable. And there were very clever and incredibly effective notes of curatorial inspiration. Such as, in one corner was an empty space, about 500 square feet -- the size of Leo Stein's first Paris studio, in which he started to collect art. And on all three walls of this space, were projected to-scale wall-size images of the art that lined his walls, over the years... it was like a film, as you could see how his collection grew and the walls became filled up. It was astonishingly immediate - you felt as though you were there, in that apartment. I was so blown away by this, that I remarked to a woman standing next to me - isn't this cool?! And her eyes widened, and she nodded her head vigorously, and said enthusiastically -- totally!

Then there was the new Islamic wing… a treasure trove… and what stands out now in my mind are the large-scale Persian rugs hung like enormous banners from on high, each two or three stories tall - I felt positively dwarfed surrounded by this collection that lined the walls of the gallery, whose coffered ceiling itself was an intricately carved work of art as well – I craned my neck to admire it.

And then there was a Costume Institute exhibit of the fashion designers, Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada… exquisite costumes, timeless, in a witty presentation, in which the actress Judy Davis plays Elsa, and Ms. Prada is herself, and the two women are engaged in a filmed dialogue, that is projected on the walls throughout the rooms of the exhibit, so that one is constantly in their presence, overhearing snatches of their imaginary conversation. Here too, in one of the rooms, which contained aisles of transparent cases housing mannequins in their exuiqistely tailored outfits – and it was a hall of mirrors in this gallery, dizzying, in amidst the costumes I kept catching immediate clear glimpses of myself – I looked alright, but a bit of weight still to lose from my middle, and my outfit – oh dear, I thought it was quite nice, but amid all this haute couture splendor – well, Peebles isn’t Prada. So I felt, a little, as though from a fashion point of view, I wasn’t cutting it, wasn’t meant to be there…

***
It was a relief to come to the end of the exhibit, and quit catching inadvertent, disconcerting glimpses of myself as well as improbable, ever-impetuous, impishly smirking and hamming Judy Davis… and so from that kaleidescopic exhibit I found myself summarily ejected into the sober, quiet, dim halls of the Arts of Oceania, from which I made my way back to the Greek and Roman marble statuary, onward to the great hall, out the door, and into the fresh air and sunshine of a Fifth Avenue afternoon.

Hello darling, up in the aerie on the early side, my re-entry day is what it's felt like. Just now outside the windows is the sound of falling rain, so soothing, I can hardly tell you, almost as therapeutic and calming as if you were holding me in your arms, running your hands over my skin. Oh dearest, I can just melt into that thought, or into the balm of a soft spring rain falling, watering plants so that I don't have to, and I remain pleasantly aloft up here, perfectly dry, oh but aching. I've been bumming out a bit today - a prospect that I've held some hope for - I don't know -- yet another ambivalent man it seems, plus - well, I sense, not really all that available (though he's divorced and unattached). Actions louder than words and all that. So I've taken the plunge again, gone fishin'... we'll see.

Oh sweetheart, I wish we could just be together at this moment. My head is just so full of impressions of my week in the City, still. And now I'm fully back, walking along these country roads, playing organ at the church this morning - as though I'd never left. As though my life had simply, for a spell, been toggled.

I don't know what to say. I drove up to the K'hook Library today, to return overdue library books, one, the Benfey, which I was greatly enjoying, but just crawling through, I'm at the part now where - weirdly resonantly for me - he's discussing Theseus and Ariadne, and the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. But I had to return it - I'd gotten the first of what promised to be a series of increasingly threatening overdue notices from the Mahopac branch - which I still don't even know where that is. But I have a mind to reserve the book again, and pick up where I left off. Truly, that book is, very labyrinthine, or geological, he's constantly tapping, surveying different layers very associatively... they don't obviously connect -- and yet I enjoy all that tap-tap-tapping, meandering, sounding, listening for the refracting, recording, and refracting back again...

I had a marvelous session this morning... this new toy has grown on me... I think it might actually be more effective than the old toy, the one that isn't even manufactured anymore. So I'll stick with this one.

I'm just hanging here, darling, not feeling very inspired, just fairly mellow, after the storm, and not just the one outside. I came home from the library, feeling absolutely ravenous, and stooped and dug through our fridge for a camembert I'd bought, and had had some yesterday... so where was it? I could not find it at all, and the more I stooped, and had to awkwardly reach into the fridge to search the shelves - it was missing. I felt so frustrated that I burst into hot angry tears - just for a moment. I found the wooden round in the freezer - maybe I had absentmindedly stuck it there yesterday after my snack, or maybe D. So now my camembert is thawing. So I snacked on leftover grilled salmon, scallion cream cheese, and a couple of thin baguette slices instead. And then had a devil of a time trying to uncork a white rioja. I mean, ridiculous -- all kinds of absolute physical exertion, straining, pulling, to no avail -- for a few moments, I possibly resembled an Olympian shotputter or weightlifter in trying my very hardest to uncork that bottle, dishcloth wrapped around corkscrew so as to not hurt my hands, and still that cork wouldn't budge, until I grunted and exerted myself with extra audible groaning force more -- and then the thing budged. Anyway, I did get it open -- but I didn't appreciate all that exertion. So after a small glass of the rioja, I'm on to screwtop rose wine...

Sort of the opposite of my sessions with myself... I let the batteries and the ingenious targeting machine do all the work... I simply, in my mind's eye, supply the imagery, and with my right hand do my best to tactically apply the tactile -- which actually takes a bit of doing -- it turns out, with this new toy, that I need to stay there and press harder, not meander about, no - stay right on the point. It won't go numb, it doesn't -- instead -- OMG... no, I don't break into coloratura arias, but instead, very very much inaudible absolute inversions, turning of myself inside-out, vocalized. So glad it was a cool day, this early June. I'd prudently shut the windows...

many kisses you
hope I see you soon - could it be?
that would be a joy
we'll see...
xoxo
Belle

Hello darling, back up in the upstate aerie, where birds are singing, the drier's going, I've got a fleece over my shoulders, and your Dora Maar is back from battle, getting from downstate to up. But it worked out, and here's a trophy photo to prove it, blurry unfortunately, probably my hand was trembling a bit as I snapped it, because I knew perfectly well that I wasn't supposed to take pictures there, and plus I'd been fumbling in my bag for the camera, and had doubtless attracted guards' attention... so this single snapshot is my little offering to you, that I was truly there. And do you know, one of the odd experiences of going to museums? I wish I could have returned, perhaps, to view the painting more closely. Because I was so blown away that it was there, that I didn't end up examining it very closely, sufficiently closely. What is sufficiently closely? How could I have imbibed, inhaled, savored that painting? Well, I could have. I know that there are ways to. I remember once, many many years ago, at the Guggenheim, viewing a Cezanne painting of a peach... and I admired the painting, and could see that it was a Cezanne, from the subject perhaps, and the palette, and the quivering sense of brushstrokes. And I was listening to an audioguide, and had paused before this Cezanne peach, and the curator intones in my ear, look at that peach... Cezanne doesn't use just gold, orange, yellow, apricot... shades one would associate with a peach.... there's lavender in there, and green, and black, and purple, and ochre...

I'm paraphrasing of course, from this immediate memory, from the distant past, but I remember the feeling of being so viscerally shocked to see --- because someone had literally whispered in my ear & pointed it out -- that indeed it was true. Cezanne's peach was full of absolute unexpectedness, that there was no way that my casual eye could register... but to focus close up on his technique... that these were the most improbable colors he chose to create this wholly realistic -- better than realistic -- because not photographic, but so fully felt, experienced, understood...

So I wish I could have had the wherewhithal somehow, to have absolutely apprehended the Bonnard -- oh just devour her, it, in some fashion. Really examine the details, the brushwork, the choice of colors, the tiniest decisions of dabs of paint that contribute to the whole astounding effect....

