Hello, dearest. Four p.m. The skies are darkening, I wonder if it will rain. In a dreamy, somnolent mood today probably due to the heat. Went for a walk this morning, re-read the geology essay in the kiosk, and realize that I had messed up my description of it. The bluff is more like 100 feet high. But the glacial lake that was once there was about 100 feet below sea level. As the glacier up north receded, the removal of its weight caused the earth's crust to rebound perhaps as much as 200 feet. Got it? Okay, maybe this will help. I grew up with mattresses like that. Everything was okay as long as you lay flat and prone. But if you sat up the top half would spring up, or the bottom half, depending, or maybe both ends at once if you were in the middle. The geologist used the word "rebound," which made me wonder if the bluff or some form of higher ground had been there prior to the glacier, that the glacier flattened it for a while, and then - presto! - the era of post-Ice Age hydraulics.

Oh good, it's raining now, nice pattering drops. Someone's grilling too, I smell the fumes. Unless it's the neighbor burning plastics again as he's wont to do.

I'm bumming out ever so slightly because page hits from someone in the eponymous river city have ceased ever since I happened to mention them. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle works both ways. That is, I became conscious of the person showing interest in my blog, and it did affect me a little - that now I had more than one (fairly) steady reader that I knew of, what did that mean for my writing? (Not much - redoubled willfulness.) I had an inkling, perhaps even a hope, of who that person might be, entirely in my head, utterly unverifiable. (And this too swings both ways - if you think I mean you - not necessarily.) So I mentioned it and the person went gun-shy or enabled a blocking cookie or whatever and either quit reading entirely in a huff or perhaps went underground. So the Observed was observed by the Observer, the Observed saw something and said something, and now Observer was the Observed, and I lost myself a reader. Read and learn, my friends, the Observed is to remain within the blog bubble like a character in a traditional novel, seemingly unaware of Observers who though inquisitive themselves are a notoriously shy species. Oh but don't you know that I am nothing if not postmodern in breaking conventions such as that even if it means (like a gun showing up in Act I) shooting myself in the foot as a result? Anyway, dear Mr. (?) Whoever You Are in the urban hole at the center of the town donut of Greenport, if you delight me again by checking in on my blog from time to time I promise never ever to mention you herein ever again. Like Vegas. Okay?

Oh, what else. Sitting around in my altogether and reading more of the Dominique Browning memoir this afternoon. It's a little uncanny how very similar we are in some ways. She plays piano, Bach's Goldberg Variations - as do I (or did, the easier ones anyway). In her youth she struggled to understand Heidegger, and finally gave up. Check, and check. She went through a Silver Palate cookbook phase. Well, many of us did in the eighties, so maybe that doesn't count. When she bakes cookies she might triple the amount of raisins since she loves raisins. My oatmeal raisin cookie recipe calls for two cups of oats - I put in four, figuring that it's more healthful that way. I could go on. Also she and I attended the same college, though at different times (she's a few years older than me). A lot of parallels.

I am getting a lot out of reading about her doomed relationship with the "legally separated" though never divorced and thus ultimately unavailable lover she calls "Stroller" because when she gets too close he withholds, withdraws, disappears - strolls away. I haven't finished the book but have read that after a simultaneously gratifying and frustrating decade she ended the relationship. She grew stronger, evolving into the conviction that her peace of mind and entitlement to the kind of mutually committed love relationship that he, a portrait of ambivalence, could never give, trumped whatever feelings of love and validation that she did receive from him. It's not exactly a parallel situation - she, after all, actually got to lay eyes and hands on him regularly - but close enough, I recognize the - well, type. I have to consider myself too this way, weigh peace of mind against love or what passes for love.

Reading her on this subject is like sitting down with the ideal friend or sister I wish I had (or with a mirroring reflection of sorts) who talks forthrightly and nonjudgmentally in a way that I relate and respond to, about such difficult, painful things as ambivalent relationships.

Rosé time, the rain lasted all of two seconds and the sun's back out. Radio Archaeology's on next, of all things. Kisses.

***
Postscript. Here is a very nice essay by Dominique Browning, written in her characteristically warm, sage, and immediate voice, on the subject of what it meant for her to reach the end of her long love affair with Stroller.

Darling, I just got home, am settled in the aerie with a glass of rosé, and KZE is playing Natural Forces. Earth science reminded me of the song, listening to it now and thinking about the lyrics reminds me of you, out West. Did you ever get a new horse?

