Hello darling. Up in the aerie. Beautiful day today, sunny, clear, not too hot. I have pans of halved plum tomatoes with garlic and olive oil roasting in the oven, fragrance rising up the stairs. Spent a little while on the porch today, reading Christopher Benfey's A Summer of Hummingbirds, which has prompted my recent thoughts of hummingbirds past and present. I'm enjoying the book very much - a perfect, delicious nonfiction read, perhaps especially refreshing on what - in their actuality - Henry James deemed the most beautiful words in the English language - summer afternoon. Benfey traces the unusual intersections and crossed paths of a host of more- and lesser-known luminaries and literati, including Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Ward Beecher, Mark Twain, among others. (Tom Stoppard might like this book and find inspiration for one of his conjectural plays.) I like the charmingly meandering paths Benfey takes - and I'm happy to follow. I laughed when he came right out and tartly observes -- as in an intimate debriefing, guests gone, after a dinner party at one's home, one might adduce -- "Twain was shrewd enough not to waste good liquor on a prig like Higginson." Soon the subject turns to Harriet Beecher Stowe, followed by the then-Emperor of Brazil's visit the United States. And when I looked up smiling from the book and gazed at the buddleia, no hummingbirds at that moment - but it was festooned with butterflies, and against the blue sky a monarch flitted and danced through the air - rather like Benfey's writing. So: a nice melding of sight & sense.

I just finished a section where, curiously, it turns out that Emily Dickinson had very close friendships with three men (Higginson, Rev. Charles Wadsworth, and Samuel Bowles) who, independently and in turn, were disdainful if not downright sabotaging of Mark Twain. As much of a fan of E.D. as I am - it does make me question her taste in men! Ah well, perhaps they had other attributes - cactus-splitting beards, of sorts.

***

I tend my flowers for thee--
Bright Absentee!
My Fuschzia's Coral Seams
Rip--while the Sower--dreams--

Geraniums--tint--and spot--
Low Daisies--dot--
My Cactus--splits her Beard
To show her throat--

***
All sorts of wildlife around, not just hummingbirds. The crazy spider still hangs in wait, in the very same spot for weeks now. The neighbor's russet chickens come over and root around the porch. They're a bit of an invading army, wending their way through the garden, scouring for bugs, clucking under their breath, coming up the porch steps - I'll have to watch that they don't march through the cat door into the house one day! They're as big as cats and our four cats, lounging on the porch or basking on the driveway, leave them be.

***
Kisses darling. Unsigned yet signed, with love.

Good morning darling. Sorry I was so scarce yesterday, I meant to write but in the end was overtired. I suppose I needed to recharge a bit anyway. It's early morning here, not even 7. The sun is just coming up, lighting the foliage gold and green. Oh good - first sun in days.

I spent the better part of the morning yesterday, and some of the afternoon, keeping as still as possible on the porch by the enormous buddleia, lying (or rather standing) in wait for hummingbirds, hoping to capture an image of one with my camera. The day before, I happened to pause in the solarium and a fleeting movement outside the window caught my eye - even from a distance I recognized the tiny, unmistakable profile - hovering body, wings and beak. It is the time of year for them here - or at least that was my experience in Brooklyn.

***
What I started writing a few days ago...

I keep wanting to write about hummingbirds but my little experience with them seems thinly feathered. Just that when D & I lived in Carroll Gardens, we had a beautiful black iron terrace, easily accessed through a French door, that served as a much-cherished summer outdoor room on which we had a table and chairs, and lots of planters and hanging baskets and pots. For many (some 15) summers that we lived there, I grew all sorts of wonderful flowering plants, including a particular form of delicate salvia named "Lady in Red" (first obtained by mail-order via the exquisite and pricey White Flower Farm, scored other years at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden annual May plant sale).

For several years in early September, I would be sitting quietly at the table and it would be as if the atmosphere changed with the visitation of a tiny, emerald-colored (as I recall) ruby-throated hummingbird, attracted to the clear scarlet tubed salvia blossoms, as well as to a buddleia. I was thrilled.

One year I made a decision to pursue a masters at the NYU graduate school of public service, and had been accepted and granted a scholarship. Even as I was about to start classes I was undecided about which track to pursue, policy or planning. (How I envy your seemingly always knowing Where You Were Going - no, not envy - I'm happy for you, it just wasn't what I experienced or could figure out for myself.) I wanted to pursue a masters because I was feeling stuck in my legal assistant job at a city agency, and also because I felt like a failure without one - most of my girlfriends certainly had figured out masters degrees and even Ph.D's. So I didn't have the best motivation to pursue a masters and was unfocused as ever...

