Tonight is the shortest night of the year; tomorrow, we start that slow slide back to December. Fortunately the change won't be perceptible very soon. This morning, I found my college directory for the Long Vacation (July-September), and most of my friends were no longer in it, and there were the names of the people who will occupy our rooms when we are gone. Times are strange around here right now--too fast, too crowded, too close to the ending.
Because my Canadian friend is leaving, we decided to take the afternoon off and take our favorite walk, to Grantchester--a walk we'd somehow never done together. On the way there, she led the way but I found the moorchicks. On the way home, I led the way and we saw cows eating the leaves from low-hanging tree branches.
"So you're not a bait and switch kind of person?" she said, with regards to my love life. "Absolutely not," I replied. This seemed to help explain some things. Other things remain inexplicable.
I confessed my perverse desire to touch a stinging nettle, just to see what it feels like. All she had to say was that the sting comes from an oil in the leaves, and I suddenly no longer had that desire. Anything that even vaguely resembles poison ivy, or works by its mechanisms, is a thing I avoid.
"I remember when I didn't think that you and I would be friends," she said to me as we left our afternoon tea at the Orchard. I remember that, too. I'm glad we were both wrong, though I barely remember what made the difference. I think it was the night in November when she asked me to have a drink with her, after I gave her the copy of Middlemarch I'd gotten for her in the market. She's asked nearly everyone I know some blunt or awkward question or another; I've seen people have to tell her to step off on a number of occasions. But she's also on my list of people I can most easily imagine getting on a plane and coming to help me if I ever need her.
When the big cow broke into a run, we both laughed out loud.
Last night the moon was full, and apparently it was one of those nights when an optical illusion made the rising moon look vast, vast enough to be hovering over the earth. But I didn't get to see it. Tonight, I rounded up a little crew, and we rambled into a nearby field, hoping to see something of a reprise. We arrived and waited, bundled up in our jackets and scarves (have I mentioned how cold it is here?), and we waited, until someone spotted a lightening in the southeast. And then we waited for a few more minutes, and then there it was--large (though not optical-illusion-huge) and gold and swathed in thin clouds. I had taken my monopod, but I needed a tripod for this one. Everything I got is just plain impressionistic. Just before we left the field, something small began chirping along the ground not far from us.
In a night field all one's companions grow smaller. You don't even have to walk very far away to experience this.
Today in the market: stall after stall of fruits and more fruits. I came home with enough to make four bowls full of redness on my kitchen counter: tomatoes, cherries, raspberries, strawberries. I will feast for breakfast.
I continue to feel that King's might be the most photogenic of the colleges, especially when they remember to order up the perfect blue skies and high summer sun.
And now their cows are back. These cows must be the happiest cows in the universe. Just look at this one's hairdo--and his "I can't believe I found grass this good" blissed out face. That field is the cows' version of my college.
I've pretty much decided that all bets are off between now and Sunday morning, when my Canadian friend, probably my dearest friend here, leaves. We keep telling each other that we'll see each other again--when I'm on sabbatical, or when we meet up in her home city, or when she comes to my little village. But I won't be able to see her across the terrace as she's coming back from doing her laundry. And I won't be able to break any more of her grocery store wineglasses with my thumb while just trying to clean my lipstick off their rims. And I won't have her around to have my back when particular people say, "Is that a new dress? I haven't seen it before." Because she's the person here who can retort instantly to something like that: "There's a lot about her you haven't seen."
She's the person for whom I'm happy to leave the dinner table in order to get trivial information (like what "Eton Mess" is, when that's the scheduled the dessert). And in three days, she won't be here anymore. And it's sadder than I'd have thought it could be, back when I first met her and she asked me embarrassing questions, just like she does to everyone.
That trip? It was tiring. But today's conference? It involved nearly zero percent ridiculousness. And that, my friends, is what we might call an Excellence, and pretty rare for academic conferences, in my experience.
This image from my journey home pretty much catches how I'm feeling--which means that you'll get more interesting images and thoughts from me tomorrow, when I also hope to have food in the house.
I figure that if I'm very lucky, the conference for which I'm about to depart will turn out to involve something approximating whatever fun craziness was happening at King's yesterday evening.
One can hope.
Walking home from my piano recital this evening, I heard a ruckus arising out on the fen. These people were watching these geese, and the geese were making a racket not unlike that of our May Ball, only with greater hostility.