I won't ever have at that Bonnard again... not in the way that I had once been so fortunate to experience a Cezanne peach...

but I do look forward to the kisses and caresses of...
well, divine works who, in private, I may touch
and get to know, marvel over
kiss deeply and touch
to my hands'
and heart's content
as much as I wish
and with incredible exactitude relishing every inch
every dimple, curve, patch of hair, "unevenness of skin tone"
kisses in all those places, and then some ---

Hello darlings, just a quick note tonight to check in, back from the city - Manhattan, that is - where I had a lovely lunch (grilled calimari salad for me, a shared bottle of pinot grigio, soft bruschetta fingers that came with a savory red puree, I'm guessing of tomato, red pepper), saw a couple of films, and enjoyed a couple of drinks comparing notes after. Nothing to report except that I've had a wonderful stay here, full of adventures and no misadventures (not to say that I haven't been naughty, I have been, but trust me, I could have been way naughtier, but in my divided brain, that takes time to process, for this evening Athena (or whoever) won out, which was all just as well), and having been whisked home - I mean Brooklyn - I'm sipping pink ice filled wine now, and I have my dinner made, angel hair pasta with pesto sauce, and a beautiful salad. It's turned so chilly I've gone a step beyond shutting off all fans, to shutting the windows. I'm freshly showered, sitting here with a towel wrapped around me - it's too chilly to be in the nude. I've actually been working on another post, that I started drafting this morning, trying to capture my impressions - before they flee - of my visit yesterday to the Met. But I haven't finished it, and I need to polish it some more -- if only to get in proper paragraph breaks, because somehow, working off my friends' Mac, paragraph breaks have to be special-coded, which I hadn't done, and I'm too busy writing usually to bother with learning new HTML codes -- oh, so anyway, it isn't that I suddenly devolved upon landing in Gotham, in that my posts have been so if not overlong then certainly run-on. Anyway, warmest and fondest and most loving hugs & kisses, and I wish you were with me and we could -- you know. All my love, and sweet dreams -- Belle

Hi sweetheart, up in the downstate aerie, a very sweet peaceful tabby, 17 years old, fast asleep a few feet away, distinctly smiling -- she looks as though she's experiencing pleasant dreams, on several levels - in her own feline unconscious sleeping mind, and also in the idyllic unchanging environs, this tiny airy study, upper screened window opened, emitting the ongoing rhythm of street noises, gentle up here, three flights up, the occasional whoosh of a car passing, voices in conversation, indistinct, and now a whistling, an infant crying. Fans about me circulate the air pleasantly - it's warm today, but not humid at all, so perfect. (And now a siren, and another car passing, and the soft whir of fans). I had a very enjoyable day, though it didn't go quite as I'd expected. I luxuriated around here this morning, simply enjoying being by myself in this comfortable private space, and so very meanderingly went from one moment to the next after I woke, after sleepless hours in the middle of the night, but then restful sleep, waking past dawn, lying in bed resting for a while, very peacefully, and then feeling nicely rested and ready - I got up around 6:30. (Isn't that what each of us does, every day, rise up, as if from the dead - a gesture of hope, on each and everyone's parts, if ever there was one.) I woke at the computer, scrambled soft eggs for breakfast, and then the morning seemed to suggest itself into... oh, why don't I give myself the spa treatment. And so I gave myself a bit of a home pedicure, neatened up my toenails and carefully dabbed on fresh coats of dark pink lacquer; our friends have a very brightly lit bathroom with a built-in magnifying mirror - so I could see in what a horrifying state my eyebrows are in -- it hardly matters! because my brows are so light, and I'm blind, and I assume that most men in whom I might be interested, who might be interested in me - wouldn't be so concerned about the state of my eyebrows, since they aren't dark dramatic arches -- still, it felt nice to, now that I could view them as if under a microscope, trim the faint underbrush a bit. And I shaved my legs with a cheap plastic razor that I'll confess I rummaged in their pharmaceutical pantry of a closet to find -- I'd been so busy with housework upstate that I realized to my horror that I'd neglected to shave my legs before My Big New York Trip. Though again -- no one would ever notice, the hair on my legs is so scant, and light -- and yet -- it's psychological. And so too, I contemplate shaving other areas - but I figured - not today - I do so much walking in the city - I don't need to be in some public place - say strap hanging on the IRT - seized with an uncontrollable itch. And I carefully let my toes dry, and straightened up the place, and shampooed my hair, and combed it out with conditioner while standing in the bright white tiled shower, and rubbed lotion on myself, and stepped out of the tub, and placed a towel around me, and let my hair dry naturally, it's light brown or dark blonde, and it dries in waves, reminding me, when I look in the mirror, of that "Slavic Venus" image. But then I took a brush to it, and a hair dryer, and blew it dry. Dearest -- I could go on like this forever, would much rather murmur such inconsequential details in your ear... I really do have to cut to some sort of chase... I ended up spending the afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum... and I can hardly contain myself in joy - could hardly, there - I saw - in person - I had no idea beforehand that it would be there - the magnificent painting by Pierre Bonnard -- Siesta. I was so excited that I whipped out my camera (whipped out probably isn't the word, my bag has so many zippers whatever it is that I'm looking for - wallet, readers, hairbrush, pen -- takes three or four passes to find. Which of course attracted a security guard's attention. But I did manage a shot of it, just to prove that I was there, in the very presence of the actual painting. I was so thrilled, I can hardly tell you! (I wish I could show you the painting here, but I'm not at my own computer -- but it should be easy to find --- 'pierre bonnard siesta' ought to do it. And I'm going to sign off here, darling. Not a poetic post at all, just a very longwinded one, so many sensations to try to impart to you. And there is more I would like to say about my absolutely marvelous experience at the Met today -- but -- I would just be going on too long. Dearest love, many kisses, oh - I'm so glad that for some strange reason the 1 p.m. matinee of Exotic Marigold was inexplicably canceled! Yours, in recumbent face-down splendor, as in that beautiful Bonnard - Belle

