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I hope you liked the letters this month. It was nice to spend so much time in the sunshine, making words and thoughts and little stick men appear on clean sheets of paper.

Your impressions that we are leading an idyllic life and this sort of existence is unattainable for the masses are both rather erroneous. I guess the snapshots I sent you do make our life look like something from Pinterest. Right now Thad has the largest mosquito bight on his arm that the world has ever witnessed, so his existence is miserable and it is rubbing off a bit on me. In addition, today is horribly hot and muggy, like we always forget summers can be, and we have no means of cooling the house. So it doesn't feel at all idyllic. I need to clean the house, too, and have been procrastinating like mad, so it's not even pretty at the moment. I think the way we live is very manageable and attainable for everyone. You don't have to move out to the middle of nowhere and toss out your television set to do it. (Although it helps.) We just finally figured out what decisions we have to make, and how to stick to it. Get rid of all your stuff and learn how to make mayonnaise from scratch. It's really very simple. 

I haven't much news for you. Thad's mosquito bight: reported. Weather: duly noted. What else is there to say, other than that I am now remembering what it's like to be hot and sweaty when I wake up in the middle of the night, and that I am not remembering how I made that marvelous iced tea last summer? I have strong belief that the knack will return to me.

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I'm baking bread today. There were a few weeks where I got out of the habit of baking, and I forgot how exemplary and satisfying it is. I really can't think of anything more so. I would drop everything and start a bakery this moment if it didn't mean I would have to wake up early every morning. Isn't it a wonder that flour can be so magical? There is deep sensory pleasure in its texture and habits of floating and slipping and collecting and puffing quite apart from the glory which appears out of the oven. Bread is the most divine medium for eating butter. Most things in life can be valued by their relationship to helping you eat butter.

Every so often, somewhere evenly in the middle between weekly and blue moons, I feel like my mind wakes up. Not that it is asleep the rest of the time, but at these moments it is much more awake. Too awake, too energized, too like a puppy tearing around and tripping you with the reef knot it just tied around your legs with the leash. I am delighted to have such energetic thoughts, but the rest of me panics, grieving for my inability to organize each thought as it arises, name it, catalog it, and rest easy with every seed of brilliance residing in a filing cabinet. Instead they are poured pell-mell through my head, dancing around together and running in and out of about a dozen doors. I run frazzled, trying to shut the doors, but they are opened faster than I can shut them and I don't really get to sit down with my guests and enjoy the party. This hasn't happened to me for a while, but I took enough notes last time during my observation of the phenomenon to contemplate it and present it to you in a pretty analogy bedecked with colored balloons.

Thad has a head cold of monumental proportions and has no snarky remarks with which he wishes to endow you.

It will be still several decades before the temperate weather is here and we will be safe in planting a garden, but the herbs growing on the window sill have begun a race to see who can be the healthiest and biggest, since a few warm days have come and we've opened all the windows as wide as we can. It hasn't really been warm enough to warrant such actions, but we have gotten to the place in early spring where we really, really do not care.

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Thad and I started reading Eric Sloane's Weather Book again. You've read it, haven't you? If you have, you know, of course, what affection thrives within that sentence. 


Everyone dwells on weather constantly, in the most boring and annoying way possible. Small talk and constant television forecasts, but not once does anyone really care about Weather. Isn't it irrational? And confusing. Such pervasive inconsistency. I am afraid that people never saw me as dwelling fiercely in the other camp, where I ignored it unless I was going to adore it. I never knew what the weather would be and I only said anything about it if it was a paean. Here the weather actually matters, to the people we meet, when we meet anyone. Thad and I are intent upon acknowledging Weather as a very important character in the narrative of our lives. We look up at the sky as much as we can. Eric Sloane is helping.

