August Thirteenth

It’s been a while since a sailing star flirted with me,

but tonight the Perseids outdid one another.

They’re not falling, they’re swinging on rigging and leaping from poop deck to gunwhale and flashing their cutlasses and swashing and buckling.

The Perseids are absolute showoffs, and every one of them wants to be Errol Flynn.

Some are sweet, some a quite edgy,

But some, yes, some are heroes.

I see you, rouguish knight. My pen is ready.

August 10

I am contemplating ink.

In some circumstances, that might mean tattoo, and sometimes I will compliment someone’s ‘ink’, but right now we’re on fountain pens.

and fountain pens have saved me from the bad thoughts, so I’m going to stay right there on ‘fountain pen ink’ for quite a while.

9th of August

Sometimes the grass grows up through the trash

and holds on to it.

That is so not a metaphor for Nature taking back the things and making them beautiful, it is a metaphor for letting trash clutter up the parts of my life that should be beautiful and loved but I put trash there.

It is not even a metaphor, it is literal… except when it’s a metaphor.

For serious, if you want to know how the inside of my head is doing, check on the care I am or am not giving to my environment.

This week, I’m throwing a lot of things away.

I am ripping up a certain amount of meadow grass to get those old things up out of where they do not belong.

It’s meadow grass – it will be fine.

It is tough as freaking nails and what dies will mulch what doesn’t and that patch of meadow will grow back without having to work on a foundation of trash.

August 4th

A religious sister’s habit is a habit, it turns out,

it is one word from one root,

twisting and beautiful down different paths through time,

a word on its own morning meander.

I have been trying to establish a morning and evening habit. It’s going pretty well. But before the active habit, I started putting on a habit, my grandmother’s bangles, and perhaps they are the anchor.

Last Day of July

Dark of the Moon!!

time to finish some things, yes.

Let me know if you notice me finishing with my crutch. I’ve been working out – sometimes very, very hard! – and I think the muscles are ready to do without it.

We will try again (and by “we”, I mean I) (and the dogs).

We will see if this is the moment to wrap it up and put it in the archives.

And at sunset is Lugnased!

Tell me, friend, if you will be dancing with me? Shall we husk corn and make dollies and dance and invite the heroes of legend to dance with us?

Yes.

Because by midnight, the moon will be new, and then it’s time to begin.

Begin.

Begin while dancing.

Begin.

Yes.

30th of July

The dogs and I are locked out

but this time I am not fighting it. I am sitting for a few minutes on the lawn

overlooking the meadow.

Wildflower and the sounds of birds and Grace’s fan

interrupt the endless lush green.

I wonder why I never made a copy of the house key to leave in my car – I know just where I’d put it for just such eventualities.

Fortunately, there are pen and paper and books – so I write

If I were the kids, I’d just reach up and use…

oh…

NO. They have taken it away with them.

I’m glad that they want the house key.

I am sad that there’s an “away.”

Children are not meant to be Peter Pans, but to go on the appointed journey (hat tip to JRRT).

But I don’t know what’s next for me

I can imagine, but I don’t yet know.

Let’s imagine.

July 29

A day that begins with opening the OED is a pretty darned good day.

Not only does compromise come from “promise together”, as it ought, but to get there one must follow a beautiful rabbit hole of obsolete words including the verb-and-noun compromit, which I now dare myself to use in a casual sentence this week.

I began grumpy and self-centered and growling at the notion of submission which is in the first definition of the first word I checked…

Saved by words.

Saved by the beauty of words.

From where I was into wonder and laughter.

Keep this lesson, me gal, which is not poor grammar, it’s my gal pronounced before the Great Vowel Shift,

Keep this lesson. Let the words save me.

Now to look up gal.