Sylvia's wall thermometer reads 85F degrees. The top of my head is beginning to simmer a little, no sizzle yet. Roof vent has been popped, shad-side window cranked out, small floor fan pushing the air around. I overslept, now trying to catch up studying, still copying notes from Nicosia's Memory Babe Kerouac biography.

The poet Robert Duncan, reading this [cafeteria, Visions of Cody] scene in manuscript in 1954, was struck by Kerouac's extraordinary ability to sustain a 1500-word narrative in which the only exterior action, besides the passing of pedestrians, is the flashing of a neon light.

and from Visions of Cody itself,

"... my heart broke in the general despair and opened up inwards to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream."

***

I dreamed of a small personal jet a wealthy friend owned. I let him park it on the vacant lot near my house. I looked out one day soon thereafter to see it being stolen - towed off down a shady alleyway at the lot's far end. I ran to cach up with the thief but I was too late. The towing tractor had reach the vacant nighttime avenue the alley gave onto and joined the column of carnival acts moving out in drays and flatbeds to some faraway venue, where it would be exhibited. I told the policeman I called then that I'd had it nearby because my friend had promised to teach me to fly it, if only I could get past my fears. Secretly I knew, though, that I would not have needed lessons. Secretly I knew I would have flown it just fine, on instinct.

Great winds rocking the little Aladdin caravan all night long. I left the fiberglass awning up to fend for itself, unwilling to go fiddle with it in the dark and cold wind of aftermidnight. Caught in the gale, it filled the cabin with a groaning and creaking that wasn't unpleasant, and wasn't the reason I didn't sleep. That I can blame on a sugar binge yesterday midafternoon and then icecream dessert too late in the evening. Shameful. But blissful as any narcotic. (Careful, though, careful ... )

Slept late in the morning, then fed the crew, fetched in the mail (package - a browned and marked-up used paperback on "the lives & literature of the Beat generation"). Back in Sylvia's warm officebed I consumed my own oatmeal&blueberries and mug of coffee, swallowed my magic thyroid pill, and spread around me the day's books and notebooks. (Interruption: a quick online foray to order refills for my Energel pens ... )

Conventional modes of composition had forced the writer to ignore much of what he really thought. Lifting the censorship of the conscious self, Kerouac opened the door to the unconscious, by all accounts the mind's richest storehouse.

That's the storehouse I want to access. It's the core reason for all the isolations of my days. And now that I'm recovering finally from a decades-long decline and enfeeblement, now that I am (ironically) revitalized in this my 60th year, I may again participate in the common realities of the consensus world, take them in and set them down transformed. Time to allow some life in. Refill, refill.

To prove me wrong -or, better, to give me a little gift - the worldgods have bestowed upon us these eight or ten days a taste of spring, gray and drizzly, sometimes downpour, sometimes a fresh burst of sunbright chilled in breezes. I am loving this. I hope it goes on and on.

The Friday-night overnight so looked-forward-to was a miserable failure, though no fault of the children's. The point of it for me was the grand breakfast I'd planned for Saturday morning, much anticipated by hungryboyDeaven. His sister was ill and did not come along and so it was only he who dropped off so nicely before 10pm on the trailercot at the north end. I, old-ladyish, anxious stayed awake until 3 at least, ruminating. So the awakening at 6:45 was rude indeed, his sister's knocks at the trailerdoor: send him home now. Now. NOW. I was surly and ungracious about it, having had no warning about his family's planned sunrise departure to shop in the city a two-hour drive to the north. Rude, I thought, thoughtless and inconsiderate to permit him his first sleepover the night before such plans. And so after they left I burned through the pages scribbling a short story about a childish grumpy old woman's experiences with a red-headed neighbor child.

It virtually wrote itself.

But anyway we had a good dinner together.

***

Sprinkles now on the trailer tin. Two cats and a dog napping alongside me today as I work. catGreta hunted all the gray damp morning, patiently staking out entrances to ground-squirrel nests in the vacant lot next door. Now she's here for her afternoon lie-down.

Abundance of wonderful nightdreams this week - fullmoontime - my own, husband's, friendKathleen and her husband, and all very similar in their positivity, even in setting. My own had me waking up reluctantly, so vivid and thrilling it was, and I was filled with happiness all that day because of it, and every time now whenever I call it to mind.

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.

Breezy enough to sweep through the open Sylvia door and keep her innards to 80F degrees or so, and so bearable and actually quite pleasant to work in as the air passes coolly over the skin.

