Clouds, cooler weather, seedheads, and the spoor of other people's weekends.
Some of which is what's for dinner tonight:
Feeling suitably elegiac, I guess.
But also enjoying a little subtle pattern-clashing, because today –– All Souls, but also my older son's birthday –– is always something of a pattern clash.
Continuing my rotation of swing dresses, because they're so reliable. Today I'm back in my trusty Wool& Camellia challenge dress with a thrifted cotton-blend open-work sweater (almost not warm enough, in a stunning shift from conditions of the past month), thrifted blue floral infinity scarf, wool Snag tights in "Silver Lining," and my also-trusty thrifted Birk Madeiras. If it starts to rain, I'll have to rush out and drag those tents in, but I'll also put on boots of some description to keep my feet dry. My aim is to walk over to some neighborhood cemetery (there are four I could conceivably walk to from my house) to pray a rosary, which will be weird, since the cemeteries are Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopal, and Presbyterian, but there you have it. If it's wet, I'll definitely wear boots.
Starting to think I have too much hair and should cut it. Trying to ride out that feeling.
Here's a revision of a poem I wrote for my birthday son, which appeared in an online journal a couple of weeks ago, but which I'm sure I'll continue to tweak until it appears in print in book form:
WILDLAND FIRE
For my son
That night, the fire you photographed––respiring
And pulsing in the trees’ bare bones, and scouring
Mountainsides, and hissing its exultet
In the air and underground, through root
Systems, capillaries of buried flame––
Existed, neither memory nor dream.
You stood in it and rested from your work
Of chopping embered tree roots from red earth.
Framed in fire, unseen, anonymous, one
Among helmeted hundreds, you held up your phone
To trap the moment. Otherwise, how could
You tell it, even you, who have a word
Or two to put together? Who could say
What showed itself to you that night? The way
The world burns: this is it, all beautiful
And metastatic. Next year, when that shell
Of ash is downed with grass, and you’ll have followed
Other fires, through other distant, harrowed
Darknesses––Nice national forest you
Got here––and crushed the root beneath the backhoe,
And gripped the bucking hose that like a snake
Fights to free itself and douse the convict
Crew, and all the world is glowing coals,
And in the trees the windblown fire-crown rolls
And surfs, devouring miles, and smoky suns
Rise, or not, you’ll find you can’t say when
You took what photograph, what year, what hour,
What you––unseen and there––what life, what fire.
Fire season is over for this year, and the new round of job-seeking has been underway for some time, which is just life in seasonal work. This week, though, the boy is celebrating with a rock-climbing trip in the Nevada desert with a buddy and the buddy's dog. He's twenty-four, which seems incredible, but it's true. He's also the child I haven't seen in the longest time: not since last Christmas. Suffice it to say that I'm very much looking forward to this Christmas and having all of them home together. This Saturday, which is my birthday, will mean exactly six weeks till Christmas Day. On this son's birthday and mine, I usually contemplate how little (like nothing) I remember of my thirty-third birthday, when he was four days old –– except that there he was, the little marvel.
Well, anyway. I've about finished the copy-editing, and was just about to relax when I realized that I've got to write another of these children's-lit essays, which I haven't even begun to think about. Nothing like these little epiphanies to wake you up of a morning.
LATER:
My lunch was unusually photogenic, but maybe it's just the juxtaposition of plates, speaking of pattern-clashing:
(Clothing is not the only thing I buy cheaply in thrift stores. Pas du tout.)
Also, I just received a text saying that my Wool& reward dress, a long Sierra in charcoal gray, has shipped at last! I hadn't originally wanted a long, and am still a little anxious about how it's going to fit, but as I consider how short all my other new dresses are, maybe it's just as well to have one that's not quite so short. Given how generous the fit of my medium Camellia is, and given that they tend to stretch with wear, I took the risk of ordering a small in the Sierra. My hope was that it would hit in much the same place as the Camellia –– a hair lower would also be fine. I think, if memory serves me, the measured length wasn't that different. I might find that I appreciate a little more length, though I definitely want it to be be short enough not to be cumbersome to hike in, since hiking in dresses has become a thing I do.
Anyway, that and some Poirot short stories comprise the excitment of the early afternoon. That and Poirot and the laundry waiting for me to fold it. That and Poirot and laundry and my extremely good lunch.