I’m not sure if I can attribute it to being too fond of books, as the Lainie’s Lady sent to me from Brisbane, Australia, by a friend says, quoting Louisa May Alcott, but today my brain has been addled by sickness and general aching malaise.
It’s nearly dusk. The clouds above our stretch of houses here on this quiet NE 22nd Avenue hillock up from Lombard toward Alberta Park are a soft mauve and gray. This is peace, you know, this sitting here with Billie Holliday on the iPod, watching the light leach from the day, the blue-gray of Roy’s house next door become flatter and purely gray. Even as I flail about, questioning and wondering, feeling another day gone, slipped away, out of my hands because of a body not cooperating, not allowing me to feel well enough to attend an event I said two months back I’d go to. Lots of issues with that, my feeling less-than-perfect, a party pooper, a lackluster disappointment. Planes circle, pass overhead, prepare to land.
There are pink buds on fruit trees in back yards and on the median between the sidewalk and the street. Our own garden bursts with pollen, ripeness from the giant maples. We’re here barely two months in this home, this place I continue to unpack, sort, organize, and arrange.
The public domain photograph above is of colorized pollen from the Dartmouth Electron Microscope Facility at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
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