My dearest, up in the aerie, having a hard time getting myself to post. I suppose something's troubling me, yet I feel reticent, at least here. I get the feeling that I'm persona non grata to some;
I may be the one with the pseudonym, but you may not be the only one with the proxy. Is that a factor in your 'difficulties?' I don't know what to say. It's tricky, uncertain ground. If my suspicions are correct, I may never see them again - and that would include you, swept up in the sweep. I don't underestimate.

I read a line by Emily Dickinson
in the Sewall biography I'm currently reading –
"My business is to love" [emphasis hers].
And that's all I can say for myself,
I can see the other points of view
I wouldn't be happy about it either

I went through two shoebox sized plastic boxes of photos today
looking for an image of you
there were batches throughout of my wedding day
interspersed with vacation shots years later, in Nova Scotia
and another time in Hawaii
and still after irrelevant still of tropical hibiscus
there was me at Windsor Castle on my honeymoon, freezing
then, rifling through, careful not to skip
too quickly through clumps
there you were! in one single image,
with your youngest, just born,
your wife's handwriting on the back
I don't even know whose kitchen that is, or dining room
there’s an overhead lamp directly above your head, like a hat
lit petals descending or rising above you

and ha! as I search now for a photo of such a lamp
I see next to you, hung framed on the wall,
a Tiffany stained glass poster, the light of your crown
reflected in its glass
and you're at the apex of the shot - as in a Baroque painting
of teeming circular rhythms, 
cast of characters in horizontal array beneath
you with your golden crown

it's a beautiful photo
your sweet girls, all blue skies & pink minotaur,
& who knows with the babe in arms?
and one cousin, holding the babe, all patriarchal beams
and my exhausted looking cousin, your wife

whoever took the snapshot - the subjects love the photographer
girls tilt their heads beguilingly and
lovingly as they pose to that loving shot

and you're beaming at the camera too
with that lampshade over your head - here, not a joke,
but a beautiful crowning, framing touch

I like you better without a moustache I think
And I compare the photo with more recent ones I have
in a Christmas card
and images in my mind
my conclusion
darling - you're a hunk, then & now

The business of America is business
My business is to love

(in that business, I've been going back through lines
I originally set down
and now actually looking at the snapshot
and if one could number the lines above
in the order they got written
you'd be surprised that the numbers are all out of order)

no one has sinned
mighty fortresses are intact
I really can't help it
but I can understand that
as with a vampire
I'm safe - so long as
outside the door

***

image:
Wisteria, Tiffany transom panel, c. 1910–20, leaded glass, 37.125 x 96.25 in., The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, Winter Park, Florida (link here)

***
P.S. Saturday, 8:25 p.m.
error message
dearest, I had a really good, pretty well polished post going
and then blogger crashed
as I was tweaking minor edits
and my polished prose
and gist went
so the post that's up there now
it's not what I intended
stupid me
I didn't have a backup
oh aaarggh
how could I have a backup when it's so hard for me to write in the first place?

***
Sunday, 8:25 a.m.
post fixed - all better

Darling, up here in the aerie, getting myself in gear to write, sort of like stepping into a cold lake one inch of body at a time - I guess I'm about up to my breasts now - excruciating - so I'd better plunge in. Just back from the CSA farm and putting away loads of beautiful produce. And now I'm inhaling the crook of my arm - Miss Dior - and my fingertips redolent with the scent of cilantro, parsley & dill. The fragrances aren't dissimilar to me - I go back & forth between arm and fingertips, inhaling, considering deeply. Miss Dior is, I suppose, a fresh green scent at its base, though with a sweet floral overnote certainly; the green herbs I just finished handling - placing allotted handfuls of each from the CSA bins into separate glasses of water - are reminiscent - minus the intoxicating alchemy.

***
13 July 2008, Belle to J

"In New York I eagerly accepted the soft job fate offered me - it consisted mainly of thinking up and editing perfume ads." -- Lolita, Ch. 9.

