Delights

Inspired by Ross Gay's Book of Delights, which is delightful, here's a random sampling of mine today.

• I woke feeling much improved from yesterday, when I was knocked flat on my back by the previous day's shingles vaccine.*
• The blossoms in the vegetable garden, the way they seem deliberately intended to add color and cheer — comically huge, bright yellow zucchini blossoms and tiny paler tomato flowers and elegant white blooms on the snap peas.
• Gus, asleep with his back against the raised bed, guarding the garden. Guardian of the garden.

*If you're as old as I am or older, get your shingles vaccine.

Rabbit rabbit!

We'll remember this when we are old and ancient.

Juney

"One Day" by Robert Crowley

One day after another —
Perfect.
They all fit.




How is it mid-June? The days were always weirdly fast/slow, but the past three months have been like no other time in my life, how about yours? 

We've slowed our baking around here as things go all summery. Those days you can step outside barefoot with your morning coffee and the yard is full of birds and flowers — how lucky are we? We're focusing more on salads, lately with bushels of greens cut from Emily's huge garden. Isaac and I made a socially-distanced visit this weekend to deliver a custom mask and left with armfuls of daisies, perfect tiny eggs. It makes me cry, it's so sweet to see friends in real life. Our neighbor came to eat in our yard with us last week and brought rhubarb pie and little toasts with homemade ricotta, mushrooms, foraged ramps. She left us bags of fiddleheads that we roasted and tossed into another big salad. 

So the days are like that around the edges, plus the working and looking for more work and other things like the rug constantly needing to be vacuumed and sour-smelling towels and waiting for someone else to clean the bathroom, and that sort of thing. We may find a way to get Zoë here later in the summer! We are slowly making room for her, the house being somewhat full of four people's stuff. Goodwill is accepting donations and the dump is open, so I'm advocating for a little Marie Kondo, personally.

Okay, here we go, it's Wednesday they tell me.

Rabbit rabbit

Try to praise the mutilated world.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing

We were in the back yard the other day and heard a dog barking happily, clearly from a moving car — the sound was in motion. I said to Isaac, "I'm picturing a dog driving a car. Or, no — a dog in a motorcycle sidecar!" I kid you not, a half hour later I was weeding in the front yard and a motorcycle drove past with a dog in the sidecar.

I will tell you another fabulous thing that happened last week: I was at Whole Foods noticing all the "shoppers" with their carts full of upright paper bags and their phones held to their faces, when I spotted one who was wearing a kimono and full geisha makeup.

On a dog walk this week, I was walking by one of those fences that create a kind of zoetrope effect through the slats as you move past, where you can just peek at glimpses, and I saw two adults and a small child enthusiastically dancing by the light of a fire.

I feel so incredibly grateful to be with Isaac this spring, so lucky to be able to celebrate his 24th birthday with him, to bake him an apple pie and watch him open gifts and stay up too late watching him win at Settlers of Catan.

I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water

I'm a NEXTDOOR nnarcissist

I forgot my credit card at Trader Joe's the other day and burst into tears, but not until I was safely back in my car. My body clearly would've preferred to sob all day for no concrete reason, but I had to bribe it to stop so we could get some work done (see above, it is very CAPITALIST work I am doing).

The month after the month they say is cruel

I want to make a record of sorts, but will it be a record of a brief, strange period in history? Or a record of the moment when everything changed forever?

Is that too melodramatic?

Detail: when I queue up, approximating six feet from the person in front of me, I picture my brother Adam lying down in the space, head to toe, approximately six feet.*

Sweet was the walk.

*It's funny, I could also picture my dad or my brother David, both also approximately six feet long. But for whatever reason, it's always Adam lying there. :)