September 9, 2012

Weekend quasi-academic meetings harmless but also– as though one hadn’t anticipated this– unnecessary.

The world says, “Things are over when they’re over.” I say, “No, they must be over when I can’t stand them anymore.”

Something brought J powerfully to mind this morning. Maybe it was my brief but not entirely futile trip to the studio. Still miss him. Lies from a friend are stranger than lies from a lover, because they are unnecessary. I would never not have been on his side, whatever the issue: no need to misrepresent. Maybe I’m the only one with these particular standards of loyalty– a little Medieval, a little Homeric, enormously pre-Facebook. I read Scott and Homer at an impressionable age.

Got off the couch and went into the garden. Whatever ails me is not physical, for I worked like an ox and never felt it. Got half a ton of morning glory vines pulled and the front yard peonies weeded and mulched. Felled the giant wild lettuce. I’d taken the disappearance of the onion plants to mean a failed crop, but that was not the case. I dug them up (accidentally at first) and had about a nine-fold increase on what I’d planted, lovely and red and firm. It is a day of extraordinary beauty, the temperature all but perfect, the sweat reluctant at first, but then free and cleansing. The hummingbirds dived at me each time I trundled up onto the porch, one time united in purpose.