We have another wonderful-cool-breeze day. Skip is out of town at his grandson's birthday party. I catch up some of what has fallen behind in the delirium of our first weeks of love-liness. Received in today's mail Branford Marsalis's Romances for Saxophone and it's the perfect match to the afternoon.

Missed you here at full-moon time, but that doesn't mean I didn't see and revel in it. Hope you did, too.

Neighbor kids Kierstuhn&Deaven were here this week and made art at the dining-room table while I cooked dinner. Deaven (5) learned how to hold scissors for the first time to cut out his many-eyed monster. Kierstuhn, of the other two drawings ("SOS help we need help cooking") would much rather use paper for sculptures than for 2D drawings (that's her snake-in-a-tree, snake-on-the-ground piece there ...).
Can't get either of them to open a book. Ah, well.

I have not set foot in the back yard since the pond failed. I do lean out the side door and sprinkle fish food at the solo baby goldfish in my trough. Sometimes I find a little frog resting on one of the lilypads. So LittleBit is not alone.

BrotherB burst into tears over MichaelJackson's demise--on Wednesday afternoon. Took that long to sink in, I guess. Simultaneously he spiked a 103 fever. I don't know whether the grief caused the fever or the fever generated the tears, but his sobbing broke my heart, and the fever was gone by Thursday morning.

I found this afternoon Lobsang's secret napping place on an upstairs bookshelf.

Dreamy days. Daze. I'm very happy. Don't wake me up for a while yet, OK?

Merely balmy

A few hot days, then a few merely balmy. Today was one such, treetoss'd breezes and pleasantly warm.

Our solo goldfish still survives, hooray! and yesterday I found a little frog at rest on a lilypad over its head, so I know it has company.

I'm spiraling down on the work at hand, finally, now that the moving mess is done with. Trying to pull together pieces for a little chapbook. And then editing a small book for young friend LukeS I may bring out for him using a self-publisher.

Creatures are doing very well. Lobsang is becoming gangly as he approaches adolescence. Long and lean, turning Siamese-y. We've looked at a nice dog named Fox who has spent the last 8 months at the local pound. They're giving him the boot. I'm thinking it over.

BrotherB seems content, laughs a lot, relaxed.

Pickup has its new plates.

And until now I haven't generated a blessed word to put in the blog. I'm falling back in step with my morning work, I'm happy with my manfriend I see almost every evening, I'm twittering a bit ("stillferal"), and I seem to be in a bloglull. I suspect once I get reading full-on this space will fill again more regularly.

I miss it.

New edition of A Moveable Feast

"Seán Hemingway has edited a new edition of his grandfather's memoir , which he says gives 'a much better impression of what he was trying to accomplish'.

The story in the June 30 Guardian ...

The kitten lies down on the writing tablet just at the top margin, out of the way. He knows how to find the love. He knows it's required for survival. He comes to me, says Love me. Love me NOW. He looks to where the energy flows. He finds the lower loop of the lemniscate, the Escher-8 of hard attention that brings the divine to bear in the realm corporeal. The kitten, purring, naps at the rim of the attentional vortex, takes in the straying gaze, the absent touch.

***

Pond failed. I've dismantled it and the water seeps out by agonizing degrees.

Seven of the eight goldfish I caught last week, big beauties all, died on transplant. The survivor is the only baby, alone now shooting about in the blackness like a spark, 150 gallons and three pond lilies all to itself. I'll attempt no further transfers of large fish, even if I could catch the others, which I can't. Why make it a massacre? A slaughter is all I can stomach. I'll add some storebought babies and grow my own fish and enjoy the trough-pond just outside my bedroom door, which opens to the yard, while I resculpt, redeploy the pond in months or years to come. A setback. Sobering.

***

The move is finished, my yardscaping has begun, I have my laundry hookups and swampcooler and fence, and that's the end of the moving money. Back to real life, and white light meditation, and the efforts to make something good out of words I arrange, and then dinnertime kisses from my beloved. This is a sweet time.

Ada's dream

One of our Ouija-board buddies, dearest correspondent Ada who lived and died in extreme New England mid-1800s ... She listened for me: when Les and I picked the board up for a session she could hear my voice calling like a dove's, she said, waking her from dream. Ada was about birds. I loved her. Her only child, a daughter, had died in infancy. After I told her my great-grandmother hatched goose eggs between her breasts, Ada told us she'd hatched eggs in a crate full of straw behind the wood stove, and when she returned to bed after turning them on winter nights her husband howled and swore: her cold feet! Ada told us a dirty story about a kern. She called him a kern. That's what these fortune-tellers were called, she said. This kern told fortunes using three small smooth stones. And he kept them in his pocket but the stones liked to be next to flesh. And the kern had a love affair with another man's wife. And when the husband came to her bedside one morning and asked her flat-out was it so, she denied it. But when she got out of bed the three stones fell out of her onto the floor. I could almost hear Ada laugh through the Ouija board. And Ada told me her dreams sometimes. Over there is always dreamtime, she said, just drifting in dreams until drawn to communicate as at our board. And she told me a dream once so vivid I have to remind myself every time I think of it that it's not my dream but hers: geese shambling across a springmuddy farmyard, slow gray geese murmuring in a line. As they approach the dead old stump of a tree it suddenly springs up full-limbed and leafy and in its topmost branches flocks of tiny birds flutter and twitter and sing.

I persist. When the kitten, purring, settles on the cool page of my notebook, turning under his forepaws so contentedly, I simply pull another notebook from the bedside heap and continue. Look at him now, batting the crumpled-paper ball about the room.

I believe summer has arrived. I believe the solstice happened when I pulled my gaze from the skies. I'd fixed it on a pair of eyes inches from my own, blue ones deeper and more unsettling than a mere firmament. The solstice saw its chance. It snuck past when I wasn't looking. Now I glance about to find summer all around me. Poplars flutter their shiny leaves. Armies of old men shove lawn mowers over acres of surrounding lawns. I dreamed something important last night as the new moon tiptoed out the door but I can't grasp a single stitch of it.

After the yowling cat got me out of bed at 5 a.m. I had a sweet deep sleep and then got straight up into the ink. This is a good day. The moon is pregnant with itself.

Got going early today. All serene. Until the first little frustration--why is it always a snagged computer cable?--sends me fuming. Forgot the vitamins. Forgot white light meditation. Forgot the welcome clarity of this morning sky.

Ceding defeat, retreating for the time being, I disassembled the pond. The backhoe's overdeep oblong overwhelmed us. The water diminishes now in on-purpose increments, to the disappointment, no doubt, of its many pilgrim frogs. Today we buy the interim trough, 150-gallon receptacle, and once its water has aged a day or two the fishies will abide there while I sculpt a true pond from the silted ruin. And the water lilies, too.

And after we transfer them at last to the finished pool, I'll use the trough for a bathtub! out the side door.

Reading's been spotty, and so writing has, too. Time to correct that. Dwelling is nearly organized. No excuses.

The local steel&supply house delivered a 100-foot roll of cheap 6-foot fencing on Friday. And now here's the fence guy to put it up for me, just a half-hour late, no biggie. And there he goes to buy three pounds of appropriate staples.

With some attractive viney things climbing up it, I think it will do for a barrier, even in town.

Asparagus is coming up at about 15 percent. And two of the three rhubarbs have leaves. We had a good solid rain over the weekend. Everything's happy.

I had a feeling the new moon was around here somewhere, and here it is today! as of midafternoon, sweet zygote of July's Buck moon, antler-growing moon, also called Thunder moon. We'll see it grow, along with seed-karma we've planted.