The occasional yellowjacket drifts in then out again. Never had a yellowjacket on the place until I put up the yellowjacket traps last week. The label said it worked for paper wasps too, the kind that sting the bejesus out of my hands and feet every summer as they nest everywhere, everywhere around and about the house. Instead, the trap pheromone simply attracted every big fat bumblewasp yellowjacket in a five-imile radius to a property they'd never noticed before. The traps are half-full of these hapless critters, while the spindlier wispwasps with the mighty stings go peacefully about their papernest building in the eaves and yardjunk unperturbed.

So. A flawed plan.

Studying all day today. Not really writing. Except for a burst of poetry a month back I haven't really had beautymind in a long time. I do not fear. I know it will return one day.

Meanwhile biographies are closely read and notes scribbled, passages transcribed. Nightdreams ruminated on.

Sitting in Sylvia sipping soft coffee, eating soft oats mapled and raisined. Door open a crack - yellowjackets drift in and out ominously, deep humbuzzes loud in the otherwise silence. Earlier I heard a rustle and glanced through the crack to see a large robin eying me from the weeds just outside, cocking his head around. We gazed at one another for a while and then he hopped off and I meandered back to my book.

I dreamed prodigiously all night long and remembered them, mostly. In the last but one (the one that got away) I lived in a women's shelter. They gave me a very nice room all to myself. I decked it out with all my belongings. I went out each day and engaged in the shelter's activities, sat down to meals with the other women. There was a matron called Grace who was firm but generally kind. One night I decided to sleep in a first-floor cell instead of my own room and when I went upstairs the next morning I found myself locked out, some young black man named Quentin living there. But my things! Where had they gone? I was in a panic, ran about the building demanding to know why I'd been evicted and where they'd taken my things. I was assured my stuff had been boxed up and taken to "The Depot" - a storage place in the town. But when I spoke to Quentin through the opened door I could see much of my stuff remained there. He assured me he would'nt take any of it. Later I forced my way through the door to see that my record collection was missing, decades worth of irreplaceable vinyl albums. I was in a rage. Downstairs, Grace informed me firmly but not-so-kindly that if I wanted them back so badly I could buy them at her second-hand shop "Grace's." Fury. The women around me seemed indifferent. Only the caretaker, a black man (played in the dream by the actor who played Lester Freamon in "The Wire") was sympathetic. He went out with me to try and find an agency that would assist me. In the courtyard of some county offices, though, he collapsed, and I covered him with my coat and put a newspaper under his head and continued alone. When I came out again he was standing up. "Do you have narcolepsy?" I asked. "No, that just happens sometimes," he said. I went on alone, trying not to need a shopping cart (although at one point I pulled one along, humiliated to look like a bag lady). I gathered up some bright yellowgold blankets and sleeping bags from the shelter, things that had been my own originally, and walked out with them. They were awkward to lug around town but I knew I'd need them against the cold of night. I didn't know where I'd be sleeping. At one point I was near the sea, and I stood and watched the waves crashing in for a time. It was a clean upscale coastal town, not unlike La Jolla, the first city I ever ran away to in "real" life, back when I was 14. (There I bought a foil "space blanket" from a sporting goods store for $12 and planned to sleep on the beach before I chickened out and took the bus back home to L.A.) Late in the day, in the dream, as I stood at an intersection hopeless and bedraggled and exiled, I looked up and saw a block or two away the great glass edifice of a public library, darkly packed with so many books they were visible pressed against the window-walls. And my heart opened with gladness and I knew that I was saved.

Terrific afternoon. Skip reads in the yard-chair next to mine. The unmown yard grasses nod and twitch their heavy seed heads in the little breezes, dandelions' spherepuffs white and soft irregular amongst them. Birds twitter and peep, occasional repeated soft dove coo-call.

dogApple lies on the ground between us, alert and panting, ears pricked to hear better the distant barks and yipes of her lonely yardbound dogfellows.

No sleep overnight. Caught a couple of hours 9-11 a.m. Pluto retrograde sits on my natal Sun yet again. Go, go, off with thee, damned planet. This is third or fourth minisleep day in a row. I fear the thyroid supplement is waking me up to old sufferings. So liquid melatonin etc stuff that used to work sometimes, not so much now.

It will pass. We'll find new strategies. I thought I shouldn't waste energy in struggling to sleep, but instead should simply shift my schedule 'round to write at night. But at night I have no words - no images, even. Only endless reruns of the day's events, pounding residual headmusic from evening TV.

