March 15, 2014

Spring morning, chill, but subsumed in soft pastels. I can see from the high study window a shelf of gray clouds moving swiftly south.

Interesting Friday. I worked hard, and was boisterously productive, though there was an edge of rage under everything that boiled through in moments of quiet. Lunch with SS. I feel provincial when we get to the subject of theater. While he was in New York working with everybody and managing the Ridiculous Theater, I was in a field watching the flight of birds and coming home to warm my fingers and write my little poems,. I thought that would be best for me, and who knows for sure that it wasn’t? He and I have the same trait in that our self-image is different in certain measure from the world’s image of us. His idea to start a new theater is electrifying, though at the same time, exhausting. The Magnetic Field is gone; Flat Rock and NC Stage are teetering on the brink of insolvency, or over the brink, for all I know. I don’t ask about Montford’s finances, but no one seems to be complaining. My own little theater has been asleep so long I don’t know that it would be right to waken it. I don’t know how much ambition I have left, except, as I hurl at heaven all the time, do me justice. Yet I have always thought it would be paradise to write for a particular, excellent company, the way Shakespeare did.

After the merry lunch I went to 62 and–much quicker and easier than I expected– undid the water gardens. Kevin the frog was gone from his, moved on in either the ethereal or the terrestrial plane. I was happy that there was no little veil of frog skeleton. I was careful in emptying the others, too, but the tadpoles I put in either grew to maturity or otherwise disappeared. I came with a bucket, intending to convey Lawrence the Fish to Beaver Lake, but at the last moment– when I held him in my hand, ready to dip him from the muddy tank into the bucket–I sensed that our relationship was not over. He was silky and surprisingly warm, and unstruggling in my hand, as if he trusted me. So I moved his great tub to 51 and built him a mountain with places to hide, and filled it with water, and now we are together again in our new home. I am curiously grateful that I did this. I would have missed him. I am happy to go into the front yard and see his flash of solar orange.

The wind had opened the windows and the back door of 62. I tried to keep my mind off the astronomical utility costs, and think instead of the sweetness of the air. That house always smelled good.

Rose late today. Took the smelly water garden tanks, the ones I’ll no longer use, to the dumpster at Riverside.