Pass the mic.


It is entirely true that one of my reasons for teaching is that I am a ham actor waiting to happen. Or maybe a rock star, similarly waiting to happen. These days, put a microphone in front of me, and I'm in love: with the stage, with the lights, with the audience. With the applause and even the cheering. Did I bring the house down? Yes, I kind of nearly did. And yes, I enjoyed it.

Never enough.


It's at the end of the day--when I'd be curling up near her if I were where she is--that I miss her most. She used to growl whenever we'd even touch her with our feet from under the covers (as in: dog on top of covers, feet under covers, feet nudging dog). I finally figured out that if I put a hand on her--as if to say, "That's not a disembodied appendage about to hit you"--I could move her around as necessary without eliciting a growl. Sometimes without even waking her up. She is such a dog. You can almost tell it just by looking at her eyebrows.

Ain't no sunshine.


How on earth do you leave behind a dog who can't hear you say that you hope she'll still be alive when you come home from your research year? Especially when she's spent part of the morning stretched out alongside your laptop, as though it were her body pillow. (Had I not tried to get a picture of her, she wouldn't have awakened. Only on rare occasions do I rue the 50mm lens--but this was one of them, and there was no way to change.)


(And here's after she busted me, and right before she left the room:)


Especially when you're returning to this weather


and this view out your kitchen door.


You just do, that's all, even though it takes you a good three hours longer to leave than you'd planned.

Thank goodness for excellent friends, an excellent dog, and plates full of excellent food.

Things with petals, things with blades.


After we saw Becoming Jane but before I fixed a sink sprayer and then had Noble Roman's pizza with my mother, I became briefly obsessed with this aluminum bloom in a parking lot. My mother, because she's wonderul that way, obliged by driving me around in said parking lot until I had the shots I wanted, neither of which I'm including here but one of which you may see tomorrow. For tonight, echoes.


This time tomorrow, deo volante, I will be back in my bed in Gambier, which (in a not-so-subtle Freudian slip) I have been calling Ithaca ever since I left town more than a week ago. It's getting to be that time again.

The day's mechanics.


"In case you want to know," my father said a few minutes after I stumbled downstairs at 10 a.m., "the mystery trip will commence at 11 a.m." I poured myself a cup of coffee, read the comics, and stumbled back upstairs for a little more Walden, then got ready with plenty of time to spare.

An hour later, we were on the outskirts of Indianapolis, where we ended up at a Chipotle (where neither of my parents had eaten but which my brother and I tend to adore) and then at a camera store I haven't visited since I was a teenager. I'm happy to say that I will be taking a monopod into my transatlantic life. After a few hours at one of the city's most chi-chi malls, we headed homeward with our various purchases--red bowls, Leatherman tools, a hip flask, silicone hotpads, my monopod--and my father and I got to work, fixing my driver's door rear view mirror.

My beloved Lexingtonians' street is very narrow, and they've also turned out to have a new batch of neighbors who seem to be fraternity guys (or similar). Sometime during the days I was visiting, someone--perhaps those new neighbors, perhaps some random wayward driver--hit my wing mirror and shattered its glass, something I didn't realize until I was leaving and checked said mirror to see whether the street was clear before pulling out. By the time I made it to Indiana on Wednesday, I'd realized that the damage wasn't confined to the shattered mirror but also involved the mirror's housing. Forutnately, I am the child of incredibly crafty parents.


Within an hour of our beginning the project, my father and I--but mostly my father--had disconnected and disassembled the mirror, epoxied and fiberglassed the damaged bits back together, covered the shattered glass with a substitute mirror surface that will at least get me home safely (and, to be honest, will probably be the car's driver's side door mirror until I am home again next summer), and reinstalled the whole thing. In the process, we even found a tiny, fragile mud daubers' nest hidden behind the mirror. My father worked some wonders with chunks of the butyl rubber he keeps in the garage for occasions just like this one. And now I have a functional mirror again. My financial contribution to the project was $9.52. My father's was the cost of the epoxy and the mini-bolt of fiberglass. Not too bad, I'd say.