Up in the brownstone aerie, experiencing a joyful, pleasant sense of exuberant well-being. I'm in the nude, tapping keys, freshly showered with a new bar of lemon verbena soap, one of my treats that I pick up for myself on my occasional sojourns to the city, which at moments, turn into talismanic treasure hunts. And so, after the Cindy Sherman show at MOMA, I strode down Fifth Avenue in my Dora Maar gear -- stylish, elegant skirt outfit, ruined, most likely, by skechers, rather than elegant sandals on pedicured feet. Or maybe I looked okay -- I caught glimpses of myself now & then, and was surprised to see how shapely my calves are, my whole physique really -- I mean, I'm middle-aged, have pounds to lose from my middle, I'm full-bodied to begin with - but you know? not bad, if I say so myself -- which I hope is saying a lot -- because, as women tend to be of themselves -- I'm my own worst critic! Another talismanic stop, into the side entrance of Saks, and I know just where the perfume counter is that I want, and so I spritzed myself with my favorite fragrance, which I actually own, and had applied after my morning shower, but it had long since faded... And then I dashed out again, barreled on a vigorous walk down Fifth Avenue, finally bailed at 16th Street... I had thought I might actually try to walk all the way home, down many more blocks more, and across a bridge, and down through Brooklyn neighborhood streets -- but I gave out, it was too much, and so I picked up the F train at 14th Street. And am glad I did, that I didn't wear myself out unnecessarily, because I felt very in need of an encounter for myself, especially with a new toy that in my insomnia overnight didn't work out for me. (Sidelight: I love to make love in daylight, during the day, when I'm fresh & awake & happy & vigorous & really able to focus. I mean, in the evening, I tend to have a few glasses of wine (yeah, I know - a shocker!), and I enjoy that as I sit down & type to you... and then afterward, I'm done - I don't drink more than that, I eat dinner... but I tend to be exhausted and done for the day. I'm 52 now, 53 in August, and not to age myself, but it simply isn't for me the way it was in my collegiate youth -- yeah, sure, drink coffee in the afternoon, drinks at night, and then have wild sex in the wee hours... And actually, for too many years, that's about roughly how it went... and it seemed adequate at the time... but things have changed, time has passed, I've become restructured I really love making love when I'm absolutely 100 percent, no artificial stimulant, such as wine... just simply my bodily corporeal self, and my mind truly being able to attend and to focus, including onto you, dearest lover... So I saw a movie this morning ("Hysteria") whose subject was - in essence - the female orgasm, and the psychic necessity of it -- which oddly, I suppose to make the subject even vaguely playfully approachable, lent to the (temporary) desexualization of (as we know now, randy) Victorian men.... And there is something to that. I feel so much better, after such a release -- I look forward to more, and with... I thought of you today, you were in my thoughts... and also I caught -- since my friends have cable TV down here -- a rare treat, Barefoot Contessa episode... I'd had my session with myself (oh effective, thank god!), and then bounded up to check the cat's plate, start preparing my dinner, and I thought --- oh Barefoot! maybe she's on -- moreover, it was a doubleheader, not her best, but ones I hadn't seen before... and sometimes I worry and wonder about encountering a man who seems incredibly sweet & sexy, and I wonder, could our worlds ever mesh -- but then I see Ina put on a beach party -- no kidding, an intimately-scaled oceanside beachside BBQ, a small circle of family & friends on one huge blanket on the sand, and then afterward, as the sun sets, they all make, at Ina's exuberant suggestion, somemores at the grill... and I feel so joyful and happy vicariously witnessing that, as I putter about this apartment, not even, this week my own and I think -- oh! I could do that! I'm not such the recluse -- I love doing that! Maybe if I were to encounter another man's children, ever -- maybe Ina could (in my quieter way) could by my inspiration... because I love to cook, and I love for others to feel welcome and happy, and loved... goodnight for now, launching without proofing - I don't have the energy to proof & edit, the font is smaller, on this computer, not my own all my love, exuberantly so, yours, Belle

Sitting here in the nude, tapping keys, much as my usual, only a hundred miles or more south... there seems to be a sexy theme to my days, these days. I arrived here in mid-afternoon, met with the wife of the couple we're friends with – she, they, are in shock that D and I are on the outs, very upset about it, I can see why, we all lived together in the same building (different apartments) for more than ten years. We were all fixtures. But things change, not all marriages last. Across the street, the beautiful brownstone building, occupied for many years by a couple and their children, whom I had fantasized about -- they seemed like the absolute dream couple, both very educated, distinguished, cultured, incredibly prestigiously employed, in their respective professions, in the fine arts. And they are history. The building has been sold, or is perhaps on the market -- at any rate, it's been vacated, the window boxes - always a glorious exuberant joy, filled with blooms, they had a flair for that - empty, barren. Funny thing is, the neighbor in whose apartment I'm staying didn't know the whys and wherefores. I helped her load her car, for her drive upstate -- to my house! And she gestured and said, oh they got divorced and had to move. I said, I know -- that is, I knew about the divorce, because it had been in the press. And I told my friend the reason why - that he had come to terms, in his late middle age, that he was homosexual. And so now that saga, as I observe it very much from the periphery - but talk about a stage-set - is over. That building is empty. And I never knew them at all, never once said hello, across the street, and yet I saw them nearly every day, morning and night, for many years, and observed their young family grow up too. And will never forget, I don't think, the distinctive sound of their front garden gate, signaling one of the family's arrival, or departure.

So after my friend left for the drive upstate, I returned to the apartment and took all of five minutes to unpack my bags -- a few tees and a couple of skirts, toiletries, etc. I left my "toy" at home, figuring I'd take a welcome, delightful stroll up Bergen Street to the Slope to a woman-centered toy shop, that I just love, and has been a real life saver for me. I confidently strode in, an old hand at this now and said, I'd like a 'nubby G' - which is a rather unattractive bright blue silicon toy, suggestive though not anatomically correct -- but with AA's ever re-charged, and with my mind cached with fantasies -- it's very effective. I have a 'fancier' toy, from that shop, that cost four times as much, and it doesn't do the trick - I don't even use it any more. So when the clerk said they were out of stock, and then graciously volunteered to go through the motions to check inventory of the Soho shop, only to learn - which I overheard, and was then personally informed -- that it's been discontinued by the manufacturer -- that was very very bad news to me - it really was! It had never occurred to me that an affordable, effective toy might cease to be manufactured...

And this bit of bad news came on top of other discoveries I'd made, as I'd simply taken a walk, albeit purposefully, around the 'old neighborhood.' Sweet Melissa's is no more? Are you kidding me? It was a very delightful tiny hole-in-the-wall cafe, with the most amazing pastries & cakes, enticing confections, expensively priced. It seemed like such an institution around here - well, I mean, I personally had always found it unaffordable - but if, sometimes on a weekend, we'd spring for a $5 take-out tiny slice of goat-cheese cheesecake - which sounds improbable, but was divine... as were their overpriced, almond-and-apricot "Queen's cakes" that are like the Polish Easter cake, mazurek. So, I note, a little dispiritedly, that this effervescent, extravagant sweets shop has been turned into a test prep tutoring/coaching center, for all those standardized exams...

And now this - my favorite toy - discontinued! Too much change! And not in the 'positive' column, though on other fronts, I don't know, yes, there is change, in the positive column... so I'm okay. And feeling really happy, and hopeful, even as I told my friend (who's at least 10 years older than me) - Yes - I am feeling really happy, and hopeful - I decided that I wish to live, that I wish to be happy.

I ended up buying a different toy, since "nubby" is no longer available, something that takes AA's.. and it seems powerful enough (more! I want more). And another bottle of lube... all insurance policy against lonely times in a beautifully spankin'-clean house upstate. And yes, maybe I'm becoming a bit more openminded about the idea of light spanking. You know - that youporn? I am learning so much! But I won't feel free to download any on our friends' computer, not my own, with "guest user" privileges, upon which - inadvertently on their part - all sorts of "parental blocks" were going up, the instant I tried to check for email messages from you, dear, or cryptic images from you - dearest (will I see you next month? I hope so, but if I don't, my hopes won't feel quite as dashed as they had been at Christmas. Do you know, I hope one day, that we can be in each other's company, and hold hands, and you can tell me everything that's been going on with you...)

I haven't tested out the new toy yet, and am not even in the mood to, but will note -- well, at last Sunday's service, the Rev M lost me just a tiny bit when in her sermon she started to go on about "signs and wonders..." -- rather more literal proofs of the manifestations of Spirit than I'm ordinarily comfortable with... But on my walk back from Park Slope, over the Gowanus Canal (yeah Canal! now Superfund site!, now might sing Walt Whitman), I crossed from this intimately-scaled yet industrial landscape in a matter of a few steps into a leafy brownstone residential shade..... And someone -- a woman I presume, had laid out a handful of books "FREE!" as a couple of post-its announced… among them faded volumes of Wuthering Heights and Lady Chatterley's Lover. There were no more than a dozen paperbacks in all laid out on the stoop, some having to do with new-parenting -- sign-language with your baby -- I don't know - I don't have a baby - I didn't examine those "what to expect" volumes but another one did catch my eye -- and sits right here on this desk now, as I type to you -- You On Top, it's called -- about skills a woman such as myself needs to know... And so that will make for great bedside reading... learning pointers about getting myself back out there – and not just watching videos (which I can't even, from here) -- but encountering him in all his amazing corporeality... me, thrown if not around his shoulders, then around his face, on top -- okay darling, probably that last line - I know it needs editing… I have imaginings and tomorrow's another day -- many kisses