"Miss Dior Perfume by Christian Dior, Launched by the design house of Christian Dior in 1947, Miss Dior is classified as a refreshing, woody, mossy fragrance. This feminine scent possesses a blend of rose, gardenia, sage, and other green florals. It is recommended for daytime wear."

And for the modern Lolita, an "updated" Miss Dior, called Miss Dior Cherie.

"This is a modern fragrance that captures the timeless couture spirit of Dior. A new interpretation of the original Miss Dior fragrance, Miss Dior Cherie combines pure couture spirit with the audacity of youthful, playful notes for a fresh approach to a timeless classic. Notes of chic, green tangerine, violette, and pink jasmine mingle with soft patchouli, musk, and delectably sweet strawberry leaves and caramelized popcorn for a delicious scent that's truly irresistible." [online ad copy for the perfume]

Caramelized popcorn?

***
13 July 2008, J to Belle
I had forgotten that Humbert wrote perfume ads at one point, but as soon as you mentioned it, I remembered... The text of the perfume ads is interesting to see after all these years, but hard for me to translate since I'm not familiar with the language of perfumes. The comment that Miss Dior is recommended for daytime wear, suggests the ad was not written by Humbert and certainly not written by me. The combination of your soft cheeks and hair, that white wrap-around sweater, the smell of Miss Dior--and your hands and lips running all over me--is overwhelming...

... Once, we were engaged in our love play in a grassy place not far from that stone bench (I have a picture of you sitting on it); it was a rather exposed place, actually, but it was dark, so we felt comfortable. I was kissing your nipples, and you had a sudden climax... I never forgot that, and I never saw it again with anyone else. It was one of many manifestations of your extraordinary capacity for giving and receiving love...

13 July 2008, Belle to J
My dearest, Miss Dior - recommended for daytime wear when a lot of action will be going on in secret, verdant spaces such as croquet lawns and froggy pond banks and I-95 and the Merritt and the sun remains relentlessly high in the sky and simply refuses to set.

Also "daytime" as a metaphor for innocence, purity, and idyll (my origins). Darling, I don't remember the stone bench offhand but I do remember my incredible capacity to climax with you (caramelized popcorn indeed)...

***

Right. Such excitement in my CSA haul, another arrowhead cabbage, head of romaine, limpid salad mix, zucchini, squash, 4 ears of corn, beets with their greens, quart of peaches, ripe cantaloupe...

***
The Hamptons has its tall privet hedges
Columbia County has its canyons of corn

xoxo

Hello my love. It's 100 degrees in Hudson, and I've stayed indoors all day. I decided to give myself the day off from a walk and a workout, not wishing to deal with the sun and heat. But I found I had all this boundless physical energy. So I spent much of the day giving the kitchen a very thorough, all-too-rare complete cleaning. I cleaned the inside of the fridge, the floor beneath the stove & fridge, washed the floor, etc., etc. I did all this in the buff, and felt perfectly fine & comfortable the entire time, just moving about briskly, thinking my thoughts while scrubbing this, rinsing that. And actually before I embarked on that mad mission (seemingly so, on a day like today, but I felt fine) I did a bunch of food prep for what will be a delicious dinner tonight: chicken baked in a marinade of Indian garam masala spices, ginger, & yogurt; basmati rice; a cucumber salad dressed with plain yogurt, salt, pepper, & dill; and a small peach tart from the CSA fruit share last week - and tomorrow's another pickup.

It's only now that I'm really feeling the heat, now that I've had a cool shower, and toweled myself off, and spritzed on Miss Dior (ah!), and put on clothes, pink leotard tee & filmy skirt. It's very hot up in the aerie, hotter than the cavelike downstairs - and unfortunately the oven's on. I suppose my menu planning could have been better. No matter.

At least a breeze is coming through, rattling the wood blinds, tilted closed against the sun. Birds are at the feeders that I topped off. Probably we should have taken them down for summer, but I keep topping them off because I feel sorry when I see a little bird plaintively going at an empty feeder, and some of the birds are quite desperate about it, too tall for the bottom-most opening at which there might still be a bit of seed, they cling to the rim of the feeder from below, like swimmers hanging on to the edge of a pool; or they sit on the rim and lean over almost 180 degrees to get a morsel. So, yes - I see that desperate effort and my heart goes out - I go around to the back of the house with the sack of sunflower kernels.

