April 14, 2015

Finished Five American Places. I’m the milliner churning out pretty hats for a people who have all the hats they need.

The volunteer wild phlox are a low cloud of purple. Stewart’s white lilacs are in bloom, though mine are not yet. My Venus flytraps bloom, pale white on a long thin stalk.
   
Often when I look out the back bathroom window, my rat will be squeezing through his gap in the fence to glean in my garden. I try to be reasonable and ask myself why he disturbs me more than, say, a squirrel, which is by any measure more destructive. His kind has kept company with sewers and plagues and monster movies, and that sticks with the imagination, though I conclude that MY rat is cleansed of all that. He seems to hunt in the daylight. Curious. Maybe there is a big owl.
   
Rolled the trash to the sidewalk with my big dead opossum in it. Seems wrong, somehow.