For the rest of the evening, we kicked back for The Bourne Identity. I suspect that I've said nothing about my love of the Bourne series, a love which has only increased now that I can see how much the third film echoes tiny details from the first one. I want to have a film fest.

But for now I find that another day has ended. Sometimes I am surprised by the swiftness with which that happens.

Beautiful scents.


Alas, I have to keep tonight's writing far shorter than I'd like: I seem to have developed some kind of elbow injury (a combination, I think, of an almost inevitable typing-related repetitive stress injury and the aftermath of my enormous enthusiasm for holding the baby earlier this week). All day, I have tried to force myself to type with only my right hand, especially while I'm icing my left elbow. But I'm going to break my own rule for a few minutes.

The dog is restless tonight. Because temperatures finally plummeted here, we've opened the windows, and in has flooded an incredible spiced scent. Just as the dog gets settled down on my bed, another wave of this scent rolls in. She stands up on the bed and looks at the dark hole that is my bedroom window at night. She climbs down from the bed and wanders over to check for a clearer read on just what's perfuming the air. She's getting very few minutes of this position, in which I captured her last night:


She has now moved to the hallway, perhaps seeking respite from those dastardly tempting scents. When she returns, she will stand near the foot of the bed and eye it regretfully, as if remembering all those years when she could dash up the stairs, race into my room, and catapult herself onto the bed, all in a blur of black fur and frenzy. And I will gesture to her to climb up, and she will wait for me to get up and give her a two-armed hoist back into her quilt nest, where she will cross her front paws and I will stroke her bone-sleek back as she sighs back into sleep.

When my parents and I returned from our lovely Italian dinner (replete with a delicious Renato Ratti Nebbiolo-Ochetti), I spent some time in the backyard, photographing my mother's flowers. For a moment, the dog didn't know who I was, crawling around near our patio. She let out with barking I could hear all the way through the glass patio door--first because she thought I was an intruder, and then because she didn't know why I was outisde without her.

Now she is snoring away at my side, settled for now at least.

Sleep, sleep.


At about 2 a.m., my dog started to pant on my bedroom floor. She hit her fourteenth birthday sometime this week (though we don't know exactly when she was born, my mother reminded me this evening that we've always called it August 14), and she's just as deaf as before, and now measurably slower, too. When I arrived at my parents' house yesterday evening, the dog yelped at getting to see me again, then instantly started demanding that I scratch her dog lips (which I am no longer allowed to do because she has allergies and sores and things). After a few minutes, she wandered off to nap before her nightly dinnertime table-begging.

The temperature here is nothing as bad as, say, Tennessee, where my brother is--and where they're hoping for a cooling spell that will take them back to the low 90's during the day. But it's been steamy here, and somehow my old bedroom has never been able to get as cool as the rest of this mercifully air-conditioned house. Right about the time the dog started panting on my floor, then, I realized that I, too, was miserable. And so we decamped for the family room.

Arming myself with a flat sheet and my bed pillow and book, I took up residence on the couch. The dog paced for a short time before circling and dropping to the floor. We both kicked off to sleep, but we stayed restless all night. At some point, the dog labored her way up onto the couch and found herself a spot between my feet, but my shifting to try to accommodate her in some sustainable way caused her to clamber back down to the floor.