I think I figured out why rain is such a comforting thing. It is comforting, isn't it? Or is that just to me? Can you think of anything more comfortable and cozy than to snuggle up on the couch and read all of a Sunday afternoon, while the rain beats against the window? It's not comforting at all, of course, when you are in it, so I am ignoring such scenarios and listing my reasons to support my theory. There is the steady rhythm, like a heartbeat, which is soothing. But mostly, it's a matter of contrast. You are warm and dry and safe, and the confidence of the impossibility of the threat reaching you intensifies the comfort. You have to have evil to show how shining and pure the good is. You have to have to have bad guys to make it a story. You have to have the rain to make the blanket and the novel so delightful.

These are my experiences with rain. Pathetic British television on rainy Sunday afternoons with my brothers. Falling asleep in the backseat of the car, watching the raindrops chase each other at the end of family vacations. That endlessly raining spring when Thad and I were married and read an unprecedented number of books. I have blocked all memories of camping.

So you see, I've just been thinking and remembering again, and doing nothing interesting at all. Thad sends his love and has been talking about that cheesecake you used to make. I would ask you to send the recipe, but we wouldn't be able to get the ingredients, and I don't have your magic touch. So we are idealizing it in our memory and will come back to be disappointed some day. Except that I don't think your cheesecake possesses the power of disappointing.

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It's been ages since I have talked to you, hasn't it? I am sorry. I would say that my silence does not mean I haven't been thinking of you, but it does, in part. I always had more honesty than tact, didn't I?

Thad came back and when my enthusiasm of being with him again had settled down to its usual level, we had a dramatic rain storm which washed out the lower half of our drive way and felled a rotten, elderly tree which we should have felled ourselves last fall. So we have been a bit distracted by manual labor and instead of spending our evenings thinking or reading or writing, we loll on the couch with our socks all slouchy and eat as much toasted cheese and garlic bread as we can fit inside before we pass out with complete disregard for the fact that we'd be more comfortable sleeping in pajamas in bed. So that's my excuse, in case you missed us. Nothing as dramatic as bear attacks or appendicitis or alien abductions. Although, if you would prefer that, I am sure we can manage staging such an event instead next time.

One thing I miss the most, I realize, is opportunities for people watching. Would Observations of Humanity be a more posh way of putting it? I can go into the village if I so choose, and do once a week for shopping excursions, but the population is small enough that my observations are now entering more the realm of watching neighbors or acquaintances at a party than of regular People Watching. There isn't the drama of the transients of seeing this one person and knowing you'll never see them again. That is what I miss. 

I have been thinking about vulnerability, and have found my definition is a shade different from the accepted one. A shade nicer. (Remind me to discuss the nicety of the word nice, too.) Observing my shade of vulnerability in others makes me feel very tender and motherly. I think it is a matter of a person being unaware of their own self, unconscious, preoccupied with something else. There's more to it than that, but I am much better with examples than definitions, so perhaps I should give them to you first and trust you to gather my meaning. It takes me a bit off guard when I watch a person writing and realize they are left handed. So you see, this left handed person isn't thinking about being left handed, yet it feels so vulnerable, because it is a surprise, and they, if self conscious at all at that moment, are thinking of something else, like their handwriting or being watched or the stupid cowlick. (My words are all gobbing up, gummed up on the point of my pen, in a sense. Thick and cloudy and clingy and persistently inelequent.) Or a person who is unbearably smart and good at everything doing something and being hopelessly inadequate. I can remember several examples. Remember the time the Bartholomew boy read the greeting cards at his birthday party? How you could hear the ends of every line. And he knew everything and could solve every scientific, mathematical, or mechanical problem you could pose. And then, when we were all in awe of him, he started reading out loud and the glass museum case shattered down to the ground and all of the sudden he was this huggable little teddy-bear.

I think it is moments of unconsciousness that I seek out by this. I call it vulnerability, but it isn't, because the object doesn't sense it at all. It's really the exact opposite, right? It's not emotional or mental or conscious. More physical, but not entirely. It is letting the guard down, but not in a way I can presently clearly define. It's forgetting to be aware. Thinking so much about this, here, and what others think of it, that you forget about that. If they were aware of it there wouldn't be that fragility, because there would be a guard even in the awareness and insecurity. So vague, I know, but it makes me feel so tenderly.

