it's late august and the prophets are calling their bears in

Popcorn thunderstorms back in the Shenandoah Valley. Got dropped at the car in Charlottesville and raced the storms over, eager to get home, out of there, back to my bugs and tomatoes and the flowers I unwisely planted before leaving. Vacation was fun, but I have, stupidly, put more on my mind than there was before I left, and the stars are nothing but trouble this week.

I have to be smarter about this. I have to be less indulgent of my own sad stories. I'd got to get my perspective on right before I'm stuck pondering all this in the dark and cold this winter.

I think I'll go out onto the cool of my back deck and watch the next storm come in. I think I'll write something I love and take advantage of the little last drip of time off from spending my PTO today. I think I'll make a homemade red sauce out of brandywine heirloom tomatoes out of my garden, and roast zucchini and eggplant also from my garden, and try to think about all the good that is given.

Charles Wright, in All Landscape is Abstract, and Tends to Repeat Itself:

Remembered landscapes are left in me
The way a bee leaves its sting,
        hopelessly, passion-placed,
Untranslatable language.
Non-mystical, insoluble in blood, they act as an opposite
To the absolute, whose words are a solitude, and set to music.

All forms of landscape are autobiographical.