#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

. . . Now it is the crickets
that say Ripe Ripe
slurred in the darkness, while the plums

dripping on the lawn outside
our window, burst
with a sound like thick syrup
muffled and slow

The air is still
warm, flesh moves over
flesh, there is no

hurry”

―Margaret Atwood, from Late August

It’s a bright day. My mood is light. The sky is light. I work from 6-8:00 a.m. on poems, both revisions for my morning workshop. Sigh. Then out into the bright morning. I wish I had more time. I walk to the pond and only have time for a short swim. The water is perfect. The swim is perfect and enough. I walk home at a very brisk pace and still I’m five minutes late to workshop. I have a client after workshop before I take a break. This is a day of organizing and packing. In the late afternoon I’m outside watering everything. A good drenching in the absence of rain. The hydrangea all around, front, back, side are thriving. I want their blooms to last as long as they can last. Bunnies hop in the back yard and the front yard. The bees are swarming all the wild mint everywhere overgrown in the gardens. Those bunnies have been nibbling my new hydrangea shrubs. But I’m letting it go for now. They nibbled a beautiful one in the front garden earlier and its proudly growing back. It won’t bloom again, but its branches are restored and sprouting growth. Oh, I guess I could write all day about my hydrangea! My irritability from yesterday has passed. Unless I listen to the news. What a dark cloud the news is. I’m letting that feeling stew to see where it leads me. My daughter Franci has asked me for ages to find my file with an original story I wrote and performed for my daughter Perri’s birthday when she was four. That’s decades ago. But she loves this story called the Granddaughter’s Red Pail. But I can’t find the file with all the birthday stories I wrote and performed for Perri. I can visualize the files and not where it’s now hidden. Because the fire in our bedroom dislocated all my files, so carefully stored, and I’ve lost track of this one, and I don’t have a copy on my computer, either. So I am rewriting the story from memory, determined to get it to Franci who wants it so much. I found myself getting immersed in the rewrite this afternoon, piecing it together from memory and letting some new elements arise. It’s a little daunting, I told her. She remembers the story with such a magical feeling. And will I be able to reproduce that? And what will she do with the story once I put it in her hands? I can’t wait to find out.