Boy the combination of fragrances of basmati rice and peach crostata, and maybe the roasting chicken too - wow - amazingly wonderful. (Do you really think I'm a good writer? What would E.D. say to 'amazingly wonderful.' Like Lolita - bah!)

And I felt a need to edit this morning's post too, because I had like three 'impressed' and/or 'impressivelys,' not to mention two 'incredibly's, one of which got replaced with a 'notably' and the other with 'remarkably' - or some such - don't factcheck me - but that's the gist.

My dearest, where are you, how are you? I haven't gotten a response to a message yet, about an invite - well, who knows - I will try not to take it personally. There's a slightly paranoid side to me - how on earth would I ever explain anything, if I had to. Or perhaps the visit up North is all done and gone, all returned home without meeting. Which is fine, if that's what happened - I totally understand. I have found for myself (at least when I was a girl and took occasional week-long summer vacations at the house, spending time with my grandmother, and with my cousins) that that house is a little universe of its own, one enters its bubble, its rhythms, whatever's going on, and a day will flow from morning to night, interspersed with meals (kielbasa, sałatki, owoce), then before you know it it's the next day again, and the same routine goes on, as the 1960s brown analog clock with black hands, the one adjacent to the kitchen stove, hanging above the plastic wastebasket, that has marked time there for decades - since I was a girl at least, and now I'm nearly 52 - revolves silently around the hours.

I don't have synasthesia at all I don't believe - a coincident incongruous identification in one's mind of mixed sensory cognitions - ascribing colors to sounds, for example - I don't quite grasp it since I don't experience it. And yet there's something exquisite or excruciating or attenuated sometimes for me just picturing an hour on that particular kitchen clock - 'quarter to three' for example, in that cozy time-warp kitchen, the black hands at that balletic position signifying the timelessness of an endless afternoon; or 'ten after five,' that bowing of limbs suggesting that perhaps there's a train to greet, that someone's arriving home perhaps, that dinner comprised of a miscellany of pots on the stove is underway, and the light is turning golden in the west, along the avenue at the bottom of the driveway, and up here from the kitchen window, the sun is visible, a glow in the distance at the far end of all the neighbors' yards.

You'd think that I'm obsessed with those memories - I'm not, but they come to mind because I know you'll know what I mean.

So reluctant to let you go. And yet - I must.

My house is nice too. I enjoyed moving about it today, very much. Actually, I'm having a very hard time with the garden, it's so overgrown - lawn, privet - that I feel psychically encroached upon, dwarfed by the messy landscape. D's aware of it, he's working very very hard, I think somehow finally something 'clicked' with him, and he's on an upwardly ascending groove now, things are getting better (I just need to be dragged along I suppose, on some level, at this point). D has it in mind to hire two young guys he's acquainted with, who are hungry for work in downtime, to do some yard work for us. And the guy with the bulldozer came by one day on his own to survey the pulling-up-the-driveway job. He's thinking he can get to it in September, timing which D says will work with our finances too.

So honestly it felt really good just to stay in the house all day, even if all I did was give the kitchen a good once-over. Because sometimes the house - unfinished as it is - feels out of control too. But if it's clean - and clean especially during a heat wave - ah, then the living is easy.

It was just that little bit that I could control. That - and this post (maybe).

