Today is my 22nd wedding anniversary. I will spend most of it alone as Tom has gone camping with Paul and James will be working, but that is fine. Wedding anniversaries are something we mostly forget in this family. Birthdays, on the other hand, are high holidays.

Next weekend James will turn 19. Oy.

Oy is a tremendously useful interjection. In fact Yiddish in general is a tremendously useful interjection.

This week I have been reading John Donne's poetry, Joe Bolton's poetry, a biography of Donne, several grammar manuals, Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark, A. S. Byatt's Still Life, Barbara Pym's Some Tame Gazelle, and probably a bunch of other things I can't remember now.

 

Last night's dinner was chicken sauteed with a boatload of chanterelles I found in our woods, followed by ice cream with freshly picked raspberries. Maine summertime food is a reason for being.

Here's a bit from The Song of the Lark:

One morning, as [Thea] was standing upright in the pool, splashing water between her shoulder-blades with a big sponge, something flashed through her mind that made her draw herself up and stand still until the water had quite dried upon her flushed skin. The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself,--life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?