October 15, 2021

Woke to find the back yard littered with somebody else’s garbage, which a bear had dragged from the apartments’ dumpster through the lilac tunnel to devour in safety in my garden. Retch-inducing clean-up. Since I was in the garden already, entered the biggest gardening day of the fall, transplanting iris and canna and lily-of-the-Nile and opening a huge space for the ironweed and joe-pye I hope to sow in the spring. Great yellow ropes of roots endure from the black walnuts which have been gone for seven years. Fine feeling on my skin, the sun hot but never too hot. I felt like a healthy animal.