10AM – awake at 730, lay in bed until 8. i dreamed the peaches on our tree were ripe. S has gone walking, and brings me back a mocha. i make eggs and toast for breakfast, with raspberry pepper jam we made the week before. 

1230 PM – much time in the garden harvesting cucumbers and peppers, we chop up some jalapenos and put them in a jar with vinegar and sugar. then, fertilize the plants. we mix up 5 gallon buckets of water and fertilizer mix, and each plant gets a scoop. we go through two and a half buckets this way.. 

dictionary discoveries: 

tisane – a decoction of herbs, tea basically. i came across this word randomly, but it made me smile to remember agatha christie’s hercule poirot always fussing about his tisane, which i at the time had always thought must be some exotic belgian drink. it seems it is just tea after all. 

tipuloid – belonging or relating to the crane flies. 

530 PM – out, driving about to pick up various online orders. garden stakes, mason jars, vinegar. when pulling into one of the oh so many barren and identical parking lots, i see a slashing of the purest blue laying on the edge of the road. it is simply broken glass, i’m sure, but so blue, like a tropical ocean, like hidden glacial underbelly, like a wedge of chill november sky fallen to earth and shattered here on this dead plain of american asphalt. it flies into my eye, then is gone behind me. just some trash. so why am I still thinking about it? 

home. we sit on the grass and read for a while. ants crawl over my kindle, immersed in the drama of their own lives, unsensing and unaware of the black squiggly marks beneath their little feet that mean so much to me. 

what a world we live in, vast and tiny at once. a world that will never be fully known to us, filled with patterns we’ll never comprehend… 

11 PM – silence. i miss the sound of frogs. i often would hear their singing out my office window, but i’ve not in a while. i suppose frog season is over. the rainy nights they prefer have been absent these overly hot and dry weeks. 

now i have only the sound of the nearby highway, the occasional growling sportscar or groaning truck. it’s not a terrible background. it’s a reminder, even if only subconsciously, that there are other people in the world. other sparks of awareness hurrying home or rushing out, fleeing or chasing… without that noise, i’d only have the ringing in my ears. i’d only have complete silence and stillness and ringing ears and an utterly black and empty void out the window like the dead infinity of space. i might, then, without the voice of the highway, find myself stranded in the blackness, surrounded by shrinking walls.