Folly

 

January 3, 2024

Fifth floor of the Tides in Folly Beach. Travel tedious & uneventful, except for the unexpected gastric urgency that makes me wonder if tours or long flights are the best things for me, yet. The tide is low. The puffy clouds are flat at the bottom, as though sitting on glass. I had forgotten how enormous pelicans are. When I plugged the computer in, it started up at the part of Messiah where it was when I shut it off– “from shame and spitting.”

A strange thing happened during the drive. I let the radio dwell on one of those Christian stations that seem to cover entire states. After half an hour, I underwent a sort of conversion, difficult to describe or explain. I didn’t move, but my position refined and clarified, spirit pointing to True North. Paul on the Road to the Beach, blinded and eyes opened. What an odd thing.

Town all but empty. Dinner with J and L at the Bounty Bar, not a soul there but us. 

 

January 2, 2024

Slept hard through much of yesterday, confusing exhaustion for illness. 

Inspired by an announcement in email, I got together a chapbook of my riverside poems, those written in the last year at my picnic table beside the French Broad. Going through the files, I had to read some of them to remember what they were about, if they could be included. Twenty-eight pages.

Phone call interrupted an amazing dream. Some friends and I had, apparently, been time-traveling, and had been captured by ancient Mesopotamians. We thought we were in trouble until they asked us if we could chant Sumerian holy chants, and we listened hard and it turned out that we could. We chanted so well, adding our own flourishes, that we had become a pop phenomenon in ancient Sumer, where they could, somehow, project what we were singing in blue letters across the night sky.

Resolutions? Not to watch corrupt cop videos. They enrage me and make me hyper-vigilant. 

CK has died. 

 

January 1, 2024

Managed to watch twenty minutes of the Rose Parade.  

Annual New Year’s Eve party was easier for me this year, as I was very gradual in preparation, doing one important thing a day every day after Christmas. Little dread or anxiety, as in years past. However, fewer people came than expected, and added to my natural propensity to over-prepare, the mountain of leftovers this morning was daunting. Much dumping and running of the disposal, load after load in the dishwasher. I find such wastefulness appalling, but I don’t know what to do about it this one day of the year. I could have hosted three parties on the food prepared for one. I should learn, year by year, but fear the appearance of meagerness. DJ’s ramp centered on the front steps, and it was sad–as well as funny-- to see my guests, many of them quite elderly now, inching their cautious way up the staircase, looking for a hand to steady them.

DJ saw a fox as he rumbled home. An omen.  

Hosts of crows cawing in the garden, claiming bits of the party foods I threw out for them. 

R gave me a strudel, chocolate-y and nutty and rich.

 

December 31, 2023

I saw a great blue heron fishing in my pond. I took that as a benediction on a year that sorely needed one.

 

December 30, 2023

Get-together last night at Rye Knot to honor L’s nephew. We recoil in shock at the high prices of the drinks there, but it’s physically so convenient. 

Tiny, isolated particles of snow, like salt spilled from a shaker.

Made bread pudding, which was my father’s favorite. 

 

December 28, 2023

Fourth Day of Christmas. The clouds parted and the brilliant moon woke me before morning. 

Finished the Fun House revision. 

Baked mint chocolate chip cookies. Called for green food coloring, but all I had was red, so, red mint. 

Made my first mess of collard greens. Froze them to take out for the party. Laying in party supplies at the ½ price sales the groceries have after Christmas.

Tall kindly girl with many piercings helped me buy sausages. 

Feast of Saint Stephan

 

December 26, 2023

Feast of Saint Stephan. 

Christmas card from Loretto in Dublin.

Raining so bitterly hard that all plans to go out have to be altered, which is fine with me. First thing when I looked out the window, a fat opossum waddled through my garden gate and across the street: an image, I think, of bounty in the coming year.