***
Hummingbirds are very quick and alert, and I didn't manage to get a picture yesterday - they flitted away in the split-second delay. But I caught many glimpses. First there was just one bird, then another, a pair, female perhaps, grey with the palest flush of shimmering green at the throat. Each paused in midair for a moment to check me out then, in communication with each other, zoomed away. They seemed annoyed by my presence and I felt that they wanted me to leave. But I stayed and observed. I saw one fly to the far side of the garden and perch on the dead branch of a small peach tree. Across the way I looked at it and it looked at me. Eventually it returned to the enticing buddleia, hovering briefly among the fragrant purple blooms along with the bees (I had stood still so long that I had become aware of the background sound of buzzing - as well as attuned to the particular hummingbird chirp), several different butterflies, and a tiny, furry, bird-like moth, the insect world's imitation of a hummingbird, a fascinating correspondence.

***

One day in the golden light of a late afternoon I was lounging on the terrace, mulling over the course offerings. I had already enrolled for the classes (e.g., microeconomics, statistics) that were required no matter which degree program I decided to pursue. As I sat among the lushly filled planters a hummingbird visited and lingered. I marveled (not for the first time) that it was possible to create a tiny bucolic haven even within the city, inviting - miraculously - even to a hummingbird, and that through concerted gestures such as planting flowers, trees, greening the hardscape, the city could be made much more liveable both for people and for nature. At that moment I definitively decided on urban planning. I looked at the schedule and realized that the first session of a required planning course was to start in about an hour. I could stay home and start dinner or --

I got moving and went out the door.

***

So I feel that I have a hummingbird to thank that a couple of years later I completed my M.U.P. My visionary ideas were a little out of the mainstream at the school. In my early days there I regaled the head of the program with my story of how a hummingbird in my garden had became a source of inspiration for me. She was a very, very dry, technical academician and as she fixed me with her uncomprehending, unsmiling eye I realized that she thought I was a fruitcake. I left her office feeling a little shaken by her stony reaction but thinking I was okay. I crossed Washington Square Park and for some reason that I've now forgotten I stopped by the office of another professor. I didn't know him at all, but knew that he was very popular and well-liked. As I stood in his doorway asking him whatever it was, I was just so immediately struck by his natural warmth and kindness that I burst into tears - it was just such a sharp, unexpected contrast from the other professor. I am not at all in the habit of doing that in my life - I was very embarrassed - and the professor was startled by my sudden emotion - but again, he was very kind as I collected myself.

Oh anyway. Hummingbirds.

***

Love you, darling. À bientôt.

I am having a really hard time today, feeling all Cinderella-ish. How did this happen? I am happy for you, truly. As I imagine it, it is like heaven, a cruise liner with many, many rooms - heaven on earth. So what am I doing in Chicago? I had my day, on business trips, once, for example, in a beautiful, secluded pool late at night in Hamilton, Bermuda. I could completely go for that again, even though Giovanni didn't speak English. (Okay, now I'm laughing through my tears - but my nose is super-stuffed right now.) Or, less lewdly, simply don lipstick and a slinky dress and heels and go out dancing. Is it over for me at 51? It feels that way to me.
E.D. got more than page hits from her Masters, whoever they were. They at least wrote her back now & then. She didn't spend Christmases alone. I should be happy that I'm alive, not imprisoned in a fashion then deceased like Mr. Judt (whose last Charlie Rose interview I listened to with rapt attention this afternoon). Not trapped for 18 days and counting like a Chilean coal miner - I cannot even imagine the horror of that, walls closing in around as in the Poe story and you're not even alone. But I am not a Prisoner of Chillon who loves her prison. I hate it. I'm the bird who's singing - no one's singing to me. I've been singing and singing and singing. Feed the bird.

Fantasy time: I would love to go to the ball. I've been working out regularly now for two years (thanks to the prompt - of you) and while my body is far from perfect I have quite a nice shape and if I didn't like rosé and sublime (or indifferent) cheese so much then I'm sure I'd have a perfectly flat middle too. My hair has grown long - I have put a stop to submitting to upstate hairdressers except for the occasional, closely supervised trim. (My first hack job up here - unwittingly, I got such a crew cut I was virtually desexed - I don't think it was an accident on the part of the hairdresser - she meant it.) It turns out that I have quite nice hair with a bit of natural wave, and it falls softly around my face. I have a pretty neckline and I do believe quite nice - well, you know. At the moment I do have a few little burn marks on my torso from a completely stupid cooking accident a few weeks ago (do not fry eggplant in the nude) but they're mostly healed. They'll take forever to fade (in my experience) but eventually will.