Of course I got out my camera and went over to see what was happening.
I kept a respectful distance and made no moves toward the geese, but some of them made moves toward me, ducking their heads and even occasionally hissing. I missed the focus on this one, but I want you to see this menacing bird:
Now, there wasn't a doubt in my mind about the fact that these birds could have messed me up, if they'd so chosen, and I was fairly sure that babies were involved in this scene somehow. It took me a little bit to find them, but then there they were:
When a duck family showed up and steamed right toward the geese, I expected to see a showdown.
But since no showdown seemed imminent, I headed on down the river. Hearing the telltale peeps of tiny moorchicks, I stopped and looked until I found the peeps' source:
Just in case you haven't gotten a sense yet of how cute these things are, and of how much I love them, know that they're probably about half the size of my fist, and look at this close-up.
I do not maintain my cool even a tiny bit when it comes to moorhens and their babies.
So, now: May Ball, check; piano recital, check; conference paper writing, almost whole check. Things are moving pretty fast these days. I want to go to sleep but need to have a finished speaking script before I do.
Suddenly, I hit the wall and couldn't be there anymore, and so now I am taking a break from the May Ball and resting in my room, still in my evening gown and my turquoise wrap and my evening shoes and my green Superhero necklace and my fake orchid hair clip. And my silver eye crayon. Though I've faked a timestamp for this post--because I really did mean to write before I went off to the event--I only have an hour to go before the "survivors' photo" is taken. And then I'm out of there: tomorrow there's that piano recital to give, and the rest of that conference paper to write.
Even though I'm not there right now, I can still hear "I Love Rock 'N Roll" (fortunately not the Britney-in-Crossroads cover) loud and clear. It's almost like I'm there. Because I almost am.
At about 10:30 p.m., while I was talking on the phone to my Chicagoan friend, sorting through some of the nuances about which I'm writing for next week's conference, I was startled by an explosion and a flash outside. And then another. And then I realized!
The kids at the college across the street were having fireworks as part of their May Ball!
And these were not rinky-dink fireworks. This was a full-on Fourth of July pyrotechnic extravaganza.
Happening across the street from my flat.
These fireworks were being shot off from the enclosed garden at the college across the road. Surely that's not safe?
Whatever! After a minute or so, I realized that I was just going to start saying "Ooo! Aah!" over the phone, which seemed rude, so I excused myself, hung up the receiver, and went outside to watch with the other residents of my building. Two floors up, someone shrieked with what seemed to be genuine distress every time something exploded.
There were hisses and whizzes and whees. There were fireworks I'd never seen before. It was, in some ways, a more fulfilling display than the one in Edinburgh at new year's--if only because the smoke from previous fireworks didn't loom and obscure subsequent ones.
When the exquisitely loud finale had finished, we stood for a short time and listened to pieces of (still glowing) debris tapping to the ground all around the building.
Given that I'd already gotten to go, with a friend from my college, to see the assorted finery in which that May Ball's attendees were decked (while they waited in their block-long queue to get in to their party), I'd say this party weekend is off to a good start.
Would you like to see the dress that I won't be wearing tomorrow evening? (Alas.) The picture doesn't begin to do it justice (or, in other words, to explain to you why it even crossed my mind that a $300 dress could be a good idea): fortunately, I have a lot more flair than a headless plastic mannequin. In addition to its (stifled giggle) boned bodice, the dress features removable straps, so I wouldn't even have had to have worn it strapless. Instead, I will be wearing my trusty £40 evening gown for the fourth time. Now that's good value for money. I figure that tomorrow I'll take a break from writing this conference paper and rustle up a shawl somewhere in town--a doubly smart move, since it's only supposed to be 60º during the day tomorrow.
See what's happening to my mind? That's why I'm going to bed now. Tomorrow will be interesting: heavy brain work interspersed with a search for sparkly eyeliner and and a gauzy shawl and a way to pin flowers into my hair. Welcome to midsummer!
Today: 700 words (of my 3100 word conference paper). Gosh, I'm always startled by how well it turns out I know this genre, once I start writing within it. I'm just about at that moment where, having given your audience some facts they need, you tell them the argument you're going to make and then really launch into things. In other words, I'm right around the fifth minute. Before I perform this thing, I'll probably have compressed what I've written so far and made this argument moment occur closer to minute four, if not three.
