Lingering Light

 April 27, 2024

Great & full day. Attacked the outside-the-fence garden head on, planting Shasta daisies, cat mint, false indigo, zinnia, and bishop’s flower. When did bishop’s flower stop being Queen Anne’s lace, and why? Golden spurge inside the fence. Much spreading of straw to protect seed until they sprout. I’m deep into my tenth year here, and this is the first day it occurred to me to heave the hose over the fence to water the space outside. It’s laborious, but works perfectly. Water was my great doubt about beyond-the-fence, and now that is alleviated. My other great doubt is the public tendency to vandalism, with its urge to damage anything beautiful in order to put one’s mark upon it. Maybe flowers are too lowly to count. 

I's son C comes tomorrow to wash windows. I engineered the job for when I’m at church, so I don’t have to witness any of it. 

Whatever my intention when I begin a painting, it turns out a little haunted.

Trump on air twenty four seven. Tolkien’s Sauron seemed over-the-top to me until Trump entered the picture, a being with no redeeming qualities, devoid of any sense of the other, a bottomless vortex of selfishness, the seal of all gluttony, soulless. Yet people adore him, find him Christ-like, feel that he has been victimized. That is the puzzle. That is the darkness one despairs of lighting, ever. Justice would have been for him to face a firing squad on January 7. I pray some more complicated justice awaits in the future. 

I rejoice now that light lingers deep into the evening.