Anyway, so I'm 51 and attractive and have a nice figure though when I look in the mirror I see - yes, my face, but not a resemblance to Julie Christie, but rather to (to my mind) my maternal grandfather, who had very great imagination, intelligence, and wit, but not, so much, physical beauty. In the pre-blogging days after the War, he wrote a column in a London-based Polish newspaper under the pseudonym "Bonzo," worked in the BBC, and later, moving to Munich, was one of the founding members of R. Free Europe. I never met him, he died the year before I was born. But I've seen photos. He's thoughtful, a bit distant, bug-eyed, bemused - that's who I see when I look in the mirror.

Oh so anyway. I don't have epilepsy or mental illness (other than situational depression) or the pox. Well, maybe I do have the pox - that is, the bit of weeding I did the other day resulted in a mysterious outcropping of tiny welts on my left arm. Truly we are not in control of our own derma. I liked the scene in Eat Pray Love when the Julia Roberts character gets a wound on her leg from when Javier Bardem runs her over while she's bicycling. She goes to a Bali herbalist medicine woman who - to Julia Roberts' character's amazement - heals her wound. She goes out dancing that night, and partying, and meets up with an Aussie, a hung Giovanni, whom she rejects on a nighttime Bali beach in favor of (as it turns out) the Javier who knocked her down --

Okay - wow - how do I end this? Well - just consider this the freeform fashion of some --

Oh, are you asking me to dance? Well, sure. I love this song!

Another cool rainy day. Thought of you this afternoon as I placed a slice of brie (from France) between the halved and toasted end of a French baguette. I cupped the tiny sandwich in my palms and pressed. The steamy inner crumb melted the refrigerated cheese, releasing its elixir, and the hot crust warmed my hands - chilly enough inside the house that the sensation was very pleasurable. The simplest snack, yet so complex and satisfying: the gift of a good baguette - this one from Great Barrington, I believe, a cheese shop there, that I had pulled out of the freezer; the cheese from so, so far away, from cows that once stood (probably still do) in a pasture in the French countryside. D bought the cheese for me the other day. I had stopped by the supermarket and in pointless hope picked up a piece of brie that turned out - as usual, no surprise - to be as insipid and gummy as every other supermarket wedge I've ever gotten. Plus I had bought a variety that was larded with ill-advised herbs that made the cheese taste of, if anything, freezer burn. Later I expressed my frustration to D - "I have half a mind to return it to ShopRite" except that I'd already had about a quarter of it, bad as it was. (I was hungry - in terms of fortification on the fly, is bad brie to me what a stale donut is to you, my darling?) These days my Holy Grail of cheeses is a certain absolutely perfect runny camembert that I've gone out of my way for to score at the Grand Central Terminal market. Everything else falls short of it, including lately the Old Chatham sheep's milk camembert that is delicious - and yet I've lost my taste for it. It simply isn't Le Châtelain. Anyway, D went into town to work that afternoon and on his return presented me with a little crumpled brown bag - a piece of brie, from France, from a gourmet shop on Warren Street. Very sweet of him. It was far better than the ShopRite, but fell short of Le Châtelain. I think pasteurization - or lack thereof - must be the key. I love beautiful, strongly flavored unpasteurized cheeses. I don't mean to take away from D's thoughtful gesture. It just wasn't the Holy Grail - he understood that.

You know, I've been trying to write about hummingbirds, back myself sideways into them, and I just can't seem to. I would love to see one here one of these days - best yet, snap a photo with my wonderful new camera - but I haven't seen one this summer. I am, on some level, bursting with hummingbirds - and yet it's not happening.

Instead I wish to go back to cheese! Or as Quentin Tarantino (is that who I mean?) - no, John Travolta - would say, drawing out the word lewdly and lasciviously, fromage. Back when D & I lived in Carroll Gardens there was a wonderful little French-inspired deli, owned & operated by a charming and exuberant Frenchman, at the corner of Cobble Hill Park.