Maybe I should just go to bed at 8 p.m. That way it will be a decent hour when the struggle finally ends.

But anyway the immediate world here is beautiful and calm today. Green and gentle and warm.

Thanks.

First wasp sting of the season yesterday - on my sandaled foot as I walked out to water the hollyhocks.

O cruel nature, red in tooth and claw.

I'd had two close calls already that morning - the beasts are everywhere, setting up shop under the eaves, even starting a nest in Sylvia trailer near where I work and sleep! So it was off to the hardware store to buy a pair of wasp traps. Hope to heaven they work.

***

Ongoing health questions use up all my attentions and the Project languishes at the almost-done phase. Meanwhile I've outlined a more straightforward piece on my experience of starting a used-book shop though Asperger's.

The yard - well, much of it - got its first mow yesterday evening. Dragged the trusty mower out from under its eight-month winter tarps, gassed it up, checked the oil, gave it a squirt of starter fluid, and we were off to the races on the very first pull. Things are looking pretty neat and trim.

And the goldfishes in the trough are fat and happy, our first water-lily leaves unfurling at the surface.

Spring comes late to the high desert, and then in a heartbeat it's summer.

All the more precious, then.

***

Look at the time! Off to mail Mother's Day cards. love

The keyboard never is at hand

Again

I'm stuck with the pen

Neighborkids screaming, unhappy at each other

and their mother

shouts, to no end

I pull the headphones on - "Alone in Kyoto" track by Air from the Lost in Translation soundtrack

Alone in Alturas ... drowsy and a little down - will I ever sleep well in Sylvia?

But yesterday woke to gloomsnow and cold, cold

Today is bright, brisk, bluesky and gustwind buffeting
Sylvia

and I within, and dogApple, catGreta

who sleep well, wherever they lie

11:54, "Armellodie" by Gonzales

***

Reading Murakami, What I Think About ... When he runs he listens via earbuds to Lovin' Spoonful, Carla Thomas, Otis Redding. I rush to download the music - soundtrack behind a novelist's mind. Once I read a Nicholson Baker novel wherein the showering protagonist contemplated the satisfying shape and heft of a bar of Basis soap. I have used Basis soap ever since.

***

Has the childrens' discontent reached critical mass? I lift the 'phone off one ear to listen. Angry shrieks. Headphones secure again: Mike Oldfield, "Theme from Tubular Bells."

I have finished reading another wry story in The Grim Smile of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett. Now I take up the wrecked secondhand hardcover volume of Memory Babe, floppy in its cracked binding, and slide back under blankets, lids drooping.

At this rate nothing will be done.

Stephane Grapelli, Chapeau Blues.

Rain all night through, whitenoise on trailer roof, turning to whitesilence midmorning, that peculiar hush that brings one to the window or door to (astonish) fat falling flakes cascading draperies snowgauze across streetscape & trees. Lovely lovely, & so cold here in Sylviatrailer. Should go to house but this is sweet, just catGreta & me under downcomforters & iPhone radio droning ambient tones.

I dreamed of Stiller and Meara (remember them?) in old-age home, settling into their little room together & the mean unheeding nurse. Stiller, Meara - the famously unsuited pair, she tall thin Irish, he short stout Jewish, famously funny. Now in my life - Stillinger, Mills - more unsuited husband and wife could not be imagined, she tall exhippie earthmother Asperger hermit, he short excokespoonwearing Armanisuit executive horseplayer worldtraveler. Brought together by circumstance in late life to age together. Not so funny sometimes, not famous at all, but happy couple mutual support, and pray - keep the mean nurses away, far away.

sweetness and sunshine defeat wintergrim at last

here on high cold desert plateau

wasps erupt from everywhere and set to, siting future nests here and there under the eaves

outdoors, 70 degrees F. - in the writingtrailer, oh! Sylvia, it is 95

unbearable

but we expected this

I am outdoors on cushioned patio chair, under umbrella tilted into descending sun

sliding devices about to follow the sliver of shade remaining

bit of breeze twisting the umbrella on its mast

today is a workday - weekends always best - but no sleep until 5am, and so slept until late, then stream of visitors and interruptions

now pets are fed, visitors gone, & my hands relax onto keyboard even knowing that very soon beloved Husband will emerge, his own work complete, at the agreed-upon hour

and I will welcome him

All right, then. Day four of Life in Sylvia (the backyard writingtrailer). Husband officially moved to upper floor, his bedroom there blacked out for maximum sleep, minimum stress. Landing equipped for his office, big TV & satellite receiver/DVR, his tower computer, desk, & monitor, half-bathroom there. Staircase that only worsened my edema trudging up day after day is perfectly suited to his small feet, to his miraculous thought processes going down them for inspiration, up again for recollection.

