Squirrel

 February 27, 2026

Happy most of the day, I asked myself “Why so sad now?” No particular reason. A rejection from Omaha, but I expected that. Maybe just the cesspit of contemporary times. 

Bought plants and gardening supplies without actually using them. They sit in the gathering darkness, waiting for morning. 

Sent A money to cover her shocking utility bill. She has four children. . . but their sense of responsibility is not my concern. 

Some time today a squirrel was run over in the street. I sat at the downstairs desk and watched while a cyclist came by with a miner’s light on his cap and a strange implement in his hands and eased the body over into my west garden. The light and implement made me think he was employed for just that service, or maybe had decided on it as a Lenten penance for himself. That it is my problem now is a little disturbing. Hope I remember to bury it first thing tomorrow. 

 February 26, 2026

Picked up euros from the bank for the Germany trip.

Coffee with A at High 5. The usual, comforting topics.  Frothed over Trump. Moaned about the demise of our university. 

Picked up my tax return. Very much more palatable than last year, $255 to the Federal Government rather than $18000. I was careful juggling capital gains this year.  The amusing thing is that I owe $1 to the state of North Carolina. Considering whether to play the scofflaw and ignore it or send in the check with a sarcastic memo. 

Have been in extraordinarily good voice for rehearsals this week. More 3rd rate church anthems pulled out of the archives. Discouraging.

 February 25, 2026

Two big dogs were loose on the street. That was an everyday sight in my childhood, but you don’t see it anymore. It was lovely to watch them sniffing and trotting about, taking in the morning. A few moments later a young man walked down the street with a big walking stick and a sleeping bag slung over his shoulder on another stick, just as you see pictures of homeless wanderers during the Depression. He took the shortcut down my drive so he appeared picturesquely in my security camera. This is one day after our hellhound President assured us that all is most well in his State of the Union.

Mahler’s 1st from the speakers downstairs. 

February 24, 2026

Sent a plush Husky to Julia A, hoping it’s the first bit of mail she receives. 

Bajazet on You Tube.

 

Oliver

 

February 23, 2026

Intensely bitter weather. My front wall had developed a gap above the floor, to freezing wind blows in and freezes the feet. What I can see from the study window is the violent lashing of the tops of trees. New York, Boston, and the Northeast lie under feet of snow.  My feeders are Times Square for the birds. 

Writing like mad, but a deadening sense of futility prevents me from sending anything out. Happy creating, glum selling. 

Sitting at my desk trying to write, shivering with cold. 

Thinking of my grandfather Oliver, sharp as a knife amid his uncertain son, his soft daughters. He rowed me in a boat out to the middle of a green lake. He asked why I wasn’t dragging my hand through the water, as children do. I told him I was afraid of being pulled in by the mermen and becoming one of them. He didn’t scoff. He just said that lake was too small for mermen. I remember a man taking me into the forest and teaching me the names of flowers. Either it was him, or it was a dream. In any case, I knew the names of flowers before I could read. Trillium. Mayapple. Anemone I didn’t know if he liked me, or anybody. He was not like us– or rather, we were not like him. When he was alive I didn’t know he had been born in England, in Somerset, among the coal mines. He worked the coal mines in Pennsylvania. His name was Oliver and his father’s name was Jabez and Jabez’s father was Oliver and that Oliver’s father was Jabez, a line broken forever in a new world, The last time I saw him I stood in the hospital parking lot in Pittsburgh and looked up into a high window where he was shaking hands with himself, as though he were shaking hands with me. 

Voting

 February 22, 2026

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s birthday.

Lonely fragments of snow fell from time to time during the day. You wonder what goes through the mind of a solitary snowflake. At last look out the windows, heading for the study where the one window shows only light, the snow gathered, beginning to squall and fill the sky in a great slant from the north.  

My poor fish drift exposed in the pond, a glaring, heron-attracting orange until the lilies cover them again. 

Voted early in the primaries. Realized that they gave me the right ballot without asking my party. Maybe they knew me, or can tell a Democrat from a Republican by his walk. Maybe there are no Republicans in North Asheville. 

One of the 103 year old front window-doors burst open. Torrent of cold. Managed to nail it shut until such time as it can be replaced. 

Spanish Madness

 February 21, 2026

Talk of Blake with PR. Mixed in with a whole lot of talk about the Prophet Amos. 

Combed the yard with a trash back in my hand, picking up the detritus left by winter. Plastic. Food containers. Beer bottles. Objects whose original use I don’t want to know.  My lot is on a curve: things fly from windows, get tossed from the hands of cyclists. 

Turkeys in the yard today.

Beethoven’s Tempest.

Dream of A, which must have got mixed in with watching the Olympic skaters. I worked to help her keep her studio, an operation accomplished by helping her skate to obscure places on a vast frozen lake unseen. 

The west lot teems with bluebirds. The sudden red flare of the red-bellied woodpeckers. 

The Spanish Madness