Last night, as I was suffering through the last throes of wakeful fretting over the lost necklace, I heard a ruckus starting up outside my flat. Now, I overlook a road, and across the road is another college. Said college is having its May Ball tomorrow night (and check out what these kids are going to be getting up to...). The ruckus taking place in the middle of the night had the distinct sound (i.e., loud bleeping accompanied by shouted directions) of large machinery being backed into place. And sure enough, when I looked out the window this morning, I saw the back end of the closer of these two trucks:
All I can read from my kitchen is FAIR. Which seems, if I may, fair enough, especially since I'll keep this part forever:
I may actually put an enlargement of this picture on my office door, just as soon as I have an office for the fall. I may even do a diptych, using this one and another I took the other day:
Which is the noun and which is the modifier--well, that's something that I'll have to decide later. Or maybe I'll decide each day whether we'll be having OFFICE FUN or a FUN OFFICE.
Right now, I haven't been having much of either: I have a conference paper to give on Tuesday afternoon, and as always, I've been fretting. (Did I mention that I have a piano recital on Sunday afternoon, too? And that there's an all-night ball at my college Saturday night--though, sadly, with no Fun Fair? Is this a sensible line-up of events? Um, why not? I mean, it's not as though it gets dark before 10:50 p.m. Might as well use all these hours.) But tonight, after a very settling evening at Pilates for People Who Thought They Might Not *Get* Pilates But Wanted to Give It a Try, I reminded myself as kindly as possible that I have never given a crap conference paper and am not about to start now--certainly not when I'm scheduled to be talking about a text I've been studying for a decade. (And for those of you who knew about the Union Action that was potentially standing between me and this conference: the action was called off, as I thought it might be, and I had decided to be loyal to the conference instead of the union anyhow. So many other stories involved there.) My process has always gotten me through, and as the years have gone on, I've gradually become less of a brinkswoman. This paper, too, will be done and fine in plenty of time. Certainly well before the time I head off to a northbound train.
As your reward for listening to me think aloud all this time, I brought you a souvenir of my walk to Pilates:
These two were eating on the continuation of the footpath I take through the fen; you can actually see the pedestrian information map behind them. I was only a few feet from them and would have gotten many more shots even more fun than these had I not been hurrying to work out my core. Probably best for them, anyway: I was impeding their ability to eat that hedge (to the left in this picture) as vigorously as possible.
I hate this--about myself, and about the situation I end up in over and over. But here it is again: at dinner, she sits between us, praises (and rightly so) the open fullness of my relationship with my parents, the ways we tell each other so many things, the way they let me curl up between them in bed the night I split with my then-somebody, even though I was 25, because I was still and am still their baby. She turns to him and says, "Do you tell your parents about your girlfriends?" "Well," he says, "there haven't really been girlfriends, until the current one." And I feel some little thing in my gut turn its face to the wall and breathe a sad, heavy sigh. Why should this be? How is it possible that I still haven't resolved this?
At some other moment--because people are starting to peel away and head for home, and because we're academics, and so we are analyzing and assessing everything most of the time but especially at threshold moments that lend themselves to retrospection--someone asks her what she was looking for when she came here. She turns to me and says, "Why did you come here?" I realize that there's one thing for which I'd hoped but that hasn't happened, and so I give the general answer, the one that encompasses: I came to recharge. I came to reassess some important things.
And I did. And I have.
There's nothing for this but to go to sleep, having said my prayer to Saint Anthony. But a tiny part of me can't help but wonder whether the loss of my Naxos eye--which is meant to be a good luck charm, and (even more than that) a protection from the evil eye--has somehow contributed to my loss of equilibrium in the past month. That part of me is already trying to figure out how to find a flight to Naxos and get a new pendant before heading back to the U.S.
As I write, it is 10:45 p.m. and the sky is not yet fully dark. In fact, tonight I've realized that it stays light even later than I'd thought; the sun now sets so far north that the part of the sky that darkens last is no longer visible from my flat. The sun had barely set when I left my yoga class at 9:15.
Yesterday I began making a mental list of foodstuffs I'd buy when my replacement debit card arrived and I could access my money once more. I got as far as "cherries" and then got lost in a dream of eating cherries.
Today I bought cherries.
Yesterday I also figured out how to change my camera's settings so that its usual picture-taking mode involves more color saturation and contrast, two things for which I'm always correcting in Aperture. Now I'm watching to see how having changed the settings actually affects my pictures.