I got rid of ugly sofa and loveseat and brought in a newer plum-colored recliner to work from in the livingroom when I need to use my tower computer there. Still no laptop for this trailerwork, though, so I continue from bluetoothkeyboard onto documents created in smartphone office app. My eBay laptop scheme won't work after all: pros attach sniping software to these broken MacBook auctions, and it's impossible to outbid them. They refurbish them in bulk for later resale. So. I'll manifest something a different way.

And I sleep now in Sylvia until I can bring in a sofa bed or other similar for livingroom sleeping. And as I say this is my fourth day. Up early for coffee & oatmeal in here with little electric kettle. DogApple who sleeps here with me every night (catGreta does, too) would not go out in the rain early a.m. to relieve herself but snuggled deep into blankets while I went about my waking rituals.

Good news: all my health problems have been solved overnight with one simple answer that was in front of my face for a thousand years. My lower extremity edema, bellyswell, liverkidney stuff, high cholesterol (despite rawfood vegetarian diet), my insufficient cardiac output, exhaustion, virtual confinement to bed, confusion, hysterical search for answers for ... how many years?--new doctor even getting me ready for MRI expense and trip to faraway cardiologist--finally I delved again into the professional literature at MedScape on my own and voila: all the foregoing inevitably result from untreated-for-decades bottomed-out thyroid hormone.

Period.

Low (as in abysmal) thyroid causes all that. Not in the beginning, mind you, when it's just a nuisance. But ignore it for 40 years and watch what happens.

This is what happens. The extreme case. Sheesh.

So just like everyone else I know I begin daily doses of prescription thyroid supplement. If that can improve my cardiac output, everything else resolves. I don't know whether the edema already there will go away, but I certainly hope some of it does.

Mind too cloudy to write for weeks, now. Now we try to bring it back online. And never again fall into pit of chronic ill-health. Life is short. Getting shorter by the minute.

Slept facing the partopened window last night to get the cold real air, then awoke four a.m. as face was pelted softly in rhythmgusts of siftsnow through screen. Wondrous. Got up to shut the glass, looked out at bluish world snowblue deep in fine sideways windsnow. I was in love with the world in the dark.

And by noon all trace was gone, just damp ground & reminiscing wind.

Now late in the day I start work in Sylvia the Writingcabin, really Sylvia the Writingtrailer but more and more homelike to me. I got the camptoilet configured in the corner--no more trips to the house every half-hour--and made an excellent writingbed out of the dining area, lowering the tabletop and unfolding the cushions across it from bench to bench, covered in rugs and blankets with Turkish-carpet-covered cushions robbed from the housesofa. Color and comfort.

Next week Husband will maybe help me knock out the kitchenette and fridge/closet units to open up the guts of it. I'll assemble the clawfoot round oak table in the space thus opened and stack the square bookshelves up the sidewalls. I'm tempted to live here now, loath to leave it but I have family to tend to. Such a quiet little womb it is, Sylvia. She.

I missed my self-imposed deadline insomniac stupid but would not risk ruining the music of the third and final draft of the Thing I wrote by approaching it with anything less than a crystal-clear awareness. Now I seek time alone with the pages again. I can't work on such projects in here because I still have no laptop computer to edit on & so must stick with the venerable G4 in my upstairs bedoffice. I type right now on my iPhone, but the OfficePro app that opens my manuscript loses the formatting/linebreaks, and they are what this stage is most about, so I'm forced to keep to the house for that--which slows it all down, vulnerable as I am to creatures there. I'm monitoring eBay, though, and may figure out how to get a MacBook Pro--grab a dead one cheap (something that needs only a logic board) and have it refurbished for a few hundred dollars. I think it can be done.

good spring to you

Frustrating today just building up steam for my third and final draft of The Thing I'm Writing, to have it done before the 31st when it must go out in the papermail. Finished the first edit quickly on Saturday, so quickly it didn't raise a sweat, too easy, but enough to tell me it needed one more yank of the wrench on Sunday. I labored through only one chapter yesterday, then, and it wore me out, so I knew I was doing good work. Had to stop lest weariness lose the music for me. Now today I'm revved up and hankering to get back to it, BUT damn world real world must intrude, and here I go off to a brick building downtown for quarterly meeting where I am the area rep for in-home care providers. They always serve a lunch of diet soda which is poison and pizza which I can't touch due to gluten, so maybe this time I'll carry my own lunch and treat myself to an extra coffee (I've got myself down to one cup, with breakfast only, each day). Or not. I have to leave in 10 minutes and I'm still not dressed, having wasted my morning on breakfast and books.