Though I spent the night at arm's length from sleep, I found myself weirdly unable to nap during the day--too restless, too distracted every time I closed my eyes. In this, I am not unlike the youngest woman of my acquaintance


whose mother granted permission for her child to be one of the only exceptions to my general rule of not putting my loved ones' pictures up in the Cabinet. (It's just too good and joyful to keep to myself.) All day, I thought about the wacky glee of this picture--and of the whole photo shoot that was its context. I believe that I am experiencing something like a baby hangover: even while I was sleeping on the couch last night, I found myself feeling like imitating her gestures. I miss being able to make scrumpshing sounds at her cheeks and putting my nose in her mouth and helping her rediscover (over and over again) the joys of sucking her fingers and experimenting with getting her whole hand into her mouth. I miss offering her her rattly caterpillar and seeing her huge eyes early in the morning. And to stop thinking about my trip to see her and her parents feels dangerously close to starting to think about what and how to pack for my transatlantic jaunt. And so I simply hover. (Though I did learn about M-Bags and refresh my memory of Royal Mail's international rates for packets of printed paper today, so at least the printed and bound part of the move is feeling less daunting.)

By midday I had decided that the gig was mostly up and that my best course of action would be to read Walden and other assorted books until I fell asleep. And if I didn't fall asleep in the afternoon, I'd try again at a relatively early time of night. And this is what I'm about to do, with the help of a comfortably snoozling (and apparently cool) dog.

And, of course, with one more look at that lovely small child's happiness. I hope you all get to make a face like that one every day, for one reason or another.

Perhaps--I can only hope that this is so--I managed through some fairy auntie trick to haul all sleep woes into my own person and take them with me out of Kentucky. It's so foreign to me to have trouble sleeping that I've been flummoxed by my halfhearted attempts to think up other reasons for my being this tired and this unable to doze. The heat broke today, and I have several more days before my next spell of driving, and my belly is full of the dinner I whipped up for my parents, so I'm hopeful that tonight will have me back to my normal oblivious slumber.

(But seriously: look at that outlandishly joyful little face. Try it out and see if you can keep from feeling just a little bit merrier.)

Curtain games.


Come, let me put you in your green stroller, and let's stroll around your house. While we go, I will sing you a song. Now we're rolling through the living room, I'll sing. Now we're rolling through the dining room. Do you have your caterpillar rattle with the funny nodules that crinkle or squeak? By the end of the night, you'll know how to put it on your wrist and wave it around. You'll spend our dinnertime pulling it up and up your arm, trying to get it closer to your mouth. You will find this experience of gripping something and pulling it novel, and intoxicating. We will watch you through the voile as your eyelids sink so low that we're not even sure you're still awake, and yet your hands will be busy tugging and tugging. You will pull the rattle onto your arm and then somehow pull it off--a thing you couldn't do a few hours ago--and you will be busy, or asleep, or both.

Did I mention that you will be behind the voile curtain by this time? How is it possible that your favorite toy might be the dining room curtains your parents picked out? I will roll the stroller up beside the windows and waft the curtain out so that it settles down over the stroller's side and makes you a little tent within the dining room. And then I will join you under there, and we will play games while your parents cook dinner in the kitchen. Whoo! I will say as I give the curtain a toss and let it fall back down again. Whoo! I will say again and again, making the curtain drift. After awhile, I will play another game. Now I'm inside your curtain tent, I will tell you, ducking in. Now I'm outside your curtain tent, I'll say after I duck out. Now I'm inside your curtain tent. Now I'm outside your curtain tent.

And you will look up with your blue eyes wide, and you will open your mouth in the loose pucker and then the gummy grin you make when delight bubbles in you. The curtains have you fixed and fastened just as surely as your inability to go anwhere does. You will wave your arms and curl and kick your legs until your purple burping cloth has crumpled under your foot. When we need a new game momentarily, I will play where's the baby? ... there she is! by covering your face and uncovering it, over and over, alternating up your face and down your face so that your hair is always correcting its direction.

When it's time for dinner, it will seem like almost the most natural of things to drape the curtain over your stroller and leave you to your own devices for a little while. When I peek in at you, I will disguise it as another game: now I'm inside your curtain tent. Whoo!

At the end of the night, I will realize that I smell like you.

Story time.