In the essay that I noticed in the kiosk this morning the geologist noted that he would be giving a guided tour of another conservation area in the county - "July 15 at 3." Yesterday (as reliably reminded by the francophile Mr. North Fifth Street at the12534) was Bastille Day so I deduced that the 15th's today and I thought, wow, so weird I'm reading this at this very moment, since for all I know the essay's been up for a while, I hardly ever look at the kiosk - maybe I'll go. Like E.D. with her wellspring knowledge of botany, I felt that I could use some hard scientific grounding in local natural phenomena in order to give me fresh source material, inspire new connections and metaphors in my writing. So D, who's very friendly with the next door neighbors (while I remain forever the pariah - for some reason that eludes me, maybe some primal one-sided death match, Mom vs. mythically child-devouring Non-Mom (WTF has really changed since "feminism"?)) borrowed their Subaru for the afternoon so that I could have the car. So I drove out to High Falls, a lovely piece of protected land, very woodsy, reminiscent of the Bartlett Arboretum, only with the abiding sound of rushing waters - Falls and brook. Hot sunny day, but here it was all dappled shade, stands of fern, and worn, rock-strewn dirt trail from which arrowheads have probably been long ago spied and pocketed (I never found one as a child - did you ever? why do I imagine that they were more plentiful then? or does the earth, after heavy frosts, yearly heave up a fresh spare supply?) -- all one might wish from a northeastern woodland trail (all but a bog walk, astronomical twilight, and thou), along with dramatic geology reminiscent of Mianus Gorge in Greenwich, CT - ravines and, I don't know, striated granite? But no geologist, and no guided tour, so I toured the place in geologically ignorant fashion, simply enjoying the cool shade, beautiful scenery and memories of you, not just memories, but a desire to hold your hand (I reached out my hand) and discover the place together. I think you would like it. Kisses, darling.

***
P.S. I finally did make cole slaw, with farmstand cabbage, carrot, and half a kohlrabi (like a sweetish turnip I've read) that's been sitting in fridge vegetable bin for a month. I'll never get to the other half so maybe right now I should go downstairs and grate it into the slaw, where I'm sure the sweetish turnip qualities will be lost in the deliciously obliterating dressing of mayo, mustard, celery seed, celery salt, etc. Also cooked up an enormous pot of pasta with a sauce of ground turkey, turkey sausage, tomato, chicken stock and swiss chard. Note to Ms. Browning - I didn't used to know what to do with chard either - those enormous bunches are daunting - but, chopped up, it wilts down and then is perfectly manageable in a very large pot, mixed up in, ultimately lost, yet adding a healthful green note (and bragging rights) to a mélange of delicious savory ingredients.

***
More kisses for you, darling.

Good morning dearest. I feel so much better today than I did yesterday, light years. I got out at 7:30 this morning for a walk, before it gets more hot and humid. I felt despairing at first and had a good cry (nothing like a private sob in the great out of doors) and walked and did arm exercises and kept up the pace and did my large looping figure 8 around the park and by the time I reached the end I felt much better. It was beautiful at the conservation area at that hour, in the midst of the midsummer rattle of cicadas, chirping crickets, and birdsong. I reached a lovely spot where goldenrod, not yet in bloom and drenched with dew, stood glistening in the morning sun, a field of shimmering diamonds. It was so crystalline as to remind me of winter, and I imagined soaring over a dense Scandinavian forest, evergreen treetops brilliant with freshly formed ice. Returning to my car I stopped at the kiosk by the parking lot and a posting behind the glass caught my eye, a nicely-written essay about the geology of the place. The geologist described a point I'm familiar with, a 200-foot high bluff overlooking the river and wetlands below. He wrote that many millions of years ago there was a lake at that spot, as well as a massive glacier further north, and it's not that as the lake receded it exposed the high bluff, it's that the tremendous weight of the melting glacier pushed the earth's crust up from below. I don't usually think about the dynamism of the earth or of geological time - not as it relates to around here anyway - but as I stood there reading, the description conjured such a vivid image of the earth shifting, rolling, rising and being molded and sculpted - I felt as though I was on a boogie-board trying to keep my balance just thinking about it, and the Lyle Lovett song, Natural Forces came to mind.