(The hundreds of times I've personally walked up and down Clinton Street - what do I think of now? That I've glimpsed the cheerful red-painted deli and pocket park on Law & Order or some other movie scenes that were filmed there. As with the matinée I saw yesterday, Eat Pray Love - what piqued my attention? I didn't stay for the credits but I am quite sure that one of the scenes was filmed at BookCourt, an independent book shop in Cobble Hill, a place I'd frequented countless times.  In years past I might have seen the movie at the Cobble Hill Cinema, but instead here I was some 100 or 120 miles north, in an indifferent strip mall triplex, viewing it - and yet could say under my breath - "Oh, BookCourt!" and feel smug as any Brooklyn insider, as if I'd been sitting in the Cobble Hill...)

Right - so back to fromage. The French deli owner had a marvelous selection of perfectly ripe cheeses, very unusual (to me) types - one, Morbier, with a grey vein of ash running through it that, as he explained to me, divided the morning milk from the afternoon, several varieties of medallion-sized encrusted goat cheeses - oh my - the selection exquisite - not encyclopedic - beautifully edited, well chosen.  And there was one that I just fell in love with - Pérac - runny, fragrant, flavorful, and unpasteurized (the cheese equivalent of bootleg at the time, a bit on the down-low given some wacky, trumped-up attack on unpasteurized cheeses going on at the time).

I adored this cheese and now and again over the course of several years treated myself to it, a little, hardly palm-sized round hovering around $8-10. Then 9/11 happened, except that on 9/10 I'd switched jobs and as of that date commuted from Brooklyn to Fordham Plaza in the Bronx (nightmare). The following summer I was still commuting to the Bronx, and the office acquired a summer intern from France, the charming, game and slightly clueless Anne-Lise. My office-friend Xio'a took her under her maternal wing, and the three of us became good friends. One day Anne-Lise and I got to talking about cheese, I mentioned Pérac and she about blanched and swooned and declared it her favorite. So the following day or the day after, I walked up leafy brownstoned Clinton Street to this beautiful little French deli and was delighted to order the cheese from the French proprietor. And - now I don't know why I did this, I bought crackers instead of a baguette - but you know, sometimes a Really Good Baguette is Hard to Find - so instead I bought a box of good crackers, probably those ubiquitous table-water ones.

I made a bit of a spread in the conference room on the 5th floor of the wretched Fordham Plaza office - not many people in the office, and f'em anyway, really the show was for the French intern Anne-Lise and co-conspirator Xio'a -- well, and whoever else was friendly to us. Anne-Lise loved the Pérac but sniffed - in France we would never have cheese with crackers - with bread only.

Ah, well. I tried. And so, my dearest darling, I warmed my hands with a really beautiful baguette today, and thought of you, and melted brie, and devoured it,

and the rain is pouring down, and at quarter-to-six it's so dark I need my desk lamp, and Penelope is asleep on a ruby-colored cushion by my feet

(and I'm thinking it wasn't a Peter Gabriel concert I had seen all those many years ago at Carnegie Hall - now I'm thinking it was Phil Collins)

darling, so much love and very many kisses

Bon soir, mon chérie. Probably already I have made a spelling, gender agreement, or accent mark error. (Mon + cherie - should that be cheri, since you're male? But that doesn't look right. Or is a dear always a female dear, no matter the Jean Doe). I was abysmal at French, despite all the middle-, high-school and even college years that I struggled with it. Generally things come very easily to me - or they don't. Geometry and French - not. And yet I love both. I especially love French culture, and consider myself perhaps French in spirit, more so than Anglophile anyway. That could well be the Polish in me.

I went to the movies this afternoon (Eat Pray Love, starring Julia Roberts) and laughed when the ever-charming Javier Bardem character explains how he gave up on proper names and varied endearments to refer to all his loved ones - lovers, children - simply as "darling."

Rainy all day and now it's pouring out, audible in the aerie, rain streaming down, wind blowing. I'm enjoying the inclement weather - what is oppressive months on end in the long winter makes for a delightful change in summer. But still there are shades of autumn, though I would not go so far as to say, with regard to the last sliver of a peach cake I made a few days ago, which I ate along with my morning cup of delicious Strongtrees coffee, that "each bite [was] a tiny farewell." Okay, Ms. Reichl, now I know you're baiting your Bourdain-crossed alter ego, I should get around to see what he did with that. Ping pong.

Ping pong. Played it a lot as a kid, table set up in the garage. There was a brief scene in the movie today where kids are batting a tiny ball across a green tabled field - India I think, not Italy or Bali. And the12534's into ping pong (or was that me, wishing one Saturday morning for a game to get started? No matter - both of us are for sure.) And - remarkably - the remarkable Mr. Charyn wrote a whole nonfiction book on the subject of Ping Pong. I really must check that out. Very much a confluence, more so for me, these days, than of hummingbirds...