There was a time when I arrived in Lexington and promptly received an empty fortune cookie. Today was different: by the time we rolled up at a local shopping mall's Chinese restaurant, all three of us venturing women were ready to eat, and by the time the fortune cookies arrived, my beloved Lexingtonian and I were ready to share. We decided that either of these could suit either of us right now, and so I pulled out the camera (with which I'd been documenting her daughter all afternoon) and deployed some unnecessarily shallow focus to capture what we'd been told. (For the record, I'm the one taking the big journey; she's having the happy adventure.)

Now that the day is nearly over, I can reflect on yet another way to understand having been told that big journeys begin with single steps. At about 8:45 p.m., the baby to whom I was reading Fuzzy Bee and Friends yet again began to melt down, and while general fatigue was the general culprit, my attempts to engage with her overenergetically were a local catalyst, leaving me to reflect on how difficult it can be for me to be patient. I keep thinking that I'm seeing things through the baby's eyes, but in so doing, I keep forgetting that the baby's brain, like all brains, needs time to process vast tracts of new information. And for her, nearly all information is new information. And so it is that the baby and I spent much of the day in overstimulation mode, especially once we discovered a new game: Kiss the Squeaky Duck. This game is particulary sweet given that she does not yet know how to kiss things and thus makes a face like a tiny bird opening its beak when she wants to give a kiss as well as receiving one. The Squeaky Duck (and the Squeaky Cardinal) are both happy to oblige when she makes the face. As am I.

In the morning, to be sure, we spent some time just chilling on the floor, feet in the air and arms waving--all four feet and all four arms--and then kicking back in the Boppy, which the baby's father has dubbed the Baby Barcalounger. This kid reclines in style. So, it's not that I'm incapable of letting her rest. I just get excited enough at the sight of her curiosity and her giggly delight that I forget to let her rest often enough. And once her meltdown started this evening, my anxiety that I was doing a wrong thing with the baby started to creep upward, even though I was able to hop to it, changing her diaper and getting her into her SwaddleMe (and what an invention that thing is).

What calmed us all, though, was the beginning of the baby's night-feeding and its accompaniment, her nightly story time. This routine is one I have long admired in my beloved Brooklynite's family: the last step in their son's bedtime rituals is that all three of them (and me, too, when I'm in town) sit down and read two books--whatever he's obsessed with at the time (for awhile, Goodnight Moon; on my most recent visit, The Wheels on the Bus) and then another one that his parents want him to know. Almost anything that exposes anyone to books puts me in a place of deep comfort, which is why the baby's new cloth books have me so excited for her: she's getting to handle her own books even sooner than I'd hoped. But the idea of babies' associating bedtime with reading aloud and family togetherness just makes feel me deeply and restfully happy, as though at least something is going right somewhere.

When my beloved Lexingtonian's excellent husband sat down on the nursery's glider's ottoman and began to read Goodnight Moon, I started settling just as much as the nursing, quieting baby. When he switched to The Very Hungry Caterpillar--a book that he read to her while she was in utero, from week 20 onward, and that he reads many nights now--I was enchanted: it's a book I read once or twice, probably in my long-ago babysitting days, but haven't revisited in anything like the way I've returned to Pat the Bunny. It's a beautifully rendered book, from what I could see over my friend's husband's shoulder: the colors are lovely, and the book design is clever. Tonight, the baby wasn't in any position to see the images or the pages' arrangement. But I love the idea that these words she's been hearing for some 31 weeks now were an integral part of her settling sleepward tonight.

The speed of baby.


Life works differently for babies: more things are frustrations, to be sure, but more things are open to being fascinations, as well. This fact dawned on me this afternoon as I stood underneath a translucent curtain, looking out a window with the newest Lexingtonian, who was perched on my shoulder. In the early afternoon, going behind the curtains and coming back out was one of her favorite games. We would pull the curtain aside and slip behind it, letting it fall over our backs like a veil, and then I would narrate what we could see through the windows while she watched, wide-eyed and pucker-mouthed.