Hi sweetheart, collapsed here yet again, in my altogether. It's sunny and hot, though quite tolerable as it isn't humid. But I'm beat because I ended up not cleaning the baths today, but instead doing battle, some, with the overgrown lawn. D's been doing some minimal mowing the last week or so -- a little too minimal for my taste, and plus areas he did a week or 10 days ago - needed to be clipped again. I would like to see the beautiful trees we planted stand out as distinct features in the landscape. I attacked one perimeter of our property, where the grass was waist-high, and inadvertently almost plowed over a baby pine tree we'd planted as a seedling -- it was completely inundated by all the tall grass around it --- and then I remembered we'd planted a small row of them, three or four, and sure enough, there they were, absolutely buried in the tall grass. So now they've been liberated, and between D and me, we mowed enough that if our Brooklyn house-swapping friends wish to take a leisurely stroll about our garden, drinks in hand, there is now a mown circuit, in which they can pleasantly revel at how peaceful it all looks --- oh, they have no idea! But of course - that's as it should be, for guests. I would like for them to feel that things are serene, effortless... I mean, that I made an effort for them -- for example, fresh flowers - roses - in vases all over the house -- but not that it was any kind of Major Project. Which it was -- and believe me, though it was a hardwon and exhausting battle, some incremental real progress was made on the house, such as a brand new really lovely Indian crewel-embroidered sheer curtain now hanging at the laundry room window, and so that that room looks a bit more intact from the so-called dining room (since there is no closed door between them), D even put on a coat of white primer on the bare drywall -- so suddenly, at least visually, that room is quite pleasantly tolerable, at least at a glance. Don't look too closely. Oh, at this point I don't care a whit about infrastructure... yes, I want things to look nice. Even if it's just an illusion... oh so what? It's all theatre anyway, a lot of it - isn't it?

I made nice gestures in the hospitality department ... baked cookies (oatmeal raisin chocolate chip, all combined), a plum coffee cake (that is, with last season's thawed plums - no armagnac, or vodka), and even a number of individual little pizzas, all from scratch, including the dough -- that's been rising explosively in a bowl on overnights -- I've found it in the morning puffed up like the top of a chef's hat, plastic wrap clinging to the top of it, the rubber band that was to hold things fast - clear across the room. And it's delicious... we'll all break bread together -- in absentia. I will probably lunch on mine tomorrow, on the train... D might microwave his in whatever vacant apartment he's camping out in... and our Brooklyn friends might enjoy theirs -- well, perhaps after that stroll around the mown garden. So peaceful here, unlike crazy Brooklyn!, I can almost imagine the wife of the couple dreamily sighing.

Crazy Brooklyn! I am looking forward to some serious R&R there, in their beautifully appointed fourth-floor walkup, peaceful treetop aerie -- mercifully, no work at all!

Many kisses, thinking of you, very much....

love, Belle

Hello darling, so I returned to the ice cream shop this afternoon, intent on 'prune armagnac' -- which, to my surprise wasn't even on the board at all today. Pistachio was far from my mind, so single-minded was I in my scattered purpose today -- no, it had to be the prune. And it seemed that it wasn't to be had, until I approached the big counter, with all the gallon cartons of the day's flavors... and there, tucked in, by its lonesome, was a single serving in a cup of the very flavor I was there to seek!

Although I have to say that - not that I was disappointed -- but it just didn't taste like what purported to be. It didn't taste of prune, or plum, or armagnac, or any liqueur at all - just thick, delicious, very sweet cream -- of which three or four plastic spoonfuls as I returned with the prize to my car -- were more than sufficient.

But now, since, I've just, to my very great surprise, gotten the most delightful foretaste of another flavor on the board... oh any of the flavors, really, pick one -- I thought, initially, fig & sweet cream (and said so) but it could just as well be sweet lime

many kisses, this Memorial Day weekend
maybe these are the sorts of wishes that those who lost their lives for us
dream of, from heaven above
that they have a chance
oh to lick that ice cream
or that popsicle
whatever flavor
before it all melts away...

all my love, darling -
yours, Belle

it was such a beautiful day today, in Hudson

Hello darling, it's turned into a beautiful sunny afternoon, humidity's breaking, and so, especially after a short nap, I'm feeling better, refreshed. I overdid it last couple of days with the housecleaning, and it's still not done, but I just wasn't up for any more today, especially with the air so thick. I could hardly get myself to move. But I went through, at least, motions. Edited yesterday evening's post -- what was I thinking? I think that was one of my single worst posts ever. Quality Control was AWOL. An icefilled tumbler of wine on top of my exhausted state didn't help. Also, I'd been in a tumultuous mood, for other reasons, wondering why someone with whom I'd thought I'd hit it off suddenly vanished. But he reappeared this morning... and it was as though the sun had come out. So I had to readjust my mood -- do a 180, like a big cruiseliner having to turn around. I mean, I was happy to be instantly happy again -- but then again, it took a while for the rest of me, somehow, to catch up to that.

I'm watching a youporn now, for my own edification, because I've had such a plain vanilla life, for the most part -- it's high time I find out about other flavors, that I've been craving, and I know others have too. So that's how it's done.

It's funny, having just written that -- this afternoon I was feeling very tired, yet restless - I lay down and thought if I could just fall asleep for real for ten minutes I would feel better, but my heart was racing, maybe too much salt in the packaged cheese tortellini (served with leftover kale-tomato-ground-turkey sauce) for lunch. D came home with the car, I got up and restlessly went downstairs, feeling hot and uncomfortable and out-of-sorts, and it occurred to me that something cool, delicious, and refreshing - an ice cream - might be restorative. So I took the car and drove into town, dreaming ice cream all the way -- pistachio, pistachio, oh that's what I want -- oh, and since I have $25 in my wallet, maybe a coffee too at the divine French bakery, and pick up a multigrain loaf for tomorrow's breakfast... I arrived at the bakery, and bought the bread, but frugality won out and I skipped the coffee -- besides, did I really need coffee in my semi-exhausted state? D possibly had some made, back at home. I crossed and walked a few storefronts up the sleepy, charming main street, to the ice cream shop, where young families lounged around on the steps and on the sidewalk, little children with their first cones. I perused the menu... prune armagnac, banana something or other, coffee of course -- I don't remember what else. But I was fixated on the pistachio - and there was none to be had - I verified with the clerk, who ruefully said "not today," and I said, "oh but that's really the only flavor I wanted right now," and the clerk understood, "I know, I know..."

And so I left the shop, drove back up the main street, and up the main highway, towards home. And arrived back home. No ice cream? No, the multigrain instead. That's no substitute. True, it isn't. But they didn't have pistachio.

I made do with delicious, molasses-infused dark bread, with a small wedge of local camembert pressed between, as I stood at the kitchen counter. Ah, like camembert ice cream.... oh it is divine.

Even if it isn't pistachio ice cream. Which, as I watch the balletic youporn now, which after hours of download, for an eight-minute film, I have arrived at the thrilling inevitable conclusion of -- I can completely see how a man would very very much like to hold out for strawberry-strawberry-banana.

love you
many kisses
hope your ice cream comes in all sorts of varieties darling
including 'prune armagnac' -- now I'm kicking myself a bit for not having availed myself - I wonder if it's anything like the elixir my aunt puts away late summers, when plums are in season, steeping for months, years even, in the recesses of her cool dark pantry, dark luscious fruit, purple-skinned and halved, pale flesh piled one on top of the next, quiescently dissolving, suffusing, letting go delicious flavor, perfume, intoxicatingly transforming, in the alchemy of angels, a gallon-jug of Pathmark vodka...

