Some lovely mail from Wiseblood Books this past weekend, a gift for having been a recipient of the publisher's fiction residency last summer. I've read . . . a few paragraphs so far? But I'd been wanting to read this book on Coleridge and Wordsworth in the time they spent together, early in their careers, to produce the Lyrical Ballads. For the commonplace book I don't actually keep, unless you count this blog:
One of Wordsworth's criteria for pleasure in poetry was "the sense of difficulty overcome," and this is a central theme of this year (1797-98): their poetry was not a culmination or a summation, but had its life at the beginning of things, at a time of what Seamus Heaney called "historical crisis and personal dismay," emergent, unsummoned, encountered in the midst of difficulty, arriving as unexpectedly as a figure on a night road, or a vision in mid-ocean, or the wisdom and understanding of a child.
I'll be chewing on this (from the second page) for some time.
Meanwhile, this has also arrived at last:
That's my husband's bookmark. He's not habitually a reader of fiction, but he is reading this work of fiction. I just can't . . . though I suppose at some point I've got to pick some passages to read for readings.
Wearing again today, for dog walking (done), writing, and general housework:
My Maggie dress, which I'm trying to lean on a little more regularly. She seems to stretch out in the heat --- I could swear she wasn't this long (mid-knee) when I left the house to walk the dog. I think if I order another Maggie I'll go for a small, because I'm feeling a little swallowed in the medium today. I do like her belted and am glad to have a dress I can belt without its becoming too short. The purple shoes don't provide much of a contrast, but they are comfortable for walking and other on-my-feet pursuits.
She's nice and easy and breezy, though. I get compliments every time I wear her. I am looking forward --- as I might have said a time or two already --- to the fall, as in real fall weather, when I can wear boots and tights and cardigans with this dress. She's truly versatile, with so many possibilities for year-round wear, from the beach to a snow day. I haven't yet tried a shirt tied over, either, because it's just been too warm for even light layering, but that will be fun to try as well.
I'm trying out the dehydrator function on my air-fryer/convection-oven thingy, attempting to dry peppers from the garden. I have a mix of jalepenos which have turned red and banana peppers on their way to turning red, so think I'll make a mix of pepper flakes to put in things over the winter. I could just string them up to dry, but if I can dry them without their getting dusty and cobwebby, as things hanging around here are wont to become, then all the better. With nobody else doing things in the kitchen, making breakfast before work and so on, this is a good time for such projects.
I have laundry to fold, and some 30-minute task to perform in my son's room, which is . . . quite the scene in the wake of his departure. So far I've stripped the bed and washed the sheets. If I give myself a little task every day (hauling out one bag of garbage, gathering up one washload of clothes I guess he decided he didn't need?), then in a few days I'll have the cleaning knocked out. It's not as awful as it could be, but I think we are going to need a reckoning about the way we leave things.
I could just leave it the way it is, to fester until he comes home again, but I do like having the whole house in order around me, ready for company --- we have a houseguest coming Labor Day weekend, for example, and I'm going to put him in the daughter's room (though my husband said, "Isn't that a little too girly? He could sleep in my office . . ."). The daughter's room, as I have explained, is simply the cleanest, nicest, most comfortable bedroom in the house besides ours, which is occupied. Now that she doesn't have bunk beds anymore, but a full-sized regular bed (thanks to the husband's curbside discovery of a whole, very nice bedframe which our neighbors had decided to discard), her room is the guest room, end of story. BUT potentially I'd like both those rooms to be company-ready, because you just never know who's going to turn up when.
The face of a person mentally rehearsing her reckoning speech, to be delivered at Thanksgiving or something, she guesses, maybe.
But also, these came in the mail today:
This is a limited-run chapbook (I think the pressrun is a hundred) from Belle Point Press, beautifully done. The prose series seems not to be up in the publisher's shop yet, and I don't think the official release happens until September, but anyway, it's a lovely tiny one-story chapbook, and I'm so happy to hold it in my hands.