There's the sky, I told her. See how blue it is today? It almost looks as though it's cool outside, even though it's actually very hot. And see that house? It's made of yellow brick, and it has windows on the first floor and the second floor. My grandparents lived in a house close to its neighbor like this one...

I told her the story about my grandparents' neighbors' dog, whose barking activated their Clapper and turned their television and lights on and off, until they finally had to unplug the thing.

We turned our attention to the curtain itself. See the curtain? I asked her. She stared and cooed. It's translucent. That means that light can shine through it but we can't actually see clearly through it. See this stitching? Here's a vine. Here's a flower. Shall we go back outside?

We ducked back into the dining room. We tried out her cloth books, Fuzzy Bee and Friends and The Boo Book. I explained wordplay: It's funny that this book is called The Boo Book because it has a cow on the cover, and cows say Moo!

Later in the day, we lay on our backs on the floor and read the books again and again. She kicked her legs and waved her arms; her aim is not such, yet, that she can actually reach out for things with sureness or know what to do with them once she's got them. After a little bit, she began opening her mouth the way she does when we kiss her face. Do you want to kiss the blue beetle? I asked her. I buzzed him down and flicked his cobalt lamé wings on her cheeks, then buzzed him in to kiss her. She chortled. The fuzzy bugs kissed her again and again.

She now has the capacity to be utterly absorbed in watching one thing--a patch of sky, the movement of a mouth, the top of a window drape--for an extended time. I imagine that she is watching it, figuring out its being. I imagine remembering her fascination later, turning the wideness of her eyes into a guiding image for fuller sight.

On our evening walk, watching her crane her neck to look at the dusking sky and the starlings skeetering across it, I started telling her the story of how we came to have European starlings in this country: a man decided that all the birds of Shakespeare should live in Central Park, and so he brought with him a small flock, only 100 birds or so, and let them go, and now there are hundreds of millions all over the country, coursing over streets like ours. She watched and watched--first the trees and hedges, then me and my telling mouth, then the sky and its birds--her eyes wide the while.

Hushabye, don't you cry.


There's a polyrhythm to walking a baby: steps forward in one time, vertical bouncing in another. After I put the baby down or give her back to one of her parents, I find myself still tending toward bouncing during each step. Today: cloth books from the bookstore. Raspberries on the forehead and cheeks. Lots of mutual fascination. Games of peekaboo. The exploration of windowcurtains and what lies beyond them. Namings: this is a flower; this is a vine. There is a house made of brick. There is a blue sky. There is a cat; do you see her? Shall we go to visit the baby in the mirror?

And now we will all be sleeping.

Get help.


I have this pack of cards that I bought years ago called The Observation Deck. It's billed as "a toolkit for writers"; I think that I might have bought it not very long after it was released. Over the years, I've shuffled through some of the cards, and their accompanying booklet, from time to time, and I was very happy to rediscover it during the excavation that was my move in June. Sometime in July, after the dust had settled and things were more or less where they would be for the summer, I decided to try a little bibliomancy with the cards. I closed my eyes and drew one at random. It read, "Get help."

The idea behind the card is a big one in almost any self-help or creativity guide. Don't try to go it alone. Know your allies. Turn to them when you need them. Total independence and self-reliance can be pretty overrated. Don't suffer alone.

But it's also a good one to keep in mind for oneself--to remember, in other words, that one can be one's own best helper when there's no one else around--as I was reminded this evening.

I've traveled once again to Lexington to visit the Newest Lexingtonian and her excellent parents. Or to visit my beloved Lexingtonian and her husband and daughter. Depending on your perspective. And to be honest, I've also traveled to get away from the village--something that I never fully realize is one of my motives until I'm away and find myself spontaneously lengthening my trips. For example: I had originally planned to head home by Wednesday or Thursday. Within an hour of having left my apartment, I was revising that estimated time of return to next weekend or even beyond.

