Saturday - 127th

It's a sizzler. A charbroiled jalapeno pepper of a day. Hot hot hot.

There is a breeze in the morning. A sticky one. Not unlike putting yourself next to one of those hand drying machines in a public restroom. Still, it has the effect of dispersing some of the bugs outside. I work in the garden without the help of the paddle bug zapper.

I don't quite get to 1000 spent lilies, but it was close.

(The lily bed by the porch has all the challenges, successes, mistakes, and ultimately beauty of gardening right smack in its belly.)






(Flowers, everywhere...)





I pluck the last lily just as all hell breaks loose. Rain, lightening, thunder, you name it.

I want to eat breakfast on the porch. It's dry on the porch. Not even that hot, what with the rain outside.
Can we get struck by lightening out here? I should know better than to ask Ed.
Maybe, he says to taunt me. We might be that one person in the calendar year that gets hit by lightening in Wisconsin.

Fine. We eat on the porch.





But when a huge crash shakes the earth beneath us, I take my coffee inside.

And then I return to my writing project. I have this day and tomorrow before I resume childcare. I'm motivated. I lose myself in the text.

In the afternoon, Ed asks if I want to break for a walk. Of course I do. I need movement to keep me excited about sitting still for so long!

We get on his motorbike and head out to our park. You know the one -- with prairies and woods and a lake at its edge. We stick to the prairie to avoid mosquitoes. And mercifully, the deer ticks are finished for the season. It's a sticky hot and beautiful walk!

(monarda, everywhere...)





(What we pass, on our way home...)





And then it's more writing for me until finally, toward evening, I say to Ed -- I'm done with the next to last chapter. Two dozen more pages and I'm completely finished.  He shakes his head.
It's your white whale, he tells me. You're chasing something, obsessively, but you'll never get it.

I tell him that literary allusions, even to such obvious texts as Moby Dick, are a mean way to remind me for missing years of literature classes in both the US and Poland. In my adolescence, I bounced between the two countries and skipped several grades to boot and so you could say that somewhere along the way, I missed most literature and grammar schooling in both countries. I feel those gaps every time I sit down to write.
You have had many dozens of years to make up those gaps, he reminds me.

I so dislike it when he is right and it is my fault.

Fine, my white whale. It's nearing an end, even though, according to Ed, it will always be out of my reach.


(Late afternoon colors...)






(Evening pinks...)





I cook a frittata for dinner. I feel it's been a while, no? With a new CSA box, I really need to start pushing those veggies. This particular frittata, in addition to the eggs and cheeses, has string beans (both green and yellow), corn kernels, garlic scapes, garlic cloves, a potato, mushrooms and basil. The proportion of veggies to eggs (there are seven eggs in all) is... large.






A July night. We toy with the idea of opening the windows for the night, but it's still just too hot.

May your world be perfectly cool tonight. May you sleep well and stay healthy in the weeks to come!