. Spinning .

Finally spent some sweat outdoors this morning.  Filled seven planters with geranium-yums, dianthus, allysum, and the silly petunias.  Now to the garden, to pull out the two-year old carefully tended baby peach trees that have turned out to be chokecherries, I think.  The tiller is broken so hand-hoeing must be done, turn the soil and hide herb seeds and yellow squash and tomatoes and anything else that I want.  Maybe okra; there’s nothing like freshly picked young okra sauted in a bit of butter. 

And the trimming.  The no-man’s land between what is garden and officially lawn.  Spouse says it’s my territory, though I point out his lawn growing into my sweet williams.  Ah well, I have the patience and virtue of a saint, and he, well, does not.  Or so I say.

Spaghetti tonight, enough for six people though there are three.  Why can I no longer measure spaghetti into portions anywhere close anymore?  I wonder, remembering my single days, my younger days, when the last strand was the last I could put down.  Perfect.  No waste, no hunger.

Ah, it dawns on me.   Younger, voracious, I ate whatever amount I made.  Truthfully, in a salad bowl–no, not the individuals, the big mother serving bowl–smothered in white clam sauce with escargot and black olives and parmesan cheese.

I eat less now, but weigh 5 lbs. more.  I never vary anymore from 100 lbs.

Separate worlds this morning, just as winter snow remains outdoors.  Wake up in dark cool familiarity.  Take my coffee cup outside the kitchen door into another world.  Sitting on the back step, even breaths are different; heavy, close with humid air drawn in and out in shallow bits of the place outside my home.  Birds fly slowly, it would seem.  Blades of grass do not stir but plan to sleep, I think, throughout the heat of day.  It is quiet too; no leaf to rustle in a breeze.

I go back in to seek and find the fraud of comfort, the air conditioned noise.

Pounding headache all day yesterday.  Catholic in me lets me take one aspirin after many hours.  Finally at night an antihistimine–I knew that’s what I needed all along.  Rationale, I need to get some decent sleep, need to work come morning.

Heathen in me has me down the pill today an hour after waking up.  An hour of pain has paid my sins today; I’ll just have to try my damnedest to be holy.

Getting nervous.  The Writers Conference is just one week away, which means I need to have all the picture framing caught up and picked up next week, as well as get the outside work done because I will be pretty much gone each day and well into the night for all that next week after.  Then before you know it, it will be July.

Has time sped up on me, or was I asleep?

There seems to be no end in sight to the things that keep me from what I would rather be doing.  I am determined to get to the bottom of the pile of framing, and clean up the mess I call a frameshop, before I get to some of the other gottados so I can do the wannas.

At least I have been able to do a little reading and writing in between, considering these to be a "break" rather than giving them the full measure of importance and attention they deserve. 

It’s clear that I will most appreciate the day when I can sit for a few hours with a book, or writing a story undisturbed by guilt for having left something yet undone. 

A thin slice of moon in the silver blue evening sky.