But first, I had to get where I was going. And today, that didn't seem like such a possible prospect. Usually it takes an hour to get to Columbus. Today, because of various traffic snarls and unexpected events (a festival in the next town over, a problem that necessitated the local power company's presence in one lane of the two-lane state highway a few towns further along--for 45 minutes), it took me nearly two hours. By the time I was a quarter of the way to Lexington, I was already frayed.

And for once, rather than push onward relentlessly, I decided to take a break. I drove to the bizarre Town Centre mall and called my beloved Lexingtonian and pushed my ETA back a bit, then rambled a little: trying on dresses, weighing wine glasses in my palms, browsing for books. I came away with what felt like a talismanic new copy of Walden and a three-pack of composition books from Pottery Barn, of all places. And a huge cup of coffee. And I felt better. And the traffic had thinned out. And I sped all the way here without incident.


Unless you count the gorgeous sunset.


And the lights in Cincinnati.


And the fireworks in Florence. Roadside fireworks: the best show I've seen all summer. There's more to say about them, but now I am tired, and in not very many hours, a baby will be awake and ready to play on a floor.

Thirsting.


Our palette has hazed and browned out in a pretty hard-core way this week. I look at the weather reports and predictions for Cambridge: it's 53˚ F there now, going to the low 70s later. I look away. What I want is a lake so cold I'm afraid to go in beyond my knees. When I lived in Ithaca, I only swam in Cayuga Lake twice: once when the thermometer read 105˚ and once when I was sort of trying to impress someone. The rest of the time, we'd get in up to our knees and chicken out. The water was that cold. We'd just stand there, knee-deep in cold clarity, skipping flat stones until our arms were sore--or until we knew we'd thrown so many that our arms would be sore the next morning.

This weather makes me think about putting my sandals on and finding water, almost any water, to climb into. The bathtub might even do the trick, and I wouldn't need my sandals there.

I don't do that kind of thing!


Today, I am sorely tempted to call this post "Landlords of My County," simply because the strangest experiences of my summer have been with local landlords. This afternoon, for instance, my flaming-sworded friend and I learned--in typical Gambier fashion, by talking to someone random on the street--that the college plans to house students in the faculty apartment complex to which we moved my possessions at the end of June and in which she'll live this year. Since we--and pretty much all the faculty and staff who live in these apartments--thought that our living-with-students days ended when we stopped being students, we're collectively less than thrilled by this development. Underwhelmed might be the word.

And then there's the studiolord. This summer, as I told you back in May, I've been sharing a studio in a neighboring town with my excellent photography instructor from last semester. Because it's oppressively hot and humid here, I decided this afternoon to decamp for the studio to do final (for this stage) proofreading on the article I finished drafting yesterday. When I arrived at the door into the building, though, I discovered a sign listing hours for a new financial management and debt counseling service. I unlocked the door and went up the long flight of stairs, at the top of which I found a sign announcing, "You've arrived!" and pointing me down the hall... to my studio, which now has a sign on its door marking it a financial counseling service.

Strangely, though, the landlord didn't bother to change the locks--which is good, since my studio partner and I still have possessions in there. I let myself in and found a fully furnished office: desks, chairs, fake plants, couches, rugs, telephones, a photocopier. It was like stepping into an episode of the Twilight Zone. All of our things had been consolidated into a corner of the space and hidden behind some craftily arranged cubicle partitions. For a few minutes, I thought that an entire revolving bookcase full of my books had disappeared, but I discovered it in a storage space, obscured by a full-size refrigerator that was also a new feature in the studio.

The whole experience is so bizarre as to be almost unbelievable. Fortunately it looks as though it's going to resolve correctly, in the financial sense.


As for my search for air-conditioning: it led me back to the officehouse, where I eventually found myself rewatching one of my favorite finds of the day (courtesy of the Superhero). I believe that that song might become one anthem for the year ahead. I believe that you should get get get to know know know know it better, baby. I know you want to dance.