Signing off, my dearest, wherever you are, I hope all is well, all my love, many kisses,

one last squeeze
aarrghhh
xoxo
bye

Hello darling, up in the aerie, doing my best with this heat wave, in the 90s today and very sunny and humid. Just finished watering the garden. I've been in the house three days straight, except for going out in the garden or for a walk. D's been out on a job and we have only the one car. Am I feeling housebound? Hard to say. I'm not really dying to go anywhere. There's an exhibition at the Clark, on the impressionist painter Camille Pisarro, that I'd like to go see, but even if had the car, the car needs work before it's safe to hazard the hour-and-a-half trek over the Berkshire mountain pass. I've been occupying myself best I can, reading a fair amount today, the Rebecca Wolff novel, and making inroads into the The Power Broker-sized (which is to say behemoth) biography of Emily Dickinson, which is fascinating and very readable, so the size isn't putting me off. The two-volume opus is combined in my massive paperback - and Miss Dickinson doesn't even make an appearance - so I've read in Richard Sewall's introduction - until Volume II! So it's tempting to skip Volume I altogether, which describes the backdrop and cast of characters, ancestral and contemporaneous, surrounding E.D. But I'll be good. I have all the time in the world. And I heed Professor Sewall's sternly persuasive admonition (akin to a school principal mind-reading a restless student's contemplation of skipping class): "To readers in haste to have her born and on the way, I can say only this: the more one knows about background, foreground, center, what's "above" and what's "below," the more real the poems become and the more awesome Emily Dickinson's achievement is seen to be."

So I'm not feeling physically housebound so much, yet I could use more stimuli, inputs, simple company - oh for an interesting conversation (hence this one-sided effort, I suppose). And so in my way of venturing out into the world, I thought to google a former neighbor, who lived in the downstairs apartment from us for a number of years when we lived in Brooklyn. And was very surprised - though at the same time not surprised, rather very impressed and happy for her - to learn that she's now in an extremely high-up executive position at a top Ivy League university. This woman over the years has built a singularly distinguished career. She was just starting on the upward trajectory when we first moved into the building, and over the years her career took off by remarkable leaps and bounds. She was a godsend to our little self-managed co-op too, took charge of organizing a refinancing (we were all clueless & overwhelmed) like it was nothing, which it wasn't, it was a total pain. She was (is) incredibly competent, intelligent, serious, fair-minded - I really liked and admired her. You know, she's achieved exceptionally important positions, but I never had the sense from her that she was 'power-hungry.' Unlike a couple of people, at least, who readily spring to mind from my last tenure, at a municipal agency, who struck me as mostly into it for the swashbuckling power & perks & what it did for their vanity. With this woman, I never had a glimmer of that in the slightest. Just hard work, determination, good humor, devotedness, purpose -- in short, integrity. I know, I'm making her out to be a saint, or glorifying her - I don't mean to - what I'm trying to convey is that she was just really 'solid.'

She liked me too, and I recall now that there was some time in the early nineties when I found myself unemployed. Hmmm, have to think back to the details of that - I'd been a paralegal at a humungous law firm, helping to administer their nonbilling pro bono department; there was a restructuring, I was laid off or let go - jettisoned. It's okay, the job wasn't the worst - but I've always had this problem in my professional endeavors throughout my life - almost always, my heart hasn't been in it. Or my heart could be in it to some extent certainly, 30 percent, 20 percent, maybe 35 percent (how does one measure?!). I worked hard, maybe harder than some as if to compensate for my duality - because this other part of me was always 'outside' the job, thinking of other things, wishing to be elsewhere, homesick sometimes. But what I always had a hard time feeling, from a deep core place, was close identification with an organization, even when its mission & purpose was ostensibly very congenial to my values (which coincidence rarely occurred).

When I had been let go (not fired, not forced to resign, as in my very last position at the municipal agency), I collected unemployment for a requisite period, I don't recall now if it ran out or not. It was an anxious time, there was a mortgage to pay, living in Brooklyn was expensive. Anyway, my downstairs neighbor saw a glimmer in me, something, and - in one of the few times in my life that I have experienced the benefit of a 'connection' - suggested that I apply for a position that otherwise I would never have become aware of. And I believe she did so not only so that D & I, with me unemployed, wouldn't be a threat to the financial health of our tiny co-op. No, I believe that though she and I are very very different - she does possess this genuine selfless capacity to devote herself entirely to each of her challenging professional endeavors - she nevertheless saw something of worth in me, that I had something to offer. And in fact recommended me for the position - I pursued the lead - that I worked at very happily for several years, and under one of the loveliest bosses I have ever worked with in my life - so nice and kind and wonderful and quirky and offbeat and bright, that when she told me that she was leaving the agency to accept a university teaching position - I burst into tears.

