A perfect day, sunny, but with a very strong breeze that's getting into everything, mussing the trees, tossing my porch curtains up against me, and blowing around my hair. The air has some kind of scent memory to it, something I'm attracted to, a mixture of laundry and dead leaves and clean, wood-fed fire. It would be a good day to camp, or go for a long run someplace beautiful. There are buckeye butterflies on the verbena in my garden. Something I learned about poetry early on is that you could just say the names to things, and people would like it in poems. Early frost euphorbia. Firepower dwarf nandina. Coronation gold yarrow. Volcano purple phlox. It just sounds good. It sounds right. Even my favorite tree in the yard: catalpa. It's like what I was saying a couple posts ago about the name of that river down in Clarksville. You can just tell it's a word native to the region, the way the sound repeats back on itself. 

I wrote a post last night but then woke up at 3 am and deleted it. It had a whiff of terrorism about it, if that makes sense, a self-immolation that I didn't actually feel. It was reflecting on my week of being alone. I guess I had a big feeling about this week that "something would happen." I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting, but it didn't occur. Nothing really occurred, actually. I was good at the simple tasks of keeping the house, the pets. I drank a startling amount less than I normally do, except for last night, when the pool got cancelled for bad weather and my friends just came over to sit on the porch instead. So I mostly want to drink a lot in front of other people? That doesn't seem true, because I like drinking: the very act of it, the ceremony, the glasses, the lore, the ritual. But it was an interesting counterpoint. 

Last night, when my friends had gone, I lay on the cool wood floor of my kitchen and listened to Coldplay. There is some album of theirs that was one of the only things downloaded to the iTunes at my first job at the coffee shop when I was a teenager, when I didn't know the person I was going to be, when I didn't yet realize I was going to be this person that I am. It's like one of those movies from childhood that you watch over and over until you have the beats of it memorized. I knew every word by heart, not because I love Coldplay so much, just because it was the only thing we had. I would put it on when I was closing alone and the store was dark and a little bit frightening. It was a good experience though - sometimes I still dream about it, cleaning the beautiful machines, scraping the ice cream cooler, wiping the counters with Windex which was all we had for some reason, and counting out the register. Good dreams, dream I wake up from feeling content.

The nandina is groaning against the house in the wind. I think I can feel my toes getting sunburnt. I need to get up and move.