But in between all the other things I did and saw today, there were the resurrection lilies, and they're what I actually want to write about, even if only briefly.


Resurrection lilies are funny: they come up as green leaves in the spring, then wither away to nothing (which, this year, probably just made them look like one more plant that was decimated by that freak cold spell that was, well, April). But in early August, they suddenly shoot back up with no warning and incredible rapidity, then bloom translucent pink. Somehow, though I generally dislike lilies, I have come to love this subset of them, probably because they're so strange and then so otherworldly when they do arrive. They bloom in huge clusters atop improbably thin stems. They are shell-pink and ghostly on their return to the air. I braved the heat to get them for you, because I have no recollection of how long they hang around once the first blooms start to wilt. And these are certainly wilting; it's been a brutalizing week, meteorologically speaking.

The current version of my article is in, which means that tomorrow is for Other Things, a development about which I am nearly beside myself.

Yet another in a row.


In this dream, I am back at my week-long photography workshop. We have specific assignments to complete for our group of female instructors. Shoot, develop, print, and mount a photo narrative by the end of the week. Storyboard it out one day, then freewrite a textual accompaniment the next. The prints are due by Wednesday afternoon, or else we fail the whole course. For some reason, I have registered to be graded in this course; for some reason, Wednesday morning arrives and I have done nothing. I find my instructors--all of them at once--and explain to them the reason for my being behind: somehow, I have just realized that for the first three days of the week, when I am supposed to have been shooting and developing, I have been teaching, three hours each day. All but one of the instructors are sympathetic. That one instructor lets their offered extension slide, but she makes it clear that she is not on board with my needing more time. I should have budgeted better, she tells me. I should have realized sooner.

I think that it's been a long time since I've had this many anxiety dreams all lined up in a row, coming in one after another like planes landing in the dark in Atlanta or Chicago or London. I understand why they're happening now: major changes are about to happen, and each day brings them home to me in different ways. Yesterday, it was my parents' calling to talk about flights for a Christmastime visit, which will be my mother's first trip to Europe and my father's first to England. I plot meet-ups for my scattered family: my brother can fly from one city, my parents from another, and yet they can all fly to London together. These details are exciting. Yet when my mother asks what I'm taking over, I go back to something like denial; even thinking about critical writing is a bit easier, right now, than returning to the process of packing and shifting.

And yet, look at this, it's also my critical writing that's (indirectly) bringing up the dreams, and not in the way I'd expect: I've finally finished drafting a piece that seems to have been in my head forever, and by this time tomorrow it will be (in what I hope will be a nearly acceptable state) with an editor, leaving me out from under it for a little while. But the more fully it has occupied my head, the less I have grabbed the camera and gone strolling anywhere; for now, anyway (and this is how I reassure myself), the more I am this kind of writer, the less I seem to be a practicing photographer.

It does not help that the temperature has, after one day of mercy (albeit rainy mercy), ascended to the 90s once again, and that the air is heavy with all the moisture we need--as rain, though--on the fields here.

And so, despite its having been a massively productive day, on which I wrote comfortably and confidently for nearly four hours and produced three times my usual word count, I seemed to be coming into the evening permeated with a sense of picturelessness. As her second Monday photography assignment, Superhero Andrea proposed taking a picture of something so close up that it's difficult to decipher, but when I looked at her picture, my first thought was that I had nothing so interesting around me today and no way of propelling myself out into the heat to find something.


But I'm giving myself up as an object lesson today: interesting things are all around you. One of the trusty oak trees outside my kitchen window all but called me out to shoot its bark at close range. Sure, it's not that difficult to decipher what it is. But there it is: a day's image, something I might not have seen without the prompt. Sometimes an image one day is all one needs to know that tomorrow will yield up another one. And the balances come with patience. I'll get them. I've always gotten them in the past.