[Went off on a riff about hummingbirds, which I've cut and pasted onto Word, and that I'll work on separately as a separate post.]

Darling - oh, I don't know what to say. It took a bit of piecing clues together to figure out where in Europe you "had" to be, and that was hours after the earlier part of the afternoon when I sat in the movie theatre vicariously (Julia Roberts' character's shadow self) exploring picturesque Roman streets and devouring exquisite pasta dishes, wishing all the while that I was there with you. There was a character in the movie, in the India part, who sort of looks like you, what you might look like now (or perhaps 10 years from now) - well, more like you than James Taylor - now that resemblance, which the doe-like Julia Roberts character exasperatedly says he looks like, I didn't see.

Sleep well, my dearest. I hope you're having a wonderful time - truly - OMG, you're in Paris! Revel in it, especially after what you've been through. But for now - midnight for you - hush, quiet, kisses, darkness, soft sheets, stillness, silence - sweet dreams, darling.

I have a new perspective on the house I live in which seems to me after this afternoon to be in better shape than I was giving it credit for, despite two cartoned bathtubs having sat in the so-called "dining room" for the last five years. Things could be worse, much worse. D scoped out a job this afternoon across the river, in an unfinished new house in the mountains (I went along for the ride). What a mess. From what I gather the house has been in construction for three years, and it's unliveable. Plus it's stuck in a very remote spot - I don't really understand how anyone would have thought it would be a good idea to build a house in this remote spot. I mean, people do, but it just doesn't seem to be happening with this one. By comparison, I felt as if D & I were geniuses buying this fixer-upper on the "right" side of the river. Sorry, the other side looks really scruffy to me, and what a very, very odd demographic mix - Orthodox Jews, toothless hillbillies, and weekending yuppies. I probably sound unkind, I don't mean to. I don't know the people at all, D's client. I just don't understand it.

Anyway, when I saw the poured concrete floor and no baseboards and no stairs (only a ladder) to the second floor on which will be sited the kitchen (who wants to lug groceries upstairs?) and no yard for young children to kick a ball around and bears in the woods and situated on a dead end road that's closed after November 30 and reopens - who knows? missed that part - Memorial Day? - and they like to ski? How are they going to access the house, by airlift? Plus it was cheap new construction - looked like it was made of Lego's. I wasn't that into the Lego's aesthetic even as a toddler.

Our house still has issues, for sure, but now I'm appreciating the hard, meticulous work D did, even if it's not completed. Like this house today - some contractor who cut and ran installed a tile floor but with less than (as we could judge) 1/16th of an inch spacing in which to grout. The tile wasn't laid properly at all. D's going to have to recommend to the homeowner, whom he senses to be perfectionist, that the floor be ripped up, started over, done right. There's no way to grout, I don't think - and even if D tries - no perfectionist will be happy.

I glanced around the downstairs, wasn't about to climb a ladder to look at the unfinished upstairs, took a stroll down the driveway, sat in the car, read a few more pages of Benfey, and went back into the house to read the exact quote that I read yesterday and amused me very much. Benfey starts his chapter on Henry Ward Beecher by tantalizingly alluding to the "biggest sex scandal in the history of American religion." Wow - that's saying a lot. Me - I know nothing. I try to follow the crumbs on the trail (don't make me Wiki H.W.B. - already had to google him to get an image - oh so that's what he looked like?) - the scandal occurred "a decade later" than 1862, the contents of Beecher's pockets - as ever for him - "the occasion of great trouble". So Benfey drops this bombshell - and then proceeds to talk about everything BUT the scandale - all fascinating stuff, but come on, you introduced that gun in Act 1 - I'm impatient for it now! So a few fascinating but beside-the-point pages ensue, about Beecher's sensibility and oratorical skills

In a typical sermon, Beecher would suddenly turn to the congregation and pose an unsettling question: "Have you ever, as a part of your obedience to Christ, taken time to sit down and think what birds and flowers mean?" To the surprised relief of many of his auditors and the chagrin of his rivals, he raised doubts about the existence of hell. An electric presence in the pulpit and the leading figure in the liberalization of the Congregational Church, Beecher conferred on his eager parishioners his own florid and luxurious tastes. Instead of the stark, dark pews of the western churches, Beecher filled his church with sunlight and music, palm fronds and cascading flowers.

and abolitionist feelings and use of gemstones to self-soothe and something about Abraham Lincoln and an impending civil war -- and then I arrive at the line that if the lovely Laura Linney were playing me - her eyes would pop to expressive effect.