Here's the kind of shot where the difference is more likely to show up, but since I'm not being scientific about this, I don't have a comparison shot for you.
I will say, though, that that purple beech on the left is the most magical tree; once you're inside it, it doesn't look purple anymore. And it sings like the ocean, now that it has all its leaves.
Rumor--or weather report, depending on what you want to call it--has it that today was the last of our unbelievably beautiful days. We slide back to the mercurial 60s tomorrow; I'm hoping that this slide will bode well for my work.
People here are starting to complain about how hot it's getting--how it's too hot to work, too hot to think. Today we made it to the high 70s; a friend came back from London bearing reports of people behaving limply on the train, wilting away in the heat.
At dinner, it felt like old times, like the early days, when we wore summer clothes and lingered long past the ends of our meals. "You do own short-sleeved shirts," I said to my neighbor when he knocked on my door before dinner. The table: academic men in short sleeves, academic women wearing t-shirts, peppered mackerel fillets, glasses of sickly sweet plum wine, a plum and apricot cobbler with surprise layers of fresh mint leaves cooked in and a tiny stream of fresh cream on top. After dinner, I lifted a wooden picnic bench all by myself, carried it across a patio. Having upper body strength--or any musculature at all--if you're an academic woman is a good party trick.
I'm going to stop kidding myself: I usually want to take pictures of the following things: flowers, grasses, leaves, fences, outbuildings, horizons, strange architectural features, stained glass fragments. For the next small while, flowers and grasses might completely occupy me. Having learned many British birds this year (and having very recently learned to find baby moorhens by sight or sound), I now find myself not knowing what I'm looking at, in terms of flowers. And I don't imagine I'll be getting a book about flowers. What I'm after is the color anyway. These, in Clare's Fellows' Garden, are a blueviolet that is beyond me.
Look at this picture, and you can see that the sun is bright here these days. At 10:45 tonight, one of the two friends with whom I'd gone to a pub said, "I should get back." The light had thrown us. It wasn't yet dark. I photographed these flowers at about 3:30 p.m. In December, the sun would have been nearly gone.
Because exams are coming to an end, the students are starting to warm up for May Week, the series of boat races and all-night parties and general merriment and festivity that make up, well, the middle of June here in Cambridge. Today, Trinity College did its part to send us into the week with a song.
First, at noon, the choir sang from two of the towers in Great Court, and a brass orchestra played from the third tower. The day had dawned cloudily, but by noon everything looked and was perfect--perfect enough for a sleeveless dress and sandals, and perfect enough to leave me actually wanting to do not only the laundry but the dishes as well when I got home.
And so what was meant to be an afternoon of reading became an afternoon of reading and cleaning: washing some dresses in the bathtub (why did I use my sink for handwashing clothes all those years? how did I never think of the bathtub?), eating some French toast, making the bed up again, reading chapters of Hester while waiting for the dryer to finish. When the cleaning was over, I pulled a chair onto the porch and read in the sun until I fell asleep. When my hand fell asleep too, I got up and came back inside.
By this time, though I'd already had a full day, the sun was still high and bright, so I shouldered the camera and went out to explore the field at the end of Rifle Range Road, out beyond the college. For kicks, I went out with my portrait lens on the camera. Soon, I was fretting to myself about how nothing was focused the way I wanted it, how the lens is bad, &c., none of which turned out to be true.
As if that hadn't been enough for the day, Trinity College's choir sang us into the night, as well--this time, perched in a set of punts moored on one side of the river. My Japanese neighbor caught some snapshots of this scene's crazy festivity.
Why on punts? If for no other reason, then certainly to create the right conditions for an excellent departure: singing their way down the river, in the last light of the peak of the year.
And as if that weren't enough for one day, not long after I returned to the flat, my Lexingtonian friends called up, and within half an hour, the littlest one, while snacking on some bread, held a piece out for me--a food offering for the computerized auntie, a fine way to send me off to Monday. I cut myself a slice of bread from my own loaf, and we had our snack together, over our thousands of miles of apartness.
Tonight, I tended bar at a museum function. And by "tended bar," I mean that I poured white wine, made change in pounds, relieved museum-goers of their empties, and washed some dishes. On my way home, I passed Goth girls in scads, and then I passed a whole Goth hen party. And by "hen party," I mean girls having a bachelorette do for someone about to get married--and doing it in matching black t-shirts and matching pink facemasks.
