All my hopes for garden rain came to naught: we barely got a drop, which means I'll have to restart my tedious watering regimen. Oh well.

Peppers are ripening now, and a few cucumbers and tomatoes and okra; I could harvest baskets of kale and chard, mint and basil. Green beans are thick. A hedge of sunflowers and zinnias blooms along the sidewalk.

[Pause: I'm taking a quick before-work bike ride with Tom. Fresh breezes, quiet streets, new sun. Why don't we do this every day?]

[Okay, now I'm back, a little sweatier than I was when I left. Coffee is still hot.]

My little house and garden are a solace to me. Still, anxiety is thick, both personal and communal.  My son has a new kitten in Chicago. The thug's stormtroopers are lying in wait in Chicago. Every teacher I know is terrified, furious, sleepless. Every teacher I know is brave and resourceful. I could babble on and on amid such schizophrenic statements, but I won't.

Instead, I will encourage the mysterious insults of 1647 to cheer us up:

Women's clothing aroused . . . [stromg] feelings. One of the first attacks on female fashions in New England was written by . . . Nathaniel Ward, whose Simple Cobler of Aggawam insisted that Zion's daughters had already been disfigured by French fashion, which "trans-clouts them into gantbargeese, ill-shapen-shotten shell fish, Egyptian Hyrogliphicks, or at the best into French flurts of the pastery." 

[from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Northern New England Women, 1650-1750]

I admit that it is difficult to stomach yet another ad hominem attack on women, but surely TRANS-CLOUTS THEM INTO GANTBARGEESE is some recompense for your righteous bile.