And here are one dozen beautiful eggs, resting in a steel basket on our dining room table.
And here is the dining room, which is also the library, in late-day light.
* * *
Today: A gale whipping into town from the west--rain, wind, maybe downed branches and flooding. So many people in Maine are still without electricity after last week's snowstorm. I fear this storm will be another mess.
But Monday must go on. Tom is upstairs putting on Carhartts, a flannel shirt, workboots. I am downstairs making coffee, stacking clean dishes on the shelves, feeding the cat. It's 5:30 a.m. and already the first raindrops are ticking on the windowpanes.
I have a small editing task to finish up this morning; otherwise, I'm on brief hiatus till the next manuscript arrives, later today or tomorrow. Paul will be in class during most of his waking hours, and I hope to salvage a pretense of solitude and write and read. Tonight my poetry group is zoom-meeting, and the boys will construct something or other for dinner while I gloomily listen to comments on my awkward poem draft. I wish I'd had something better to share. My only hope is that everyone else's drafts will be exciting and thus able to distract me from my own tangle.
But the house is tidy and warm. There are fresh line-dried towels in the bathroom. Tulips are budding in the garden. I think I found a source for flour. I am going to eat whole-wheat toast and Easter eggs for breakfast.
I'll also keep reading a Eudora Welty novel that is feeling more and more like a short story that just won't end (an intriguing craft problem that I wish a fiction writer would explain to me). I am trying not to perseverate on the depravity that is driving a pickaxe through our collective heart. I am trying to imagine what it was like to be William Blake:
The Blossom
William Blake
Merry Merry Sparrow
Under leaves so green
A happy Blossom
Sees you swift as arrow
Seek your cradle narrow
Near my Bosom.
Pretty Pretty Robin
Under leaves so green
A happy Blossom
Hears you sobbing sobbing
Pretty Pretty Robin
Near my Bosom.
3 comments:
I love your dining room/library--it reminds me of the images from Dickens and others, of what a private dining club would look like. I like to think one can be cozy, amid all the craziness. In the English novel, the image is redolent with privilege-- which I'd like to set aside for the moment, because I would like to have that sense of centeredness. You are right about the pick-axe. I agonize about getting groceries (fear), but then I remember, entirely guilty of another sort of privilege, at least I can get groceries.
Ah, humanity.
Robins sobbing indeed.
Thought: Those Dickensian dining clubs were exclusively male, whereas I am both partaker and housekeeper. That complicates matters.
True--perhaps this is a good re-invention. I like it, regardless. I recently moved my small antique table into the living room as well, where many of my/our books reside. Must be an instinctive thing?
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