On Monday, my Canadian friend's laptop melted down about two hours before she was due to give a presentation. Because I gave her some last-minute help, she bought me six stems of allium, and five days later, they're still going strong. (Which is good, because Marks and Spencer guaranteed them for at least seven.) They might be the most fascinating flowers I've ever had in my presence. And the fun I had photographing them with my auto-focus shut off makes me wonder what else I should take out of focus for awhile.
Yet another picture from that drive through the fens about which I haven't yet told you much, because that's the way my life is right now.
Rumor has it that the cows that graze across from King's College are ready to come back, any day now. Someone finally got worried enough to ask a porter, and the porter confessed himself to be worried, too. "It gets lonely out here without the cows," he said. He is the porter who mans the back gatehouse, making sure that no tourists get into King's for free, and that no one bothers the students while they take their exams, which most of them have done by now. Meaning that May Week, held (bien sur) in June, is about to happen. Meaning that hilarity and mayhem and general overconsumption are about to take place.
And I? I find myself thinking about my Ohio prairie more and more--not wishing that I could be there sooner, just feeling out the contours of how happy I will be to walk there again. Maybe the cows will be back on their hillside near the apartment in the woods when I get home.
In the meantime, I keep tracking the colors coming into view here: the wine-dark leaves of the beech by the river, the heady purples in Clare's Fellows' Garden, the red-orange of the saucer-sized poppies there. The burgundy snapdragons velvety even to the eye. The fuzz grey of the moorchicks as they grow up so fast.
Evening sets in at about 8 nowadays, and it lasts until about 10:30. Tonight, when my Pilates for Beginners class let out, I decided to cut home across the weedy fen, since it was still well light even at 9:10. The sky was every light pastel, illuminant grey to glowing rose to tender blue. When I reached the little footbridge over the Cam, I heard the telltale peeps of tiny birds; looking down, I saw four tiny ducklings, almost tiger-striped in their markings, following their mother into a nest at the base of one of the bridge's supports. Techno drifted across the fen, coming from some pub or another where some students or another must be celebrating finishing their exams, or something. A woman sat, swaddled in her clothes and wearing dark gloves, on a park bench and seemed to be meditating. Four cows grazed in the high grasses, only their broad red backs visible, and the muddy footprints they left when they wandered across the paved path to get to where they were. When one looked up at me, off in the distance, I waved back.
Ducklings remind me: I am especially fond of baby things these days--baby birds, puppies with their big floppy feet, tiny people. (What I didn't tell you when it happened is that the littlest Lexingtonian is now one and poised on the brink of walking. She and I have spent many an hour kissing each other across the impossible distance of our computer screens while I have lived here; I am still wondering what she will make of me when I turn up again in the flesh. Obviously, I'm hoping that she will like my real being as much as she seems to like my computer-conveyed one.)
In a not unrelated development, I finally checked my class lists for my fall courses and discovered just how many of my students will be people I've taught before. One of them drops in for a visit tomorrow, and I would be hard-pressed to explain how happy I am about this.
I am nothing like consistent when it comes to responding to these kinds of surveys, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that I make my living by studying people's methods of self-disclosure. But I'll give this one a go--and I've still got another in the pipeline, from weeks ago.
This one is called
Some facts about me! meme
(Do these things get called "memes" because they're all about me & me?)
I've been tagged by Meli.
1. I'm meant to post the rules of the game here at the beginning, so here they are.
2. First, I answer the questions about myself.
3. Then, at the end of the post, I tag five people and post their names, then go to their blogs and leave them a comment, letting them know they've been tagged and asking them to read my blog. When you get to the end, you'll see how I've strategically not followed these directions.
What was I doing 10 years ago?