Hi honey, up in the aerie, nearly collapsed after doing a whole bunch of hard housecleaning, on this dustbomb of an 1885 house. I do vacuum it twice a month, at least, but when's the last time I wiped the baseboards, especially after the winter? Dust is amazingly insidious - it settles on absolutely every tiniest horizontal or angled surface, vertical ones as well, if the electromagnetics are just right. Honestly I was feeling positively forensic in my minute once-a-year passes, in the form of swipes with a wet ‘spic-an-span’ loaded sponge, going after every surface I could find, while I was possibly even remotely motivated -- due to impending house-swap, not that our friends are such hard-asses, but, well one does wish to present one's best face.

Yes indeed, on my hands and knees, darling, scrubbing, and yes it was akin to the Francis Bacon image

and let me say too - in defense of this weeklong onslaught of housecleaning (believe me, this is unusual) - that it is the best workout ever. Never mind my lame ones to Oz or C.R. I keep up this regime -- and I'll be ready for a bikini! Or a thong! Like a Brazilian! and maybe a Brazilian. (Okay, so noted, how you like it - hey I get that, I'm just trying to imagine it, a bit. First of all, I'm going to have to do it myself - am I going to itch forever after? I really don't know the ropes on this stuff, I don't mean to sound like a clod. And obviously, this isn't the sexiest post ever.)

I had a wonderful session this morning, with myself & my imaginings, and I in a walk with weights around here too, as well. So that's good. Not quite the trifecta --- or, yeah - way so, with the housecleaning. The best, sexiest, trimmest, curviest figure I ever had --- was the summer, on the coast of Maine, that I spent as a chambermaid, in a B&B in Ogunquit, Maine. Now that was a workout. And you know -- there was no hanky-panky. Well, one paying guest, a guy, did try, when I entered his family's efficiency - but nothing happened, and I simply backed out. This was - summer 1979, maybe? Though, as a chambermaid whose hours effectively ended at four in the afternoon -- I had plenty of off-site fun, with the deliriously decadent and transient scene of the "below-stairs" types in the Ogunquit environs...

Oh anyway, darling, I only think of this now -- because truly my body -- which if I don't exercise very vigorously I instantly put on weight -- was rarely ever more beautiful than that summer that, days, I was stripping beds, scrubbing baths -- first Room 1, then Room 7, 13, 12, 11 (oh they're checking out today maybe a big tip!), 27, 14....

anyway, sweetheart, I'm fading now -- here is my day, recorded, in the tiniest, most inadequate form – but recorded nonetheless --

ah, tomorrow's another day -- oh, aren't I so fortunate? yes, I do feel that I am so, I am alive, and in quite comfortable circumstances, and with a sense of clarity, and with a loving and intriguing cast of characters around me... oh well, we'll see. We will see, won't we? It simply isn't, in the U.S.A., 2012 -- the previous generation's world anymore.

Aw, not to get heavy, or political. Having a hard time letting go... this message... good night, many kisses, sweet dreams, xoxo...

hitting send, because at this point truly (as I sit here typing) I need a shower...
I will be thinking of you, very much...

Hello darling, sitting here, damp from my shower, towel wrapped around me, my hair, freshly washed, dripping wet. It's past six, but it can't be getting dark yet, yet it doesn't seem that overcast -- the light is that, nearly, of the gloaming, or of approaching dusk. Another day of heavy housework, in advance of the house swap. Today, the downstairs curtains and drapes laundered and ironed, and half the solarium scrubbed. I gave out before I could complete it. It's a very dusty room, from the pellet stove. Every surface needed a swipe -- such as each individual slat of the five wood blinds in the room -- I got to two. Etc., etc. So - tomorrow, I'll finish that room.

I'm sitting here, too, even as I type, feeling a little sad, and conflicted, and torn - about my blog, whether I should continue it or not. It just raises so many issues, that I'm grappling with. I've been putting myself out there (and I don't mean in this blog, I mean in trying purposefully to meet a potential serious love interest), and the fact of my blog -- well, some find it delightful, others - others I might potentially be interested in - are disturbed by it. Which I don't blame anyone for being taken aback. But I don't want to shoot myself in the foot with it either. I'm not Emily Dickinson -- I'm not prepared to give up the potential of true love for my writing. Or am I? Do I want to give up my blog - for a man? Does it have to come down to that? That's rather stark.

I don't know what I'm going to do, not tonight anyway. I don't really have to decide definitively tonight. But this blog's days may be numbered, so I guess I'm telling you that - again. I mean, I can't work against myself.

And you know, as frank as this blog has been, in expressing some difficult feelings I've had, grappled with issues, that I've never used it as some way to "out" anyone in any way. To say I feel that that would be "uncool" -- is an understatement.

I guess I just want to say, too, that I know people are justifiably very worried about their privacy and the internet. And I was doing a workout once to Anderson, and there are individuals out there who devote entire websites with the express purpose of "outing" whatever category of individual that they in their rigid belief system believe deserves the "scarlet letter" of their name prominently disclosed. I'm aware, for example, from that program, of a website that thus exposes "cheaters," men having extra-marital affairs, whose (presumably) disgruntled liaisons (I guess), go out of their way to vent their anger by projecting it in an overt act of exposure and public humiliation of the guy. Or woman (as the case may be). I imagine that that website (which I obviously won't dignify by even going through the blandest gesture to look for, I'm so -- 'not interested' is not the phrase - truly disgusted, that such a site would exist - that's more my feeling.)

So, I don't know. I write under a pseudonym -- so that I can be frank, in ways, about my feelings, and my experiences as a middle-aged woman -- or maybe, as someone thinks of me, as a woman in my prime. And yes, I do feel at a kind of "peak" in my life, my prime indeed.... oh I hope it's a cascading series of mountain peaks, truly, starting here now, and going on and on and on, for decades longer, well into my dotage.

So, I don't know, I'm wrestling with it, I don't have an immediate conclusion for the moment - except to note that I am not in search of material for my blog, in the form of for that reason looking for a relationship. Or turn that algebraic equation however you like -- I'm not looking for a relationship, as a way to provide content for my blog. No -- rather, my blog came about for me as a way to express myself, deeply, fully, somehow, to the ether, and then over time, one male muse or another, and sometimes both, and then back to one, transpired over the long trajectory of the two-and-a-half years of daily postings. It was as stark as this: without my blog, I had absolutely nobody, nobody at all, to communicate with, in any way, any kind of deeply human, intimate way. My life felt involuntarily silent and isolated... my blog was a way out of that... a singing bird. Not some passive-aggressive fast promiscuous hottie with a chip on her shoulder who has deep resentments against men.

Do you think that such a woman could write, the way I do, like this?

Hello darling, are you alright? I wonder, from the few page hits I've received today, which I imagine (perhaps wrongly) are from you: the disturbing image of Francis Bacon's paralytic child, damaged, on all fours; an old post of mine, Notes of a Panic Attack; and a search this morning, landing on the lovely Picasso etching, of the Minotaur caressing the hand of the sleeping woman with his cheek...

Well, if they're from you, I don't have to spell it out for you... I wonder, and worry a bit, though completely hopelessly, because there is nothing I can do, save for what I'm doing at this very moment, which is thinking of you, and tapping these keys. I'm sure you don't have it easy, I don't see how you could with so much on your plate, but I do hope that things are manageable, tolerable.

