Summer is here with nary a spring. It's only taken me the entire 13 years of my confinement to this area to grasp that, on the ModocPlateau, there is no spring. The snows and freezes sublime directly into punishing heat and lightblast, desiccating wind.

But no matter. Yesterday Husband helped me raise the grubby fiberglass awning over Sylvia's long south window, and now it's not unpleasant in here at midday, until time for me to leave anyway and tend to The House.

I sit with my volumes and papers heaped around and watch the line of dark-blue prayer-flags flap in the quickening air. I can't read the Sanskrit on them, so I am ignorant of what it is we pray for. From time to time a paperwasp settles on the cloth there for a moment as it passes through.

From time to time, too, a yellowjacket enters the trailer and bumbles deeply at me and exits again, so I won't forget who's in charge.

Got the ambient noises going on the speaker, catGreta stretching in deep sleep at my elbow.

Bright, warm, spring day. Outdoors, the green stuff is drying out after a week of rain and damp. So is my lawnmower - the first time I've ever let it sit out like that, in the weather. I didn't even fetch a tarp for it. I hope it forgives me. They sometimes do, in my experience. But forgive me quick - the lawns are knee-high in alfalfa and dandelions, thanks to all this moist.

My trough fishes are happy today, too, I'll bet, since they sink in stupor whenever the temperatures drop. When the sun shines, they can eat! and boy do they have appetites.

Neighbor kids have asked to spend the night on Friday and I said sure, in my great happiness, having hoped all my life for grandchildren who would stay with me as I stayed with my own grandmothers as a child. Now I hesitate, though - where will they sleep? Can I handle two at once (these particular two fight and argue incessantly)? Maybe on Friday I can track down foam pads at the second-hand stores and fix up the bunks here in Sylvia opposite my own bed. Otherwise they'll sleep on the floor in the house and I'll have to doze in the recliner or something. Then I'll be wretched in the morning, and I so wanted to fix them waffles and strawberries ... OK, don't get all Aspie about it. This will be fine, you wait and see.

***

Here's dogApple right this moment:

Had a head full of words and delayed setting them down just long enough to lose the thread. ... Well.

***

Eventful week, from my perspective, given that I usually stay shut up in Sylvia most of the day and night and shut up in the house the rest of the time. It rained and rained, which is unusual for these parts and most pleasant to experience from Sylvia's innards. Wonderful sound on the trailer roof, and with the barn heater going and the curtains open wide, catGreta to my right and dogApple at my foot, I was snug and happy indeed. Read copious amounts, taking notes from a heap of books-in-progress. Did almost no writing.

On Monday I drove the old Cougar down the mountain, a rapid turnaround trip for a cheapie ultrasound from a clinic there that serves uninsured people. I suffered not one whit from the journey, so my heart must be beating again behind these thyroid pills. The result of the imaging was - gall stones in plenty, due to my sluggish no-thyroid decades. Doc says let's remove your gall bladder forthwith; I say not so fast.

And fast I did, on Granny Smith apples and spring water, for three days (ugh). Then Friday night I flushed my system with olive oil and lemon juice and spent much of yesterday passing softened (from the malic acid in the apples) stones in great quantity, from sand and gravel to end-of-my-thumb size. Impressive. Felt much relieved, most pain and discomfort of past several years was gone, and I was down another two pounds.

So, yay.

I'll do this every month for another 2-3 months, though, and incorporate lots of raw apples into my menus - at least one Granny Smith every day.

I think all may be resolved.

***

I've been reading John Clellon Holmes's essays in his 1967 volume Nothing More to Declare. If, like Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac is considered anomalous and undeserving of critical respect and more closely looked at in biographical terms, then John Clellon Holmes was Kerouac's Ted Hughes.

In a way.

Having read Kerouac's notebooks, journals, and working drafts during a time in the late '40s when his friendship with Jack was particularly close, Holmes, perhaps not believing Kerouac would ever publish, and lacking themes of his own, wrote and published the novels Go and The Horn and, particularly, the essay "This Is the Beat Generation," using ideas and materials sseemingly culled directly from Kerouac's papers. When Holmes was the first to be published and celebrated it was a slap in the face to the trusting Kerouac, who fumed for a year or two before finally forgiving him.

But I find, at least in this autobiographical collection, which does not seem self-serving but rather generous and affectionate, that the great betrayer has been misunderstood. Here, he is Kerouac's interpreter, apologist, promoter. I find no trace of guilt, but neither do I see any defensiveness. Humility in plenty.

If anything, I think his preemptive work probably broke the ice, provoked the curiosity that got Kerouac read later on - perhaps even got him published in the first place. Holmes could no more parrot Kerouac than fly, given his constricted verbal imagination. Clearly he envies Kerouac's casual access to otherconsciousness, the ease with language his own coifed and tailored approach could never incorporate.

He was not Kerouac's Ted Hughes, in the end, but his John the Baptist. And who remembers him now? This volume of autobiographical essays has been out of print for decades, and the few available used are cheaply acquired.

I think he was an OK guy, in the end.