I rode across the great high plain
Under the scorchin' sun and thru the drivin' rain
An' when I set my sights on the mountains high
I bid my former life goodbye.

An' so thank you ma'am, I must decline
For it's on my steed I will rely
An' I've learned to need the open sky
I'm subject to the natural forces
Home is where my horse is.

Now I'm up in the aerie with a great cup of coffee from a cafe downtown. We've been out of the "good stuff" the last few days, just really wretched supermarket stuff, and I simply don't want coffee if it's not going to taste delicious. (I believe that's what got my day yesterday off to a bad start.) I am in such a good mood now (and nothing hurts!) that I can see myself making cole slaw today after all. Let me get right down to it. Later, darling.

Dearest love, up in the aerie, reading Dominique Browning's Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas & Found Happiness. I'm doing her one better at the moment - I'm in the nude. (I do keep a robe at the ready in case Mormons should stop by.) Oppressively humid today, and I'm having one of those "everything hurts" days. Gave in and took an ibuprofen. The sun is breaking through the clouds now, instantly lifting my spirits.

Browning and I are kindred spirits. Or perhaps we're a type, of the sort I rarely meet in life, more frequently in the pages of a novel, memoir, or blog. Educated, literate, sensitive, passionate, romantic, poetic. In her memoir, she's even enmeshed in a doomed love affair that drives her mad, against which she beats and yearns for years, moth to a flame. There's no use talking reason at it. Something gets unlocked. I get it.

I wonder if I knew someone like her, had a friend like her, we'd like each other. Or are we so similar and strong and individualistic that we'd be wary of each other, maybe even slightly repelled? I used to have girlfriends, most of my life, maybe will again. Right now, though, it's not what I want. It feels almost subversive to admit that. But I just don't. In your way I have found you more constant than most.

Where are you? Such a desert here today, nothing but Altamonte Springs, Florida, and Hastings on Hudson, New York, in passing.

Notes from a little while ago (expanded and embellished now). Dearest, I have the car again this afternoon so am back at the picnic table. On my walk down the garden path I found myself wondering, not for the first time, about the mystery of your page hits. I can't figure them out so of course my imagination goes haywire. I was working on my post yesterday when you flickered on my site. I posted soon after, and you haven't tried again, not since yesterday early afternoon your time. Isn't there 24-hour satellite connection there? Maybe there isn't, though that doesn't seem likely in this era. I rule out that you share your iphone and so are simply not in possession of it at all times. So then I think, maybe you're only free to hit on my blog when someone isn't looking, because the person will be angry or hurt to know what you're reading. (That doesn't make much sense - you could be reading all sorts of things, news articles for that matter. Will they see you reading it? Isn't the print awfully small?) I think about this person, settle on her gender. I really hate when my mind goes there but it does. All yesterday you never tried again. (And sometimes you'll miss a day altogether.) I don't mind - it's fine - I don't mean to sound needy, that's not what I mean. It just makes me wonder about your evenings, whole entire days and nights on that beach. They are so full & busy, there is that much to do, so much to absorb your attention, that you don't try again? Perhaps so, in a sense that hits me hard. Or, things I'm sure really are very busy and physically taxing - so perhaps you're so exhausted from the day that you've simply crashed - you're really asleep? No, that doesn't explain the long lengths of time. Perhaps there are frenetic excursions Off the Island? In any event - I can't figure it out, and so my mind goes over and over it. I hope you'll let me know the explanation someday.

More bird song and if I saw monkeys swinging from the trees in this verdant grove on this tropical day I wouldn't feel surprised. Kisses.

Notes from this afternoon...
Dearest love, I am sitting at a picnic table in a grove of honey locusts at the conservation area. A train sounds in the distance and around me birds twitter invisibly in the trees. I've brought a glass of ice water, readers, bug spray if I need it, and I'm wearing my pretty skirt outfit. It's very sultry out. A few minutes ago a brief shower pelted the car as I drove down Route 9 to get here. Now a faint breeze feels cool on my bare arms.

I came here for a walk this morning and was delighted to notice raspberries growing wild along the path. I took photos but they came out so dark it looks as though I was out wild-orchid hunting at night.

