Squirrel

 February 27, 2026

Happy most of the day, I asked myself “Why so sad now?” No particular reason. A rejection from Omaha, but I expected that. Maybe just the cesspit of contemporary times. 

Bought plants and gardening supplies without actually using them. They sit in the gathering darkness, waiting for morning. 

Sent A money to cover her shocking utility bill. She has four children. . . but their sense of responsibility is not my concern. 

Some time today a squirrel was run over in the street. I sat at the downstairs desk and watched while a cyclist came by with a miner’s light on his cap and a strange implement in his hands and eased the body over into my west garden. The light and implement made me think he was employed for just that service, or maybe had decided on it as a Lenten penance for himself. That it is my problem now is a little disturbing. Hope I remember to bury it first thing tomorrow. 

 February 26, 2026

Picked up euros from the bank for the Germany trip.

Coffee with A at High 5. The usual, comforting topics.  Frothed over Trump. Moaned about the demise of our university. 

Picked up my tax return. Very much more palatable than last year, $255 to the Federal Government rather than $18000. I was careful juggling capital gains this year.  The amusing thing is that I owe $1 to the state of North Carolina. Considering whether to play the scofflaw and ignore it or send in the check with a sarcastic memo. 

Have been in extraordinarily good voice for rehearsals this week. More 3rd rate church anthems pulled out of the archives. Discouraging.

 February 25, 2026

Two big dogs were loose on the street. That was an everyday sight in my childhood, but you don’t see it anymore. It was lovely to watch them sniffing and trotting about, taking in the morning. A few moments later a young man walked down the street with a big walking stick and a sleeping bag slung over his shoulder on another stick, just as you see pictures of homeless wanderers during the Depression. He took the shortcut down my drive so he appeared picturesquely in my security camera. This is one day after our hellhound President assured us that all is most well in his State of the Union.

Mahler’s 1st from the speakers downstairs. 

February 24, 2026

Sent a plush Husky to Julia A, hoping it’s the first bit of mail she receives. 

Bajazet on You Tube.

 

Oliver

 

February 23, 2026

Intensely bitter weather. My front wall had developed a gap above the floor, to freezing wind blows in and freezes the feet. What I can see from the study window is the violent lashing of the tops of trees. New York, Boston, and the Northeast lie under feet of snow.  My feeders are Times Square for the birds. 

Writing like mad, but a deadening sense of futility prevents me from sending anything out. Happy creating, glum selling. 

Sitting at my desk trying to write, shivering with cold. 

Thinking of my grandfather Oliver, sharp as a knife amid his uncertain son, his soft daughters. He rowed me in a boat out to the middle of a green lake. He asked why I wasn’t dragging my hand through the water, as children do. I told him I was afraid of being pulled in by the mermen and becoming one of them. He didn’t scoff. He just said that lake was too small for mermen. I remember a man taking me into the forest and teaching me the names of flowers. Either it was him, or it was a dream. In any case, I knew the names of flowers before I could read. Trillium. Mayapple. Anemone I didn’t know if he liked me, or anybody. He was not like us– or rather, we were not like him. When he was alive I didn’t know he had been born in England, in Somerset, among the coal mines. He worked the coal mines in Pennsylvania. His name was Oliver and his father’s name was Jabez and Jabez’s father was Oliver and that Oliver’s father was Jabez, a line broken forever in a new world, The last time I saw him I stood in the hospital parking lot in Pittsburgh and looked up into a high window where he was shaking hands with himself, as though he were shaking hands with me. 

Voting

 February 22, 2026

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s birthday.

Lonely fragments of snow fell from time to time during the day. You wonder what goes through the mind of a solitary snowflake. At last look out the windows, heading for the study where the one window shows only light, the snow gathered, beginning to squall and fill the sky in a great slant from the north.  

My poor fish drift exposed in the pond, a glaring, heron-attracting orange until the lilies cover them again. 

Voted early in the primaries. Realized that they gave me the right ballot without asking my party. Maybe they knew me, or can tell a Democrat from a Republican by his walk. Maybe there are no Republicans in North Asheville. 

One of the 103 year old front window-doors burst open. Torrent of cold. Managed to nail it shut until such time as it can be replaced. 

Spanish Madness

 February 21, 2026

Talk of Blake with PR. Mixed in with a whole lot of talk about the Prophet Amos. 

Combed the yard with a trash back in my hand, picking up the detritus left by winter. Plastic. Food containers. Beer bottles. Objects whose original use I don’t want to know.  My lot is on a curve: things fly from windows, get tossed from the hands of cyclists. 

Turkeys in the yard today.

Beethoven’s Tempest.

Dream of A, which must have got mixed in with watching the Olympic skaters. I worked to help her keep her studio, an operation accomplished by helping her skate to obscure places on a vast frozen lake unseen. 