I got out of the car, went into the hull of the house and yelled up the ladder to D so that I could read aloud to him the line that I had mentioned on the slalom course drive up the mountain pass.

His organ was said to be the largest in any American church.

Torture, torture, torture - everywhere.

Kisses, darling.

***
Over the river and through the woods...

Dearest, beautiful autumnal day, cool and sunny. I tossed laundry onto the clothes umbrella to dry. The buddleia's grown through it and I felt too lazy to haul the big blue Ikea bag of wet jeans down the porch steps to hang it properly. Besides it was fun to toss it to the winds! I am not looking to collect a prize for neatly hung laundry.

If this post already is loopy it's because I feel sleepy yet too wakeful to shut my eyes for a few minutes and reboot. And maybe I'm written out for the day, since this morning I ended up editing yesterday's post quite a bit.

Am still puzzling over the mysterious "United States" hits that started when they did, and ended when they did. I believe you - or are you constrained? Mad, mad mission.

Have been reading a few pages a day of the Benfey book, Secret Life of Hummingbirds - no, that's not the title, but the book's in the other room and I'm not getting up to fetch it. It's quite an unusual book, tracing trajectories and connections and coincidences and correspondences among a set of disparate (but not random) characters, linked in part by their fascination with hummingbirds (and all that that implies of a cosmic view). It's nonfiction and scholarly, but Benfey has a wonderfully imaginative, poetic take, drawing these connections. He elucidates them in fascinating little narratives as he moves - hummingbird-style - from one subject to the next. It's not yet another dull linear biography (I do find most biographies dull, I'm afraid, and tend to read them Borges-style, consulting the index and reading pages at random as my fancy takes me. I may, over the years, have actually read most of the 700-plus-page The Power Broker this way). Not only that, but it continually occurs to me as I read that if Benfey didn't follow the hummingbird leads and other correspondences as he traces them - this book, those connections - the lines between the dots - simply wouldn't exist. Who would know? Not even the actors in the book themselves. The connections had to be, on some level, discovered, invented, collected, coalesced. They had to be written. I don't mean to imply at all that the book is less than scholarly - I have complete faith that the book is meticulously researched - it's that I appreciate the innovative, expansive, and imaginative approach. More "truthful" than those dull biographies I try dutifully to slog through - as Charyn said (paraphrasing from notes I jotted down listening to a radio interview) - "biographies are voiceless, like strange mirrors - you can't glimpse that far - I wanted to go right down the rabbit hole."

Also as I read the Benfey little connections "ping" for me - I have a bit of a personal history involving hummingbirds, and just now I read about how Henry Ward Beecher used to be quite lulled and pacified by simply staring at the beautiful light and colors refracted from gemstones he kept in his pocket for their tonic effects. I instantly recalled how as a young girl I had a tiny emerald ring that had been given to me at birth, that on rare occasions I was allowed to wear. Some of those occasions were Sunday mornings, when my parents would kick us out of the house and send us to church up the hill. I don't remember clearly, but it wouldn't surprise me if I negotiated that in exchange for going to church I be allowed to wear the ring. So I'd sit in the church pews (while Father Frog-in-the-Throat rattled on) gazing at the gemstone, putting it up to my eye, enjoying the tiny gleaming green facets, seeing how they reflected the brilliant stained glass windows that lined either side of the small church, and the sparkling chandeliers (I believe) above. Between that, and the fascinating human interest of the point in the mass when parishioners would form a line to take Holy Communion - I loved that part, the people-watching, women in fusty coats with whole dead animals - foxes, weasels, I don't know what else, but dead animals with faces draped along a woman's shawl collar - it was fascinating and horrifying both.

The rare occasions my parents made an appearance at church they never took communion and I never understood why. Nor did I understand why people would take it. I was pretty happy to make my First Communion, mostly for the pretty white dress and probably a sweet cake, but a few years later I didn't make it through to Confirmation, having at that point (6th grade? 7th?) declared myself an agnostic, or Unitarian, or existentialist, or all of the above, and left the dark boring Church one beautiful afternoon such as today when the would-be confirmees were being tutored, shrugged it off to go out and greet a glorious, glorious day.

Signing off for now, darling. I hope all is well with you. Many, many hugs and very much love.