As I think of it now, up here in the aerie typing - I'm tearing up! She was that nice. A very, very rare boss, in my life.

And that's it for now, darling. A little trip down professional memory lane. I liked working - as long as it wasn't fulltime. I found that I could devote myself 100 percent - if it only entailed, say 20 hours a week, spread over several afternoons, or two or three full days. Because then that left a lot of time for me to take care of the (then) apartment and garden, and I always seemed to require huge amounts of downtime simply to refocus, recover myself.

Anyway, that's that for now. This virtual house arrest is strange to me. But still - I'm writing, and that's a good thing. I show up every day, around this hour - and devote myself, entirely.

Many kisses, darling. Hope you have central air, wherever you are, because goodness knows that upstairs garret doesn't have it, sweet as that space is.

P.S. Menu-planning in my dreams, darling, hope you're coming. And it's 12534 - not 12345, sweet deflowered proxy.

My dearest, wondering how you are, where you are, what you're doing, hoping you're having a nice time. I'm doing fine, in a mellow, quiet mood, back now from a walk. Laid low much of the day, it was quite hot & humid, the sun too strong for me. Made minor edits this morning on yesterday evening's post. I re-published it and received a puzzling error message which I disregarded, not realizing til minutes later that several paragraphs had gone missing - and I had no backup. I spent more time than I liked trying to recreate the lost lines. Not many, fortunately, but I had been fairly pleased with the post (except for its need of a bit of tweaking) and so it was distressing to lose any of it. Recreating the missing section wasn't easy, a brain/memory challenge - fortunately I could remember most of it. But it was an entirely different process from having written it in the first place, when it flowed right out of me, in the cadences that came. This morning, instead, in stumbling fashion, 'words came halting forth,' to borrow from an Elizabethan sonnet, by Sir Philip Sidney ("Loving in truth and fain in verse my love to show...")

Most of the day I lounged around the aerie and upstairs rooms. Started to read the Sewall Emily Dickinson biography, a used copy, de-accessioned from the San Diego County Library, bar code sticker & library card pocket still attached to the frontispiece - small world, that that particular volume should now sit on my desk in Hudson, NY. Read more of the Rebecca Wolff novel, beautifully written, and which resonates with me, this sexual coming-of-age story of a sensitive, intelligent, precocious yet naive child-woman and her enthrallment with an enticing, predatious young married couple, newcomers to town. I took a fitful nap, checked headlines (can't do much more than that as have read 17 of the monthly allotted 20 articles that the NYT allows for free). The day felt like a lackadaisical waste, much of it, I couldn't seem to get myself going. Then finally around 4:30, as the sun's glare softened, I forced myself to tidy the kitchen, fold laundry, water the garden, fill the bird feeders. And I went about the garden with snips, gathering bouquets for vases now placed all around the house. An earthenware jug filled with long woolly sprigs of faded lavender, sitting on the raised brick fireplace hearth. Twin mixed bunches of lavender, fragrant buddleia, pale cascading hosta bells, and single deep-rose echinaceas, set into a pair of identical mustard jars, one in the solarium, the other on the kitchen table. I love French Pommery mustard, delicious & worth seeking out - which I have done in the past, on occasion, on one of my wonderful adventurous Manhattan treasure hunts - mainly because when the mustard's done the jars make wonderful vases (and as I glance in front of me at my desk, pen & pencil holders). If I wish to give someone a casual present of garden flowers - I like to give it to them in such a jar, theirs to keep. The jars are plain blanched ceramic, simple and seemingly ordinary. Flowers look lovely in them.

And on my desk before me is another miniature Redon, sprightly nosegay of several kinds of zinnia (I love that flower, variegated & cheerful in its way as tulips - is there such a thing as zinniamania?), light & dark pink roses, cosmos, and airy spider flower - an effusive party-colored spray of pinks and violets.