I myself am so bushed, so beat at the moment, that I feel almost faint. But valiantly I type (sitting here stripped down to my braless slinky tee and panties, sipping from a refreshingly icefilled glass). It's gotten very sunny out, and warm, and it's been humid and rainy all week, so now things are quite steamy -- not just in my mind & body, which I unfortunately never did get around to today... ah well. I'm just back from a walk around here, with weights, and I tried to keep to the shaded areas, out of direct blazing sun, best I could, and so I cut through the vast cool green graveyard behind the church -- it's big as a Brooklyn city block, that ancient cemetery - that's how cheap real estate is around here. It's a beautiful plot of land, up on high ground, and I cut through to the back of it to what I imagine must have been an old Native-American trail, a pinestrewn path, so leafy and cool and peaceful, that leads pleasantly downhill and delivers me creekside to the road, where I usually end up anyway, via a longer no not circumlocutory - but circuitous route (this, a reference to a word I had a mind to amend this morning, from last evening's post, but never got around to).

Also exhausted because I did a hell of a lot of ironing today, all the upstairs curtains, in advance of the house swap next week. This place has its issues (e.g., a pair of huge stacked cartons, next to the out-of-tune albatross Steinway in the so-called dining room, containing --- now mind you, these cartons have been there for - five years? I've lost count -- bathtubs, intended for the bathrooms, that never got redone) -- but hey, at least all the linens will be clean.

I'm just riffing here, darling, very tiredly. I think of the TV series we've been Netflixing lately, called Modern Family. It's extremely witty and sharply observed - I highly recommend it - you get drawn into the madcap characters very quickly. Honestly, they're feeling like my family in a way. Well why not - since I don't have one! (I don't mean that bitterly, just shaking my head a little - what, ruefully, wryly? Ahhhh whadever... channel the Colombian-accented Sofia Vergara character rolling her eyes, sneering eloquently, and dismissing all with a sexy gesture of her manicured hand.)

Oh, right -- so my scenario here -- latter day version of "one of the causes of the French Revolution" -- "property rich/cash-poor" -- the forevermore stacked bathtubs in the paid-for house -- a small metaphor for the overdevelopment and subsequent collapse of Ireland -- right here, writ at my house. Call the series -- Modern Economy. And Mitt Romney can guest star in some episode... when he shows up, say, late one night in a raging blizzard, his dog strapped to the roof of his car, and he says to us -- we're standing around in our bathrobes, incredulous ("is that who we think it is?" that he's in our solarium), and he says, as D tries to fire up the pellet stove, but it's acting up again, and the cats have darted out the door into the freezing night -- that he's headed for Florida. Well of course, Florida, yeah, duh, we'd love to be there too, beaches, sun, palm trees, of course, as we stand there shivering in the cold night. But what's Mitt's reason, as he stands there grinning at us, not quite seeing us -- why is he contemplating moving to Florida? For the tax breaks.

No kidding, that's what I heard on C.R. today, from one or the other of his lame establishment pundits, As I Stood Ironing.

Oh sweetheart, yet another mess of a post, hope you're enjoying it. It's my typerly equivalent of hanging endlessly on a cellphone -- aren't you glad I don't do that? But if I did... well... perhaps a message such as this... if the phone on the other end had gone dead and I wasn't even aware of it -- well a transcript of such a monologue -- might well look like this.

Hi - sweetheart (shit, what's wrong with this thing?) - can you hear me now?

love you, hope all's well
many kisses -- thinking of you --

Hi Prof, Emma Bovary here. Stuck in rural provinces a hundred miles north of the city. Will be sprung to Carroll Gardens for a few days next week -- solo, catsitting for former neighbors. I would love some male companionship... and you sound wonderful... I'm a poetic writer myself -- age 52, full-figured (size 14/16), attractive. Perhaps you wouldn't mind tutoring a Wellesley grad who needs a refresher course --- well, in something or other? Belle

Okay, we'll see how that goes. It was good for a laugh. He's 46. Probably when he means he's dying to teach again, he means someone younger, not 'Continuing Ed.' But it did cause me -- oh these very circumlocutory ways to discovering poems -- to look up a reference -- the crack in the tea-cup opens -- the phrase he requested be placed in the subject line, so as to show that I am not "a bit of spam." Who says "a bit of" -- only -- I daresay -- a Brit. (And who says "I daresay"? Only someone who read too much Henry James at an impressionable age, and whose Polish parents spoke English with a British-inflicted -- no, I mean, inflected -- accent -- which caused my grade school mates to look at me askance with great wonder as we introduced ourselves first days of kindergarten and subsequent grades -- what are you from England or something? I was so screwed up as a kid!

Ah, but darling -- fortunately, ever so fortunately -- that was ages and ages ago, and now I have it all figured out, and everything's fine. I'm right on top of it all -- well, no, not quite, not in the way I'd like, which definitely played a role in my sweet session this morning. I have taken -- now that it's summery -- to ritually closing all the upstairs windows and also the door to the juliet balcony -- so that I might -- as though it were the dead of winter -- make all the noise, or whatever noise, I might possibly want to. And then I start downloading a youp*rn (usually disappointing, lately). It takes forever with dialup - yes, that is still our mode, one of my very many absolutely excruciating frustrations - I mean, why should I waste my time, suffer through a disappointing 'not right for me' youp*rn when, if I could just somehow get at them quicker, there is no reason among the possibly millions of recorded encounters - I would find the one that does it for me, for real? I have found that as much as I might enjoy, really revel, in a particularly good one (oh veex-en, as he clambers up the settee and she milks him from beneath, looking like a trollope in a Hammer film, the quality of the footage slightly grainy, and the furnishings in that color film, weirdly cheesy, bookcase filled with colored spines, the Empire-style settee...) -- I never wish to see it ever again, not twice -- I find that I am very restless, that way.

Right now, my book written by a different Prof, is, as it happens, sitting on top of the Fifty Shades of Gray, book --- suggestively. I'm about halfway through both. And honestly I'd completely forgotten about the latter, I find it so lame. Well - perhaps because, however solo, I've managed to craft an actual sex life for myself -- its frustrations aren't a result of lack of orgasm -- and amazing orgasm at that. Which makes me wonder -- because it takes me a while, even by myself -- and you have no idea how frenzied my imaginings are, riffling through image after image, scenario after scenario, cast of characters even, gender-switching, positions -- OMG -- like a card shark, riffling this way and that through my deck, my cache - mental cache - of cards... and then somehow -- ah finally, the one key that unlocks the door (cue up Nicole Kidman in The Others) -- and there I am, my mind (plus battery-operated highly targeted vibration) having taken my body -- as if through one of those Star-Trek portals -- into a completely different place, of involuntary vocalizations, and clear, unmistakeable -- the moment it hits, it's just - well, that's it -- it takes me forever to get there, with all sorts of machinations -- but then it's --

beyond my control, seismic. It's the most extraordinary feeling (duh!). I mean think of it -- so many of our bodily experiences are beyond our control -- I mean, I don't really, have a sense of how my digestive system works, for example, there's a lot that happens -- well, certainly without my willing it to happen.

So to have so much power, in a way, over one's body, and really be able to hit an involuntary ecstatic state -- I can hardly believe it.

And then I spring up, feeling very satisfied and gratified (because it's very frustrating for me, the many moments before, in which I feel so distracted, by all sorts of things - weak batteries, so I change them out; maybe someone replied to a message; what's fresh as to blog-stats? oh, now she's giving him a bj (at 1:17) when at (0:47) he was inside her -- oh, and is everyone, in these new times, all shaved down there, because I'm not, and I've heard of the term Brazilian, but = well, no, I don't shave, and not only because I've just had solo sex (if any) in recent years, but -- well, I'm going to lose it eventually anyway, so why rush it - I don't know, I sort of like hair!

Plus, I grew up on reading The Joy of Sex, sneak-peeks reading it, the volume on the night-table of the couple whose kids I babysat for many Saturday nights, c. 1975. It didn't phase me in the least that the man and the woman, in graphite-drawn oddly chaste embrace, had "pubes" -- the fact that she didn't shave her armpits -- for this fourteen-year old, then -- oh, eeeeew!

