when, if not today?

Just shy of six in the morning, there is some movement in the farmhouse. Isis wants out, I want to be left alone, Ed tracks the both of us and comes up with some partly satisfying, but not really, solution. He's up and following Isis, telling me he'll be back momentarily.

Some twenty minutes later I hear the clank of dishes in the kitchen.
Ed?
Are you awake? I made a new batch of applesauce. Try this one!






I do. Without asking the obvious -- why are you making applesauce at 6 in the morning?
Because I suppose I know the answer -- if not now, then when?

We eat breakfast on the porch -- it is a really beautiful day, the kind that has the dry warmth of fall, the smell of spent leaves and false sunflower, growing wildly in the fields.

I tell Ed it's time to throw him the camera for the breakfast photo.






A good chance to record the skirt I struggled to exchange on the left bank, in August.






And now it's time to decide: will it be a rosie ride to work? That would be the easy choice. But why am I not biking? True, it takes twice the time, but it brings with it three times the health benefit. If I do not bike on this most beautiful day, then when will I bike to work?

Am I growing soft??

I bike.

We often sigh at the prevalence of soy and corn in the midwestern fields, but when I look out at an expanse of soy here in early September, I'm left breathless. As if clouds were casting a shadow and then letting the sun do its thing again.






The bike ride back, in the early evening, is leisurely. Equally bucolic.






Wednesday is Ed's night out on his own biking adventure. So I throw foods together for myself  instead of cooking a conventional meal.






Eat and exhale. That's the rhythm of an evening during teaching weeks. Eat, exhale.