And now you've lit on that charming theatre poster of Peter Pan & Wendy, and I'm looking at the post again which I'd forgotten all about, and downloading the embedded youtube of Windmills of My Mind. I do love that song, I was thinking of it just the other day. Ah, but in what context - that, at the moment, eludes me.

So no big revelations today, darling. Thinking of you, so happy to connect with you, soaring.

Many kisses.

My dearest, I'm not having a great day, not the worst either, but I'm just finding myself bumming out. It's very humid, that isn't helping. I struggled with this morning's post, I was trying to express something, tie together perhaps a few too many ideas. Or maybe I need photoshop. That Bruce Weber image? I wanted to doctor the male figure with a superimposed image of a Minotaur's head instead of the model-beautiful visage. I wanted to describe what I was feeling while I was fantasizing - so effective while fantasizing, and I thought - I want to write you a letter about my Minotaur fantasy. But then nothing came, and am not sure I want to go on that road again, too frustrating. I reread some of what I'd once written in that vein, and could hardly bear reading it -.

A few books arrived in the mail today, the 1970s National Book Award-winning biography of E.D. by Richard Sewall, and three slim paperbacks written by the mother of 1.0. I couldn't afford 1.0's book, but found hers on an online used book site - priced at $.99 and $1.99, the ones I purchased - shipping was more than the cost of the books. I've been aware of these volumes for years now, but there's rarely been all that much extra discretionary money (even while I was working) for very many books (back when hers were full-priced) so I never did purchase them, nor did I ever find them in any library, and I did look, over the years.

They arrived today, a children's book and two memoirs, and I trolled through the memoirs, scanning, searching. I certainly didn't expect to find myself in those pages, though she and I had been quite close at a couple of different periods, both of which were very many years ago (she is deceased now). I was searching for her, I suppose, her distinctive voice. She was a very vibrant exuberant opinionated warmhearted goodnatured woman - theatrical in her gestures and mode of telling a story. I liked her very much, with occasional slight reservations (as I might have with most anyone, in particular women - and after all, of course, she was 1.0's mother - she and I had different "interests" in him.)

Her memoirs are charming, a series of independent recollections compiled into two volumes, lacking, really, only her own lively presence and way of regaling stories that I could remember as I turned the pages.

And too, I was searching for clues about 1.0. (Yes, shoot me.) And I found a few, one of which in particular hit me to the quick and left me - I don't have words for the feeling. 1.0's mother had flown west to spend Christmas with her son, his wife, and their two young sons. There was an enormous Christmas tree with gifts all around, the wife was cooking wonderfully fragrant dishes, the delightful little boys were playing, the son was attentive, and she wrote (I'm not looking up the exact quote, I've buried the books behind other books on my bookcase) that the scene was that of a very warm, happy, loving family.

And that was painful to read, what I've always wanted, especially, a long time ago, with 1.0, then not thought of, with him, for many years, until again three years ago. It's something I never had, a warm, happy, loving family, not in childhood and not, as it turned out, in adulthood either.

This morning too I read a post in a blog I follow, that also hit me to the quick, and that I suppose I relate to - though honestly, I don't know that I have all my own motivations figured out, why what has happened with my life, has happened as it has. But it has. Many of these adult daughters of narcissistic mothers are loving mothers to their own children. Others decide not to have children. They have sustained too much emotional deprivation to consider having children of their own...

No, I didn't raise my siblings, not as literally as the psychologist's post paints, but I certainly shouldered & withstood very much, through my childhood. I reread the title of her post - yes, I certainly have a sense of having raised myself. My mother was there - and she wasn't.

(I've looked up the blog now, and think of 1.0 when I read the title of the latest post.)

And so I try to buck up, self-soothe. Why am I envious of 1.0's wife, the family & lifestyle he created with her? Yes, envy. Or a sense of --- that could have been mine. But --- what - could have been mine? Could I really have been happy with him, over the long haul, given --- the givens?

But why didn't it ever happen with me?