What do you think darling -- do you think I'm done? Ah, rolling over in bed. It was good for me. I hope it was good for you. If not, there's tons and tons -- here, take the remote, or the mouse, or maus, whatever.

Okay I'm done. Rolling over in bed, getting up, with my great big tall stiletto heels (oh, so that's what they're for - to grab onto - got it!). In the past I'd had a cigarette. Instead, now I'm hungry. What's for dinner? Oh good, cheese ravioletti, on a bed of garlic-sauteed kale, sprinkled with parmesan cheese. Oh good, I'm glad -- well, I'm glad it's all there, ready to go, on the stove downstairs...

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

***
Hello darling, I wonder where you are, are you traveling again? It's a cool gray day, with periods of rain, much welcome for the garden, and for the birds, since I've neglected to fill the bird bath. I've been feeling achey today - due to the humidity? I really don't know. But maybe because the rain was falling in a soothing way, and my room was dark, and the house was quiet (as always), when I lay down for a nap, I fell fast asleep and for longer than usual, got up about an hour later. And it did invigorate me, and I set about to hanging up clothes, folded in a pile from the laundry, steaming cauliflower, running outside to snap a few pictures, and doing a workout.

I'm thinking about how I'm having very pleasant email exchanges with someone who works 60 hours a week, and he seems to cheerfully (?) admit, that he's done so for the last 30 years. And here I am, not working, puttering around, feeling achey, taking naps, not weeding. Trying to refer to, or think of myself as an artist -- well who needs that label, no not even I -- and yet what do I produce other than this blog? Is this blog enough? Someone else asked me today, in an email, "so you're a Professional Poet?" No, amateur poet, professional layabout...

Ah, I'm being hard on myself. I just read a thoughtful couple of essays by a super-intelligent, extremely well-educated twenty-something-year-old, who is feeling - despite all his achievements, and the support of his boomer-generation parents, that he's facing a different world altogether -- the world of the 1 percent calling the shots over the 99 percent. And he is worried (at least that was the subtext anxiety I got) that despite his intelligence -- it simply won't be valued in this new economy, this new iteration of an age of robber barons -- these ones faceless [despite Facebook!] and corporate -- that his very mind, his powerful intellect, his judgment as he grows more mature -- all of that, in this new economy, will be viewed - by the Masters - as redundant, expendable. In the name of efficiency, which hasn't reduced hours-per-week worked by most Americans, including the very most intelligent, creative, educated, vibrant ones -- who might have something other to show for their time -- all sorts of creative pursuits! -- other than logging in endless hours.

I think of this in light too, of how the landscape around here is so paved over. It's been hardscaped so much over the last 100 years -- I can hardly imagine what the next 100 will bring. The New Economy absolutely relies on lack of collective memory. Does anyone remember today, how the skies of this region used to darken with vast huge absolutely teeming flocks of birds -- aerial crowds of them, like moveable and doubtless noisy clouds? No -- these birds were, in fairly short order, shot out of the sky -- clearcut, in that fashion, which decimated their populations, rendered species extinct, and made it hospitable, possibly, for perhaps the scrappier of species, which - these days, outside my kitchen window - include blackbirds of some sort, tiny sparrows and finches... and I'm overjoyed always, if I see a rather desperately hungry-looking single tiny dramatically colored (black with red, yellow, and white markings) grosbeak managing to salvage the last few seeds from the very bottom, which bigger birds can't quite get...

***

No, I'm not a professional poet, or even really a poet at all, not in formal sense anyway. I sit down at the end of every day and come up with written "snapshot" of my day -- I do these in letter-form to my "male muse" (a friend of mine -- but we're completely unavailable to each other, due to geographic distance, committed marriage (on his part), etc. -- but we stay in touch in this fashion, with my daily little online notes to him, that often end up being quite poetic. Hence I think of myself as a writer - of poetic letters.

***
We're the rare grosbeaks, some of us around my age in my generation, who didn't quite, for whatever reason, 'fit in'.... and that young man, and many others, of his up and coming one...

***

60 hours a week -- is that between your two jobs (the second being coyote-catcher) or the main one? That is a lot of hours -- but you seem okay with it -- those kind of hours were always too much for me... I know what you mean about the momentum. When I was working I just kept working... you put your feet to the floor, you show up, and you do it again the next day, and it's not so bad, and you (that is, I) don't have to think about it too much -- it's just what you do. When I moved up here and didn't have a job -- I really had to go through a long period of mental restructuring to deal with that. For at least a year or two, I felt very guilty and inadequate about it -- I mean, this is a world, and maybe our country especially with its culturally ingrained 'work ethic' -- in which everyone works. But I did finally manage to adjust to my new situation --- and now the momentum of working, of course, is gone, though I feel better about myself about it. I also wonder if part of my strange inertia might be cultural, in the sense that I'm first-generation Polish-American. My mother, who came from a very aristocratic family in Warsaw, raised me to be very cultured, educated, musical -- taught me refined tastes, but little if anything at all in terms of anything practical or common-sense. Which was hard for me -- since I wasn't going through childhood (let alone eventual adulthood) in pre-war Poland ... but rather in suburban Connecticut in the 70s!

***
Also, I'm very grateful to D that he found time to do a bit of mowing yesterday evening. The grass was so overgrown - nearly waist-high - I couldn't even bear to look at the garden -- and so I retreat here. But I stepped out this morning, and was blown away to see how the trees we (he) had planted six-seven years ago, are finally 'looking like something,' grown, substantial -- it is turning into a beautifully landscaped garden, after all. I think that once he -- or some vastly more powerful masculine or machine energy than me can mow the lawn -- maybe it wouldn't be so hard for me to push the gas mower around, and keep the lawn trimmed. Oh, who am I kidding? I have a hard time getting to the vacuum cleaner, dragging it out from where it's currently stashed right up here, on the other side of the stairwell. Ah, maybe I can let it go for this week, why not. Big major house/Brooklyn apartment swap slated for next week... I will be super-motivated - as the day (next Tuesday) draws near -- to swipe, vacuum, dust, everything in sight!

***
Oh, and there's just now, as I'm getting ready to hit 'publish post', a gentle rain falling...

many kisses, sweetheart, wherever you are
hope everything is well with you
or as well as can be expected, in your generation
and in that - older, and older still
and of that younger --
and even way younger, teenily so - still

love you
you are such a comfort to me
& joy
oh the rain is falling a bit harder now
the loveliest patter with the windows open
so many kisses

Hello my dearest, many kisses, up in the aerie in my near-altogether, it's just so warm out and the sun is blazing. Back from the conservation area, closes at eight as it turns out. Marched around there with my handweights. Saw the elderly gentleman with his dog, we greeted each other warmly, though I haven't been there, or seen him, in months. Wild white roses are coming into bloom, perfuming the air, and there was wild geranium, with delicate pink blossoms, and buttercups, opaquely vibrant as egg yolks. I am glad I didn't mess up in church, though the Rev. M. thought I had -- Belle, she said, surprisingly approaching me at the organ as I wound up a postlude of a movement from Handel's Water Music -- I had asked for hymn #594 -- not 544. The stuff my anxiety dreams are made of -- I was mortified, and said so. I'd jotted down the hymn numbers she'd emailed me a few days before – my note read 544. Well, no wonder I couldn't hear the congregation, since they were puzzling over #594 – we hummed along, said the Rev. M. with a wry smile. I'm so sorry.... But when I returned home I checked her message -- and - as I emailed her moments later - "I'm feeling just ever so slightly vindicated! You did write hymn 544 -- not 594. However, in the future, I will definitely, on Sunday mornings, cross-reference my list of hymns against the numbers as posted on the board, to double-check that there are no discrepancies."

Ah - life in this tiny parish -- it's always something.