The west lot teems with bluebirds. The sudden red flare of the red-bellied woodpeckers. 

The Spanish Madness

Goldfinches

 February 19, 2026

The goldfinches are getting back their summer color. 

Both recent afflictions, the fiery red of phlebitis and the less fiery red of hemorrhoid activity, abate. Some. 

Ancient dream of the first day of school. The University was a cluster of tents. I didn’t know where my office was, or what my schedule was, and all ways of finding out seemed to be blocked. I asserted myself by stealing a chair to use at my desk, when I found it. 

Accepted a Facebook friend invitation from JF. He was once the most beautiful man in Asheville. He isn’t anymore. 

 February 18, 2026

T led rehearsal last night, and it was memorably useful--without drama, without the struggle to enforce wilful interpretations, without mannerisms, without the constant interweaving of mockery and correction. 

My once fairly robust alcohol use has turned into the consumption of rivers of tea. I’ve searched for counterindications of that, but it seems to be all in all a beneficial choice. Sense little actual difference, except that I sleep longer. 

Nap dreams of receiving huge deliveries, by truck, of apples and cherries, to a place I had high in wooded mountains.  

 February 17, 2026

Various hours, various days. Phlebitis hit. I was able to fend off the great sickness, though my left leg is pink and itchy (no heat though, which is encouraging). The pills still amaze me. I rose in the night at the brink of unbearable pain, took the pills, and the next time I woke all was almost well. I think of my mother with the same affliction and, through most of her life, no antibiotics. Several things that were wrong with me and I blamed on something else seem to be related to the attack. It is always thus; I never remember. 

AVLGMC meeting here last night. It veers further and further from anything I recognize, anything I want to be part of, and yet I stick with it because what unfolds has interest of its own, and the companionship is fun. Thomas’ Uber came early, so he had to heat his frozen burritos in my microwave. B’s mania for control would be alarming if it were exercised on anything of more consequence than a men’s chorus. 

Strove to bring the pond out of winter torpor. Had to put my garden hose back together before I could. The solar panel guy had unscrewed the hose from the wall and the two bits of hose from each other, leaving me to put it back together, for reason’s unfathomable. All workmen detach the hose from the outlet, and I never know why. Something they teach in workman school and keep from the rest of us? L detached the hose when he came to give me an estimate on a deck. Really? It’s an issue to me because my threads are ancient, my wrench the wrong size, and to get an unleaking fit takes a deal of labor. I want to stand in the yard and say, “Do not unscrew the hose, though every fiber of your being commands you to do so!”

I discovered the magical principle that lures bluebirds to my yard. 

No music on Ash Wednesday. Things fall apart. 

Jesse Jackson is dead.

 

February 14, 2026

Brilliant day. I went to the Mall to replace my aged phone, but the Verizon people had moved to I know not where. Instead I bought a shirt from Eddie Bauer, because they were going out of business, and a raft of Girl Scout cookies that went straight into the freezer. Each time you go there are fewer stores at the Mall, and the ones you went for are gone. No Valentine card in the mailbox. 

 February 12, 2026

Twelve years in this house. I turned off the space heater (having read an article on the fires they cause) meaning I’m now trying to write in a freezing attic. 

Sat in Starbucks reading Swann’s Way while Iris cleaned my house. What power in Proust, to make one genuinely interested in the minutia–often enough disagreeable– of his life. 

SS having trouble casting Purification. My inner self shrugs his shoulders and says, “Well, of course!” 

Missing AVLGMC dress rehearsal tonight, as I can’t bear to be at the Valentine’s Fund Raiser tomorrow night. There are points at which too much bother is too much bother. Bother is a young person’s game. 

Looking forward to a night of revising, and then hot mint tea before whatever’s left of the Olympics. 

Anniversary

 February 11, 2026

Twelve years ago tonight I spent my first night in this house. 

Episode last night between bouts of sleep, when the image of my pet rabbit Charlie came to mind. I treated him poorly, never playing with him, ignoring him in his hutch for days on end. The unexpected intrusion–how often in the interposing years have I thought of him? Almost never– I took as a reconciliation in the spirit, for in the spirit he came and huddled against my side as we slept, and I was at peace in the matter for the first time. Do we live into old age so the sins of our past can arise and be, somehow, expiated, or at least acknowledged? If so, fine. My father gave me to understand his memories in age were sweet. If I did anything particularly noble, or even amusing, my recent thoughts have hidden it from me, though my missteps stand revealed in blinding light.

Received the following note by email:                                       

Hi David,

I recently read Night, Sleep and the Dreams of Lovers and found myself really taken by it, especially the way the book treats desire, memory, and creativity as inseparable, slightly unruly forces. The conversations with cats alone felt like a quiet permission slip to let the strange and intimate coexist on the page.