So still and peaceful here. I hear the tu tu tu of a cardinal. Now I hear voices, a father and daughter. They have the audacity to sit at my table. What a breach of decorum! Oh. They've just gotten up. (In fairness, they were here first when I arrived, so I went to the other, more secluded table. They left so I took their place. Maybe they feel they still have a claim, a trace haunting. Whatever - it's all very friendly and peaceable. I'm glad they sat down. Sweet.) The girl has a few wildflowers she's put in a soda cup. She smiles at me and I smile back. I wonder if she knows the names of the blooms. Queen Anne's Lace, I see, and wild aster.

I got a little spoiled blogging from Brooklyn. There was so much new input it wasn't hard to come up with posts. Now that I'm back, and perhaps particularly with this enervating weather, I'm like - what am I going to write? That I just feel like napping - another reason I've taken myself out with my notebook. That I bought a farmstand cabbage yesterday and am trying to inspire myself to make cole slaw. That I seem to have a new reader and wonder who it might be, if we're acquainted. That it makes me very happy when I see "United States" on the pageload activity. I kiss my index finger and touch the screen. I'm happy to see Hudson there now too - benevolent, I sense, unlike the last one.

The Catskills ridge reclines in a smokey, dimmed silhouette. A gnat circles about my face. My pen is running out of ink. Dinner will be grilled chicken. Honey locusts, grouped and tall here, are lovely trees. I think of fractals, feather-shaped individual leaves arrayed along twigs, branches displaying graceful fans against the pale sky. There are plenty of young specimens, but I have my eye on the handsome mature one right in front of me, the one with the most luxuriant bark, gray, thick, and ropey, deep intertwined furrows I want to run my hands up and down all over. Beautiful thick trunk. I want to reach my arms around, press, feel it hard against me, look up into it, close my eyes, worship and adore...

I felt unusually amorous earlier and exhausted at the same time. I was on my way to the library but went home instead and lay down and imagined you and did something about it and dozed off and then got back up and drove to the library. A dollar covered an overdue fine and the recent fiction issue of The New Yorker. I wonder where in Europe you'll be. I wonder how your summer is going. I think of you. I cup my chin in my hand and look at the mountains.

Let me see if I can get better shots of the berries. Loving you so, darling.

Dearest love, very hot here today, 91.5 reads a website. Up in the aerie in my altogether sipping from an icefilled glass. Radio's on low, brain's in a bit of a fog, perhaps from the heat. I've been at low ebb most of the day. Or perhaps just in a reflective mood. I didn't do very much today. Went for a walk this morning but it was already getting hot and I felt achey so I didn't press it. Went to farmstands and the supermarket. Listened to radio. Read more White Heat. Read that Roman Polanski is free - I'm glad. Watered garden. Ran washer. Hung laundry. Put away laundry. For lunch spooned wonderful middle eastern dishes from Sahadi's onto plates. Hummous, baba ghannoush, kalamata olives, lamb-stuffed grape leaves, curried couscous, finely minced parsley greened tabbouleh salad, fresh pita bread. Made a cucumber salad with plain yogurt and fresh dill to go with it. Half a local peach for dessert. Lay down for a bit with my book, tried to fall asleep and couldn't - yesterday's strong iced coffee can't still be the culprit, can it? Peter Gabriel's Power of the Heart came on - beautiful song. I listened to it among the bedsheets. He covers the song - who did it first? All around the world just to bring you back, it was the power of your heart - when I hear that line I think of foreign adoptions. But then he sings, Marry me today, so I don't know. If I could be anywhere but here right now (ruling out being with you, near where I read it's, yes, 39 and overcast), I think I would like to be at the Maine coast, on a rocky cliff overlooking a marine blue sea, ocean breezes cooling and energizing me. Lake Taghkanic park reminded me of Acadia N.P. in Maine - what a beautiful place that is. Have you ever been there? Typing that now I remember after you left for AK your parents invited me up to Maine for a weekend trip. Your mother was a great driver (I mean automobile, but I suppose in an expanded sense as well). That was quite a long drive to Bar Harbor from Stamford. We stopped at a restaurant in New Hampshire that evening and I had the first lobster of my life, and I was flustered and all thumbs about it, but it was delicious and great fun. Later that weekend we stopped by staid and lovely Oberlin College. No, not Oberlin - Bowdoin, of course. I think it was the first campus of its type - small New England college - that I'd ever seen outside of Seventeen collegiate fashion spreads. The light at the tiny cottage in Bar Harbor was clear and golden. It was right on the water. Beautiful time of year to be there, early fall. Warm sun, crisp air, cold at night for cheery wood fires. Many years later, one September, D and I rented a cottage for a week outside Acadia, and I thought of that weekend with your family all those years earlier, and wondered where that cottage was, right on the water, somewhere nearby. Even at that point, in 1976, you were a million miles away, at the start of everything that came after (did you know that then?, yes I think you did), and I was just starting the A.D., and now it's all these years later. Wrinkles in time. I don't really understand it. You're on a beach, I remember a beach, and I dream of a beach.

