here I am with my hand

I wish this weekend would just be gentle with me for a little while. Kindly, you know? I think please be nice to me is the most pathetic thing in the world to think, and I find myself thinking it so often. I keep thinking I want a return to my confidence and original fire, but maybe I'm just actually like this.

It's hard to find a direction today. I didn't sleep well, and it makes me unfocused. I need to work around the house, but I think I would rather lie on the floor with the windows open and think about my many shortcomings. I'm wearing a sweatshirt and jeans that are too big for me and look bad. This morning my banana tree has unfurled one big leaf.

so it's storming out on the lake, little waves our bodies break

I woke up early this morning, before anyone else was up. The ashes of last night's fire were still warm enough to start pine needles and twigs, so I set the coffee on and slipped off down the creek for some dawn alone time. Taking the right hand turn out of the site, my favorite site, there's a little cut in the side of the White Oak creek and you can follow it up to a good log jam and trout hole, a place where I've drank champagne with my mom and watched ruby-throat hummingbirds feed on cardinal flowers last June. A secret, perfect place. This morning, there were no hummingbirds, but the little mountain ephemeral flowers were up as bright spots of color on the ground. I saw birdfoot violets, yellow and white, and silvery blood root blooms and their weird pawprint leaves unfolding in the weak sun. The hemlock needles had that kind of misty, smoky look to them that they get some times when the light is either coming or going.

I felt alone in the best, best way, although I wasn't, really, since Sven had gotten up with me. I let him sleep with me last night, something I don't usually allow, but he'd been so tired and sweet, and he'd gotten into my sleeping bag before I realized what he was up to. This morning, though, he was all business, since supervising any extracurricular camping excursions is something he takes extremely seriously. The Girl is going off by herself again and he'd better come along because who knows what kind of trouble she might get into without him along to chaperone, and also what if there is something to climb or bark at or smell or race around about?

I hadn't forgotten it was Easter Sunday, this being the first one I have spent away from my family, not going to church, not having any fucking ham, (although later in the morning I would cook farm sausages, along with eggs with ramps and shallots over the fire.) I wondered about if my mom and my brother were arguing about where they'd be going to church. I thought about my grandfather, whose fatigues I was wearing. His death feels so strange, like a hole I keep worrying at, forgetting it's there and then returning again to check on how it feels. I thought about my friend. When I am comfortably in solitude, I am sometimes my best self, or maybe my most authentic.

I could have kept the quiet for a long time, but there were things to be done, even just in the tiny microcosm of the wilderness, with my phone 30 minutes from relevant and my tools limited to elements: fire and water. Sven got antsy, anxious to get back to camp, to his boy, and Travis, whom he adores. He doesn't like people to be separated, this dog of mine, and nothing makes him more content than when everyone is just in their same good place, all together. As we walked back to camp, he grabbed one of the pieces of wood I was carrying and pranced ahead with it, as if the whole thing had been his idea.

tired and wired we ruin too easy, sleep in our clothes and wait for winter to leave

I bought some earrings in Winchester, and then tried for 24 hours to take a blurry picture of them. This early morning no-makeup last-night's-hair was the ticket.

*

Last night at the bar, I went out onto the roof to look at the moon. A scummy, too-drunk guy peeled off a group, to come bother me the way a scummy, too-drunk guy always will when he sees a woman even temporarily unaccompanied. Like most people with bad taste, he used the excuse of my having a visible tattoo to assume that I was willing, and even eager to be interrogated about "what is it even" and have my body touched and commented on by a total stranger.

That's something I never expected when I got my first tattoo, that people would do that. Now instead of explaining the backstory and meaning of my tattoo, I just say "it's the world serpent, like from Norse mythology. The one who swallows the Worldtree."

His immediate comment was "Why would a pretty girl like you want that on her body forever?"

Because I slew and ate the world serpent, you impotent milksop.

Later that same night, Travis said "Why do you smell amazing, like sawdust?!"

I told him it was my perfume. (Which it was indeed: Santal 33: woodshop, cedarwood, vanilla). Then he told me I was dressed like Yan. (I was indeed wearing a snake dress.)

*

Made duck tonight, something I love to cook:

Egg moon. View.

just say you will wait, like snow on the rail

I love early Saturday mornings in my little house. I'm wearing my favorite green leggings and drinking out of my special little mug and feeling very much in my lair. I have watered all my seedlings, and my dog is quickly losing control of his emotions because of my disinterest in his tennis ball situation. The weather on the front porch is perfect, with light running along the little dew drops under the iron rail.

I know I have to put on real clothes--running clothes--and go running, and make breakfast, and get ready for what promises to be a pretty busy day. I'm going to Winchester, then out dancing tonight, and that's about the opposite of homebody mood I'm in, although I'm sure I'll have fun when I go. I have to be social sometimes, and not just spend every weekend out with my dog. And I can do that tomorrow. Work in the yard, run my errands, and if there's time, check to make sure the woods are still there...

I am not in the mood to read any Charles Wright, so all my library books are overdue. Drew the page of cups, and propped him up on a little Brandywine tomato seedling here on the bar where I'm writing this.

just need a friend to guard the door, just need a couple minutes on the floor

I just cut the neck out of my blue dragon urban outfitters crop top, and I'm working on my "fancy ramen" post in my lifestyle blog, so that's how my night is going.*


*Great. Genuinely great.

don't be careless with me yet, no, not yet (I'm staying under spiderweb roads)

I keep thinking I should write a thing here. It's not that I don't want to write or lack the energy. It's just been a busy few days. I feel thoughtful and full of progress, but also barely articulate and I'm writing the worst structured sentences.

The weekend was not as restful as it might have been. I had an old friend staying with me, and while it was good to see her, she mostly wanted to talk about people who we knew who had died, and my friends Jill and Jaime, whom she wanted badly to discuss, having never got the full story on that measure, and her being still a mutual friend. I felt a little feverish by the end. I didn't really sleep Sunday night, and I'm still playing catch up.

I am trying so hard to be not a fuck up anymore.

Anemones from the farmer's market. I don't like how perfect they are; they look fake. But you know I like the purpley blue.

Yesterday was nice, with the rain. I went for a long run in it and then had a hot shower.

I do love the Piney river in the spring. Took Rach out this weekend. Ten miles of the trail runs along an old train line, so it's cut into a cliff at points, and Sven kept looking sideways at the rockface. Camping trip before last, I climbed up a cliff into a little cave in one of our favorite sites, and he came along. He must have thought it was pretty fun, because before long, on our hike he was racing up straight vertical walls, sliding down on the shale and slate wastes. It was so cool to see him putting the pieces together, remembering, figuring it out and applying what he'd learned. He's right at that age where he's gaining confidence and trying things out. He thinks he's pretty unstoppable, and I have to agree: I have seen his zoom butt.

I stayed up too late last night, too. I should really just go to bed now, or at least curl up and look at a book or something.