**
Now, a minute or so later, he seems to have settled down to a low roar, and I am able to snag three more ideas: the deliciousness of hot black coffee on a coolish summer morning; a cardinal singing in the stagnant maples; the pleasure of having a stack of books to read.
I didn't finish the editing project yesterday, but that's because I was talking to Jeannie and Teresa for two hours about the poems of Patricia Smith, our favorite Virginia Woolf novels, the excitement of this year's teaching conference, and I would remember more if Chuck weren't trying to put his paws into my mouth (ick). Suffice it to say, it was exciting and synapse-triggering, as these conversations usually are, and it made me feel as if I'm not really as dumb as I've been feeling lately.
Today I have to return to the land of slog, but at least I'll get to go out to write tonight. And about that stack of books I mentioned: Teresa, Jeannie, and I are going to reread To the Lighthouse together. I've been talking to my friend Janet about Charlotte Bronte, and I've got a Whitman project underway, and I'm currently rereading Iris Murdoch's The Green Knight, and yesterday in a little free library around the corner I found Clarence Major's anthology Calling the Wind: Twentieth-Century African-American Short Stories. How I love books!
Now the coffee cup is empty and the cardinal is silent, but the books are piled up around me like birthday gifts, each a mystery eager to be opened . . . always a mystery, even when I think I know what's inside.
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