Ten years ago I was just finishing my first year of grad school. So, let's see: that means I had just finished all of my first year essays except for the incomplete from first semester that I didn't finish until mid-summer. By early June, I was in Chicago visiting my then-somebody. I believe that I'd finished my final essay (on William Wordsworth) the day before I flew from Indiana, where I was visiting my parents, up to Chicago. As I was trying to get that essay finished, my sleeping and eating schedules went haywire, as they sometimes do when I'm writing. One evening, around 5:45, I had to try to explain to my mother why I was taking a nap instead of working until dinnertime. Then, at 1:45 a.m., I was still at the computer, analyzing something or another about the long poem Peter Bell. In Chicago, we went to the city's huge Printers Row Book Fair. I bought a copy of W. Jackson Bate's biography of Samuel Johnson. I've now moved that book through four houses and still haven't read it. But I have it, for when the moment comes, which it will. That was the Chicago trip when we also went to a party at another first-year grad student's house, and some drunk guy revealed to me at the end of the evening what every attendee's funding level was within the U Chicago program. I wondered to myself who else had gotten drunk and handed over that information to a first-year grad student.
Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world:
1. Toasted Italian fontina on good French bread.
2. Pie.
3. Toasted crusty white bread with butter and honey.
4. Black licorice.
5. Heck, I'll say it: Doritos.
Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:
6. Sainsbury's fabulously fruity yogurt.
7. Apples.
8. Toasted crusty white bread with butter and honey (or marmalade).
9. Rich tea biscuits or jaffa cakes.
10. Black licorice.
Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:
1. Pay off the debts and houses of everyone I know and love, trade in my sixteen-year-old car for a hybrid, and work out my parents' immediate retirement and travel dreams.
2. Upgrade to Canon's top of the line camera and lenses, get a field camera and a darkroom, and start traveling and taking pictures.
3. Endow an arts, creativity, reading, and writing center for kids and teens in rural mid-Ohio.
4. Stop ever having to ask whether or not I can afford to buy a book I want.
5. Start spending part of every summer in England (though even as a billionaire, I don't know whether I could afford to have property here), and start seeing my friends and my favorite small children in person a lot more often (especially since I'd get myself some hilly Ohio property with room for multiple little buildings--a house, a studio building for me, and at least one little guest house--and invite more people to come visit).
Five jobs that I have had:
1. Cashier, lifeguard, and assistant swimming teacher.
2. College writing center tutor.
3. Substitute legal secretary.
4. Automotive component factory worker (forklift driver; faulty parts rehabber; inspector; deflasher; small team supervisor; steel-toe-shoe-wearer).
5. College professor.
Three of my habits:
1. Drinking Gold Blend instant coffee first thing in the morning.
2. Reading in bed.
3. Taking on more tasks than I can finish and then feeling bad that I can't get more done.
4. (Bonus!) Taking deep, measured breaths when under stress.
Five places I have lived (here are the last five, working backwards in time, not re-naming places [namely, Gambier] that have popped in more than once, and listing places where I've lived for more than six months in a row--which is why my Indiana hometown isn't on the list, since the last time I lived there for more than six months was 1993--):
1. Cambridge, England
2. Gambier, OH
3. Rochester, NY
4. Ithaca, NY
5. Exeter, England
Five people I want to get to know better (a nice way of saying TAG!)---or in my case, five people I wouldn't mind hobnobbing with sooner rather than later:
This part of memes is the one that I always skip or modify. Today I'll modify (I'm not going to leave comments in everybody's blogs). If Boricua en la Luna, Notorious Ph.D., Nick, Carter, and Four Inches of Ego feel like playing, then I hope they will. But if not, I'm not going to be knocking on anybody's door asking why. At least not until it's legal for me to reenter the country. And even then, I won't be showing up to ask you about this meme thing.
Well, kids, that's the trivia from here for now. I feel as though I should be apologizing for having cut out lately on my attempts to offer deep thoughts. I haven't even told you about what it felt like to follow my new yoga instructor's directions last night, attaining some poses I've seen my beloved Brooklynite do, and to discover in the process that, um, I apparently have very open hips. I feel as though my brain is on overdrive here at the nearing-the-end point of my year away. By now I think you know what happens when my brain goes on overdrive.
The rain was pretty much non-stop today. Rainy days make for good reading but not such good ambling. I'm hoping for an amble tomorrow.
While I took this picture, another goose made his awkward way over the grass, using his wings to help himself balance. He was missing his right foot; his leg ended in a skinny stump. I didn't take his picture, even once he'd found an uneasy balance and begun eating grass from the corner of one of Trinity's lawns. I did try to feel his pain. This group preened and preened; no one went near the unsteady one.
It's true: I did tear up a little at the end of the Sex and the City movie, even though parts of it didn't thrill me. The ending got me almost as much as the ending of season six.
So much fatigue today. It rains and rains. My head is full of goop.