#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

Wake early, Frank delivers my coffee. I work a little on my poems. I don’t feel great about either. But I also didn’t have much time to work on them today. I went out to walk and then swim, but it was rainy and cool. Perfect weather for doing brushwork. So I stayed out doing that until it was time to get in the car to drive to Connecticut to see my aunt. She’s in rehab after her hospital stay, and I was so relieved to see her looking much better. She is the most resilient, cheerful person in the world. She appreciated every treat I brought her. I sure wish I lived closer. It was a hard drive in the driving rain, both ways.But I very much enjoyed listening to a wonderful novel, “Independent People,” by Nobel Prize winning Icelandic writer, Halldór Laxness. It will be a good, long, long listen. I have never heard of him. My friend’s daughter recommended the book and I got it free on Audible. Home just in time to play pickle with family. Then takeout and family dinner. Wave is back. And my Ukrainian friend, Lilia, is just back from her Kripalu retreat. I liked the cool rainy weather today, especially when I was working in the pine grove. I am hoping I can make progress on the poems tomorrow.

“Shortly afterwards it started raining, very innocently at first, but the sky was packed tight with cloud and gradually the drops grew bigger and heavier, until it was autumn’s dismal rain that was falling—rain that seemed to fill the entire world with its leaden beat, rain suggestive in its dreariness of everlasting waterfalls between the planets, rain that thatched the heavens with drabness and brooded oppressively over the whole countryside, like a disease, strong in the power of its flat, unvarying monotony, its smothering heaviness, its cold, unrelenting cruelty. Smoothly, smoothly it fell, over the whole shire, over the fallen marsh grass, over the troubled lake, the iron-grey gravel flats, the sombre mountain above the croft, smudging out every prospect. And the heavy, hopeless, interminable beat wormed its way into every crevice in the house, lay like a pad of cotton wool over the ears, and embraced everything, both near and far, in its compass, like an unromantic story from life itself that has no rhythm and no crescendo, no climax, but which is nevertheless overwhelming in its scope, terrifying in its significance. And at the bottom of this unfathomed ocean of teeming rain sat the little house and its one neurotic woman.”
― Halldór Laxness, Independent People