I was struck by how Asheville moves through the novel as more than a setting, sometimes vivid, sometimes shadowy  almost like another character carrying both history and longing. There’s a generosity in the writing that trusts the reader to enter at their own point, which I really admired.

I’m MH. I tend to write about the messy, funny, and occasionally heartbreaking parts of being human. My novel, Really Good, Actually, came from a place of starting over and trying to find humor in the middle of emotional chaos.

I’d love to hear what you’re working on now, or what first pulled you toward writing this book.

All the best, Monica

Bought her book. It’s lively, detailed, without forward motion (or what one would call ‘plot.), like a teenage Virginia Woolf at a slumber party.

Blue Plastic

February 10, 2026

A shredded spider of blue plastic has been clinging to the redbud since Helene. That’s year and a half. I supposed it was out of reach, but never put that to the test until today, when I took a leaf rake down and had the plastic out of the branch in two minutes. I think Gary Snyder has a poem about suffering a leak in his roof until one day he pushed on a board and–voila–the leak is gone. If I had my life to live over, I might adopt “do it now!” as a motto. Seven huge turkeys gleaned in my yard for a long time. Spillage from the bird feeders was a boon to them. God makes up with the beauty of their plumage for their striking stupidity. Maybe it’s not stupidity, but trust.  Warm day. Sat on the porch with tea in one of Kit’s mugs. I’m suddenly a fanatic consumer of tea, when months would go by formerly without my touching it. Sent manuscripts out. 

 

 February 9, 2026

Tinkering with the LT manuscript, still finding typos after I ran it through Spellcheck. The day filled and overflowed, even if I’m not sure with what. 

 February 8, 2026

Finished the umpteenth and second most radical revision of The Lexington Tract. I moan when things are not published, but when the Voice of the still room says, “Would you really have wanted it published like THAT?” the answer is no. Watched the American boy and the Japanese boy skate in Italy. I wanted the American boy to win, of course, but the Japanese boy was so full of life and so sad when he lost that I wished I hadn’t watched. 

Ashes

February 7, 2026

A day that turned out very different from what I expected when I woke, spent time re-arranging wanted and clearing out unwanted objects. Panicked because I couldn’t find Titus’ little box of ashes. Found it finally, put it in the cat shrine with remains and relicts of his sisters and brothers. Theseus and Conrad and Jocasta sleep on the hill across the street, where I cannot reach them, but where I remember them. Found old cat toys. Wept bitterly. Something about the feng shui of the house stands immensely improved. 

 

 

February 6, 2026

K sends a letter announcing a Sabbatical for this spring. Sends a revised schedule, from which he is largely absent. So, that’s that. I want to say “I saw it coming,” but I was probably the last.

 February 5, 2026

Another dusting of snow. 

Rehearsal somber last night. K is done with being a choral director. He has resigned ASC and provides the church choir with third-rate pieces whose mistakes he barely manages to correct. We have declined into a second-rate church choir, whereas we were once the best in the city. Whether that is a cause or a result of his disinterest is difficult to tell. It is well when your own change of concentration affects nobody else. 

Frenzy of rewriting– which makes me blissfully happy. 

 February 4, 2026

When I checked my Schwab account, every single holding was in positive territory. God knows what causes such things. I thought maybe it was Trump’s death, but checking the news revealed no such mercy. 

Ajax came again for his repast at sundown. The Twilight Buccaneer. He’s very young. This was his first winter. His plumage hasn’t darkened, and he tried to land on the car, sliding down the hood with wings flapping wildly. 

Ajax

 February 2, 2026

The branch where Sweetboi perched is gone, but on the branch nearest to it that can support such weight I saw a young red-shouldered hawk. Against such an unforeseeable moment, I’d bought the proper food days ago, so I threw the offering out onto the snow. In a few moments Ajax the hawk stood on my driveway ripping apart the pork joint. He called from Sweetboi’s tree, and I answered as I did before. I was stupid with joy. As soon as things open, I’m out in the stores laying up hawk-supplies. Build your nest in my tree. Stare into my window. Scream from your branch when you are in need. 

Brigid the Blessed

 

February 1, 2026

Brigid the Blessed

Woke listening for the hum of the furnace that would testify that the power had not gone out. Held my breath for the flushing of the toilet that would testify that the pipes had not frozen. Watching what seemed like multiple thickness of snow fall from the air did not prepare me for the hard, compact, shallow snowfall revealed by morning. Patches of grass showed through. Places were swept bare by the wind. My red brick porch is clear of snow after the first day. 

Watched the film Sinners.  I tried to make it better than it was. I’m the ideal audience for things I don’t initially understand. Always the benefit of the doubt. 

What do I think about all day? It must be something, for I awoke in the first light and now tap at my computer in the last light of Saint Brigid’s Day. Something must carry one hour to the other. The odd thing is that I am happy.