Hello darling. Sitting at my desk up in the aerie, freshly showered, wrapped in a bath towel. I became so re-enamored of swimming this week that I took myself out to Lake Taghkanic state park this afternoon and swam back and forth as far out in the lake as I could get, along a rope upon each of whose plastic buoys was alighted a single tiny iridescent blue dragonfly-like insect. Are they called bluebottles? Not sure. I wished I'd had my readers in the water so that I could examine one up close. I'm sure they're exquisite. Their coloring certainly is, and they seemed alert, as if surveying the leviathan swimming to and fro.

It was my first time there. It's a beautiful, classic vacation lake, slate and silver ripples surrounded by green wooded hills, blue skies today with huge clouds suspended in ornate billows like Vesuvian steam. I swam, then sat on my towel and read White Heat, by Brenda Wineapple, a well-written examination of the friendship between Emily Dickinson and her preceptor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. (Preceptor - I've been meaning to look up that word. It's a word that I've only encountered in connection with E.D. (Fascicles is another word like that, the term for the packets of poems she compiled and stitched together.) Preceptor, from Latin praecipere, to teach, (1) a teacher; an instructor; (2) an expert or a specialist, such as a physician, who gives practical experience and training to a student, especially of medicine or nursing; (3) the head of a preceptory. You were my Preceptor once, darling, and I still think of you that way, mostly because before I looked it up I thought the word might mean beloved and willing recipient.)

Then I lay on my towel and tried to nap. I'm exhausted today, mostly due to a tedious, unnecessary fight yesterday evening which accomplished nothing and whose lingering effect was to wear me out. But I couldn't sleep because I'd treated myself to an iced coffee from Strongtree's, a wonderful organic coffee roaster and café down by the train station. Their coffee is delicious and strong, so I lay awake in the shade of a mature pin oak, stretched out long in my bathing suit, staring up at an expanse of robin's-egg blue firmament. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again a thin gauze of clouds had appeared as if lowered from above. I sat up and read some more. In front of me a father admonished his young mischievous daughter, spider slim in her wet black suit and dancing on her feet, to stay put right in that spot ("don't move") and said "you're in charge" to a slightly older boy. The father left for the pavilion and the boy did his best to supervise his wayward sister who with a big grin on her face stood on the pavement and peed. A puddle gathered under her and she laughed and made rude noises and darted away and darted back and peed a bit more and taunted her brother. I observed this whole thing and the boy looked over at me with not embarrassment so much as weariness. What am I supposed to do, his look seemed to say. I have no idea, I telegraphed back, good luck. I returned to my book and when I looked up again the boy and his sister had vanished. I stood up and headed to the water, taking care to avoid the wet spot on the pavement. I swam a second ten lengths, and that's when I saw the bluebottles. Also the cloud cover had thickened and settled overhead in a massive bank like a huge sci-fi spaceship, benevolent though.

Then I gathered my things and got in the car and drove down 82 to a farmstand where I bought three cucumbers for $1.25. They were out of lettuce, and they had no tomatoes which I was craving, and Mignorelli's, a local produce shop on Warren Street, also didn't have any because they're not in season yet as I was informed by a girl behind the counter. We planted tomatoes here but tragically during my stay in Brooklyn, as I was debriefed on my return, one night some creature invaded our vegetable patch (true, we're lackadaisical about gating it) and ate not only numerous nascent tomatoes but the peppers too.

I'm terrified of most highway driving, but yesterday on the way back from Brooklyn I did the Columbia County portion of the Taconic, and today got back on to go to the park. I accidentally overshot the state park exit, which surprised me by being on the left as I drove south, so I wound up in Dutchess County before I could turn around and come back the seemingly interminable miles. Now Jerrice is on with a fado and I've shaken off the towel and I'm very glad that... that... that... oh I don't know, that you're my preceptor, my dearest, whatever the meaning of the word. Icicles to fascicles, darling. XOXOXO