I can't speak for 1.0, but there were moments in our deep past where there were gaps where (in an alternate universe) we might possibly have gotten together again (if for brief reacquaintance), I know that I myself resisted them mostly (I think). I felt myself to be a mess, very confused, and smoking way way too much out of anxiety. I felt very embarrassed about the smoking. As my teens and early twenties progressed I wasn't the sweet fairly uncomplicated ingenue whom he'd weaned off whole-milk. I was addicted to cigarettes, and they took a toll of course on my breath, my appearance, my manner - everything.

It's hard. They were a companion for me, I suppose, very reliable. I'm thinking just now too, of how I sucked my thumb as a young child for a long time, longer than most children, well into second grade (and I was embarrassed about it) -- and my grandmother managed to shame me out of it. Love & approval of my grandmother trumped all, I suppose - and so I gave up the wet wrinkled thumb.

So 1.0's not stupid. His wife is I'm sure ultra-competent, with a gift of the blind eye to boot.

I wouldn't have lasted in that arrangement. In that arrangement, I almost certainly would have become deranged with sexual jealousy.

But why couldn't some quieter form have happened for me? Well, it did. And I have to remind myself today too, that I was very happy for twenty years. (Though now we're coming on 25.) And we had our Christmas trees, with gifts around them.

My thoughts are all over the place.

Emma Bovary under house arrest, while D. Str.-Kahn takes in plays & concerts in the Berkshires in recent days, as I've read... Ah, that's just humorous!

Sweetheart, I don't know your story, I really don't, I can guess and surmise, and it's okay, I don't expect anything, way too complicated. I mentioned once how I'm not angry or frustrated with you in any way - you met your wife way before you ever met me - and I totally accept that.

The hard time I have is accepting the same with regard to 1.0 - he had met me first.

And yet it's all so over, so why don't I let go? I don't know. I suppose I was trolling his mother's memoirs for clues.

This is so incomplete, I'm sorry. E.D. didn't have children either, but I'm convinced she had orgasms. In that sense I relate to her very much. But why does it have to be an either/or? Why is everything so compartmentalized?

Madonna/whore
Is that what it comes down to?

I wonder.
But I reject the binaries. I guess I'm just in this other in-between category (which, except for its upsides, mostly sucks).

Couldn't I have been who I am *and* have had children? I didn't wish not to have them, it just didn't happen, the circumstances

Another source of resentment is this sense of (until recent years) having tried very hard to do everything right. And it didn't work.

My alumnae magazine arrived in the mail today too. A budding investment banker I was very friendly with in college -- who, like her father before her, became an investment banker -- is now, after career, and marriage, and children, a 'life coach.'

Or it did work, and here I am sitting buck naked by myself up in the aerie typing.

I would readily put on clothes for the chance to, in a way that didn't provoke anxiety, be in a living room at Christmas with a huge Christmas tree and pots simmering fragrantly on the stove

I can pull myself out of myself (that suggests an intestinal Francis Bacon painting in itself). I didn't quite find the person in 1.0's mother whom I'd hoped to find in her written and published pages. But she would lament too, about aging, about being an independent-minded woman -- her resounding, overarching theme was -- I'm still here

***
launching without proofing, which I'm sure will show
but really must run
xoxo
yours, the pink minotaur

les plaisirs de la campagne

My darling. Very many kisses, up in that aerie of which I have very many happy memories, none of which unfortunately, involving making love with anyone, let alone with you. But I will be there with you in some fashion, darling, thinking of you, hovering like a benevolent spirit with sweet-breathed kisses, loving you.

***
This morning outside the windows a gentle rain patters in the garden, sounding through the hazy gray and green. I settle back against the bedclothes, eyes closed, and conjure elaborate ravishing visions of you dearest Minotaur, fully wakened.

***
images:
Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973), Girl Seated by Sleeping Minotaur, 18 May 1933, etching

Bruce Weber (b. 1946), On Top of the Porsche, Lisamarie and John, Santa Barbara, 1989, gelatin silver print

Les plaisirs de la campagne, tapestry, 16th century, Musée national de la Renaissance d’Écouen