22 March After days of noncreating, during which I gave up on writing altogether and began sending out resumes to solicit paid freelance editorial projects, I read a great deal and stayed mostly flat in bed between errands and housekeeping and serving meals, laundry, and so on. A second journey to the valley for my followup with the painfulacupuncturist became out of the question because the old car is too poorly maintained to go up and down the mountain anymore without worry, and likewise my old body, which will not sleep before such journeys and certainly not in the hardbed motels, and which breaks down from the strain of traveling around, canceling out any hoped-for benefit. I will buy the Chinese powder formulas, though, by mail, from painfulacupuncture person, as they seem to facilitate kidney function pretty well. And try to see the local nonpainful needleguy, who is less effective and doesn't do herbs.

Meanwhile I eat raw food for my first two meals each day and take enzymes and supplements, and I feel well, like I may come out of the woods long enough to earn some money from the page, maybe even enough in the end to move down off the dry high plateau to a valley where sunlight pounds a dusty soil and perfume wafts from the waspgall oak leaves.

wretched winter gloomdays without end
gray gray
sometimes snow

but

poetry.

And dreams.

***

I have a title for my project. The finished section in seven "chapters" will comprise Part 2 (possibly Part 3, if Part 1 grows too large to contain itself) of the larger work. They have titles now. Each Part will come out on its own--this Part 2 first--and when all has been said--and done--will come out together as a single volume, as well.

***

BrotherB's birthday was Saturday. He is 44. I made him a very nice gluten-free chocolate cake and we lit the candles and sang the song.

Neighborboy Deaven spent Sunday and Monday afternoons here. He will turn 8 in April. I hadn't seen him since Christmas, and I was astounded at the changes since just then--his growth is taking off, his voice has a far less screechy timbre, and he has more control over his excitements. His hair is shaggy and a deeper red. We made seedplanting pots out of halved cardboard toilet-paper rolls, and filled a nursery tray with them, and filled them with dirt. We were going to plant seeds yesterday but it was so cold and dim outside and I was hard at work editing my Thing, so he played quietly near my workbed with Legos until his sister came to fetch him home for supper. She is twelve now, and so very thin and mature (and her untended darkening blonde hair reaches now to her knees, and the ungainly braces on her teeth)--nothing like the chortling hollering desperate-for-attention little thing who invaded us three years ago. I praise Jesus and Baha'u'llah and Vishnu et al. that I may grandmother these two in my life.

Listen.

ooh wooooh airs piping past the window slid barely open just so. Gray weather is here, and damp, and chill. No notice of it until the little winds sing. Then memories of just such soft little breezeflutes and gray days from childhood flood the mind and bodysense, feelings from Iowa farm weathers just before storms, trees tossing and big white farmhouse humming and lilting in every little crack and draft.

And the strange remembered happinesses blossoming in the breast.

Ravens out there, too, just now. Near enough to hear their three-caw calls. Except it's not really a caw with ravens, is it? What English onomatopoeia best describes it? There's a slight ringing quality, a higher pitch. And a sort of excitement, an exclamation point built in. The tone of crow caws seems wearier and downwardturning.

Husband emerges from his downstairs lair. Good morning I love you I greet over the wall. Coffee water hisses now in its electric kettle. Crinkle of the stiff plastic bag around Husband's hand as he scoops the new grounds out.

Brief break in cloudcover brings in the skylight beam right on time, falls on my keyboardhands now, not my face anymore, as the arc moves north.

7Feb2012 fullmoon edition: gray day = chilly worktime in the writingshed. Bit drafty, no sunrays to cook the place up. Barnheater churns away.

The water froze again in my drinking cup here overnight.

I have conceived a form for the Thing I Wrote, so I suppose I should go inside and up to the officebed computer and make that happen. I want to print and submit it this week. And start on the next Thing.

Best get on with it, then.