February 19, 2011

Glorious day, and it is not over. Many nights of moonlight. Now that the hedge of hemlock is gone, I can see the moon set at morning in the northwest, and that is as wonderful as watching him rise. When I drove out last night, the moon was colossal, teetering on the horizon like Humpty Dumpty.

Painted early, alone in the building for a long time. Came home and attacked the south edge of the backyard, now a tangle of ivy, which I will make into a garden. The sheer mass of all that ivy is remarkable. I carried load after load way in my arms. A shovel will not avail. You must start with a pickaxe and work up to the spade. I went to different nurseries the last few days hoping to buy trees, but there was nothing to buy. The bare ground once covered with plants and trees made me sad. Even the nurseries have winter. I planted two volunteer hemlock seedlings north of the house, because there is always shade and I know they can grow in the shade. I might dig them out in favor of something else, but if I don’t I will tend and prune them so they don’t become the spidery, squat horrors I chopped out this year at such expense. They are beautiful in the forest.

Out to Warren Wilson to see Middleton’s Women Beware Women. Both the play and the production were better than I expected. WBW was one of the plays I skipped in London, so it was good to have another chance. The Warren Wilson students trooped in in their bare feet and blond dredlocks, the girls with furry legs and the boys, almost to a one that night, petite and hairy and escorted by two or three girls each. They were a disrespectful audience, but also an attentive one.

Coffee with TB at that noisy bus on Biltmore. He confides that I’m one of the “older gentleman” he takes as a father surrogate. Flattering, mostly, though when is it that one begins to think of oneself, or begins to tolerate others thinking of one, as old, or even “older”? I’m probably delayed in this as in many other things. Toured the downtown galleries, which all looked pretty much the same. Was wanting to buy something, but every price tag turned into a percentage of a flight to Europe, so I passed on.

Night. Another spectacular moon rise. Can’t tell whether what I’m feeling is sadness or exhaustion. Bach on the CD. How to tell a friend that what he has planned for himself will not happen? Maybe this is the source of the exhaustion. But then, I’m not without an examplar. What I planned for myself did not happen, and if someone had told me decades ago, toward the end of saving me the trouble, I would not have believed them.