Caressing the details here, darling, trying to, the miscellany of my day. I have had the loveliest messages this weekend from a CL contact in Holyoke, just so very warm & thoughtful, who corrected me as to what I wrote yesterday -- BTW Belle, never say NEVER on meeting one another...(-; And in one of his messages he explained how he loves some of the minutiae I write about of my days -- how, and now I'm paraphrasing him, he gets to know me this way from afar, sideways (a favorite word of mine, esp. since that wonderful movie with Paul Giamatti), or "aslant" - to use Emily Dickinson's word. I do get what he means, and he's a beautifully poetic letter writer himself, truly. And yet I'm the one who tries to "self-identify" as a writer -- well, no matter. A personal, heartfelt, non-cliched, thoughtful, original message is -- well, a thing of beauty, and of grace.

I was thinking of such matters, how there is great substance and texture and curiosity and interest in just the smallest details of life, any life. I have a hard time sometimes hewing to just those very mundanities -- or they can seem mundane -- and yet they're a miracle, the very simple phenomena of them. And I'm not even looking for blow-me-away miracles -- honestly, it's enough for me, if I really think about it, to enjoy so much being alive this very moment -- think of it! we're alive!! at this moment, and we won't always be, and think of all the hidden graveyards all over the place, in this county for sure, I'm constantly stumbling past overgrown tiny abandoned graveyards. But my point is -- wow! we're alive, we're sentient -- oh, this is our moment! And so truly, in that regard, absolutely no detail is too small, that isn't worthy of the most profound attention, even if that's not how we tend to focus ourselves -- and I don't. I have all my senses... and plus my cerebral mind... there is so much that I have to tune out... simply to make sense of the world, or to make it manageable. And most of us, probably, are that way.

I think now of the beautiful film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on a true story, a memoir, of a man who for some reason (was it a major stroke? I don't quite recall), lost most of his vision, and became paralyzed. (I saw it some years ago, and blogged or wrote to someone about it, I don't quite at the moment recall.) If I recall correctly, he had only the slightest bit of peripheral, or perhaps very blurred vision, an incandescently crystalline sense of his own consciousness. The only way he could communicate was by blinking his eyelid in Morse Code fashion -- and in that way -- once caring individuals on the receiving end figured that out -- he was able to dictate his memoir to a transcriber who'd sit with him, chanting "ah eh ee oh ew" and then the rest of the alphabet in succession, spelling out letter by letter -- and then solving crossword or game-show style for the word -- when he'd signal, literally, via a blink of his eye, the letter he had in mind.

Today at the service was a guest clergyman, very young, no older than late twenties or early thirties I'd guess, with his young wife there -- a very attractive couple, clearly well-matched even physically – both of them on the trim, spare, blonde side, and their baby boy, all smiles - revealing a single pair of brand-new teeny bottom teeth. The clergyman is a delight - he delivered the sermon. He is the 'youth director' for the diocese, and I can see why, given his own youth, and great joy & enthusiasm.

(Actually, it was the loveliest moment for me this morning as I hurried in my heels down the road, at 9:15, trying to get to the church on time (thinking even of that similarly titled song from My Fair Lady. Wow, that church -- I think it's literally a two-minute walk from my house, it's that close. And so -- Alice-like, even though I felt that I was rushing out of the house last-minute, late, late! for a very important date! -- by the time I arrived at the church, it was still 9:15 by my watch, and suddenly it seemed that I had arrived luxuriously, langorously, leisurely early! Ah, advantage - Belle!

And I observed, just as I was approaching the lovely old church, surrounded by tall pines (planted perhaps a hundred years or more ago) and an ancient graveyard -- I glimpsed, in the distance, the young clergyman, whom I'd never seen before, outside, in the beautiful green morning, in his pristine white vestments, communing with -- well, the absolutely exquisite moment that that moment was, and before the service was about to begin. I'm glad I saw him there - an apparition, all in white, I'd never laid eyes on him ever before - exquisitely standing there, like a white Easter lily -- and then I hurried into the church, and inside... )

The theme of the young clergyman’s sermon had to do with (of course) the morning's gospel reading, from John (sorry, I don't know which, precisely - the Rev. M. read it all so very movingly -- the very last chapter of John, she said, before she delved into the incandescence of it) -- it was all -- I am yours, and thine is yours, and mine is yours, and yours is thine... I'm completely paraphrasing here. But it was very beautiful, chanting, reciprocal, eternal, circular...

And the young clergyman delivered quite a lengthy sermon, prefaced by a prayer that he actually, in his exquisite very spiritual tenor sang, very movingly - actually, it was spellbinding, as though he was channeling a Negro spiritual, completely unaffectedly, very purely, just really really feeling and experiencing that - connection... it wasn't falsetto, but it was unusually high... and pure... and deeply felt... and thus expressed...

and the charming, enthusiastic young clergyman, with his young wife in a front pew rocking their young teething adorable baby boy -- told story after story, in his sermon, of miracles he'd found in his life, due to Jesus... and they were quite remarkable stories -- very much so -- "do you want me to tell you about the miracles that happened at my wedding?" he asked -- I thought not so rhetorically, of the mute congregation, the scant numbers of which mostly sitting towards the middle back. Yes, I said, from my seat at the organ...

and he laughed, and so did everyone else -- that I (anyone!) had dared to reply!

anyway, he told beautiful, charming, loving, whimsical, tale after tale of amazing tiny meaningful occurrences that transpired during he and his wife's outdoor summer wedding --- it was quite remarkable

and they were miraculous occurrences -- how the bride's wedding veil became lifted, at the apposite moment, by a sudden gust of wind

how a "wish candle" (like a Roman candle of sorts) that went off awry, and settled, still lit, high up in a tinder-dry pine... didn't set off a fire, that might have burned down the house, a forest... and instead - on fervent prayer - extinguished itself, and then even - a bit later - descended, branch by branch, downwards down the pine... stopping just out of reach... where the bridegroom's father, had to get a branch to joyfully and serenely retrieve the now-safe spent candle, holding it aloft and triumphantly returning with it – like a stag draped around the father's neck - I don't know, maybe I'm mixing metaphors here...

So - I'm not at either extreme. I'm not so severely challenged that it is an absolute miraculous force of will to be able to experience life, and in turn to give thanks, and validation of one's presence, via expression. Nor do I look for serendipity or kismet (words that sprang to mind as the young clergyman told his story) when it comes to acknowledging.... well... Love... at its profoundest.

And so I am very grateful -- here I am somewhere in an extremely privileged middle -- alive right now, enjoying myself -- not severely handicapped, and not really feeling the need to 'prove' some extraordinary miracles. Though I did appreciate the young clergyman for that -- for his very very great sense of delight, wonder, whimsy, drawing connections, being so connected, so powerfully in tune, attuned -- ah, of course -- so beautiful --!

but for me -- oh darling, and all sorts of darlings really, some I love now, or have loved, or wanted to love, or wish to love -- isn't it just enough

here we are -- on this most beautiful day -- alive, sentient

tonight's dinner? leftover grilled cold salmon, 7-grain pilaf fortified with chicken stock and a spoonful of lentils for protein, since there isn't much salmon left, and mesclun mix, big handfuls on plates I've already laid out, and the salad dressing's done too...

many kisses
and I had a very lame CL coffee date this afternoon, that I could hardly wish to be over
the guy was alright, I suppose - but please, you won't win my heart by showing up with a decrepit smile and some horrible NY Yankees shirt, and baggy jeans

but the whole while I sat there trying to get through my iced coffee and making conversation with him
there was the tiniest little sparrow hopping about
very busily in this little outdoor cafe space
hoping for crumbs
so glad - in its moment, of which in its way it's fully aware -
to be alive

many kisses
you & you & you & you
love you all -- oh really truly