Green Waste
I was glad to read a brief defense of rubbish by the lately passed Peter Dickinson, whose own books I never read though J. remembers them. We’re now reading Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown to R. the second time through. If she has her mother’s proclivities there will (I hear) be a couple dozen more go-rounds.
Someone put a glowing white cross on the top of Albany Hill. It must be seasonal but I am freaked out by its appearance in the rain.
The bicycle is timed to the minute. The shower. Get your pants on, kid, and no, we don’t know where your other fleece is. Out of milk. Then situate yourself in the workplace, remain in that known condition until it’s time, again, to time a bicycle to the minute, and no, no one bought any milk in the meantime. This is what we call the loom of duty; you wove it yourself.
Sometimes the days are too weighty for R. to stay awake through dinner. This evening I got to bolt back out of doors at six, spent a couple hours writing at a coffeehouse, a couple more writing with a good Belgian-style something at Schmidt’s Pub; when was the last time I spent four consecutive hours on anything? It was fruitful, yes, the way it often used to be. Came home feeling briefly very happy in the rain, a little like the hellebore that I planted out front on a slight slope not wholly shaded in summer afternoons. It would throw up shoots, the shoots turned yellow and brown and fell off, I gave it up for dead months ago. Today I noticed that the last weeks of clouds and rain had not only revived it but, apparently, generated it a whole new body from nothing. The vegetable soul, φύσις, conserves its virtue. It’s been damned hard to sprout this year.