Thad read this all over my shoulder and I am now very self conscious and embarrassed and he says I need an editor, which I admit, and also maybe that I don't know what I'm talking about. But I do! I just don't know how to bridge this gigantic gap between what I know and feel and my vocabulary. How my vocabulary lets me down. There is no nicety in my vocabulary, so I throw all the words I possess out here in the hopes that you will understand what I mean. Listen to what I mean, not what I say, and love me in spite of my verbosity. And pretension. Many thanks.

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Thad is still gone and it is raining and I feel a bit lonely. Today is a day for curling up with a fat book, a warm blanket, tea, and a placid cuddler. I am making do with Fabian, who is adept at the placid cuddle, but he's a bit small and I can't get the fire to burn properly. Hence the loneliness. Perhaps if I broke out the chocolate. So much for enjoying my hermitude. 

I suppose there is discrepancy in this whole situation, or at least there appears to be. We have come out here for our indefinite period to live in seclusion and sort out the good from the clutter life was imposing on us. And I complain that I am too alone, now, when I haven't seen family or a movie or a mall for months and months without, until this moment,  feeling the slightest crumb of deprivation. (Maybe there have been crumbs occasionally. But very few.) But it makes sense, doesn't it? One is so much more than nothing than any other quantity can be to one. I don't need society when I have the society of one companionable soul. I know I am indulging self pity. That is what rainy days are for. If only I could say it more clearly.

As to secluding ourselves and leaving it all to find whatever it is we left it all to find: there isn't much news on this front. It's been how many months? But we didn't leave blindly, idealistically, the way I imagine people dream when they say they want to get away from It All. We knew that It was as much inside us as out, and we'd be taking whatever is inside along with us in our one giant, decrepit green car. And it was much less of running away and much more chasing after. We haven't caught up yet, but I feel like we are closer and don't get winded so quickly as we used to. This is all terribly vague, isn't it? The clouds have entered my brain. But here is proof. We can sit still now. That is the great one. There are others, but the kettle is whistling, so you'll just have to wait.

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Most of the time I think of us, humanity, as being properly sized, neither too big or too small, and then every once in a while, (as I hope most people do,) I think of us in comparison to the world we live in. Aren't we tiny? It isn't such a problem that we are around 1/5280th or whatever of the height of the sky (I can't remember the exact numbers anymore), or that we forget how small we are, but how hopelessly lateral we are. At least, that's what bothers me. We make great expansion all over the surface of the earth, and goodly expansion, too, and move all around at great speeds. But our whole existence is parallel to the ground, and we have no concept, or very little, of the perpendicular. We go up in airplanes, but only to move parallel at a greater distance from the surface. Even our loftiest, most impressive sky scraping feats of architecture are about as close to scraping as dipping your finger into a full jar of peanut butter for a quick taste is scraping. You step back from a city renowned for it's tall buildings and view the horizon and receive a reinforced impression of how flat our lives are. I'm not sure this is a bad thing, but I do think we should be more aware of the vertical and take breaks from our headlong horizontal dashings to look up at the clouds. (The ones here aren't much today, but I can see beauty in monotony quite easily, if I take the time.)

Thad is away for several days, so I have been enjoying complete solitary confinement, although it hasn't felt like it because of Fabian the cat and because the birds are back on speaking terms with me. It is the height of luxury, I think, to wake up and hear birds singing every morning. I want to make these days alone count, because it seems so much easier to accomplish things when I am by myself, but so far I have succumbed to all the little chores and things, and have gotten no where near my great tasks. Great they are indeed, being to bake bread in bakery proportions to take to our distant neighbors, to reread Emma, to explore the muddy woods, and to finish piecing a quilt top I have had sitting in a cupboard for too long.

Is it tacky to tell you that writing to you was one of my little chores? I'm crossing it off now, and you may take what moral you like from it. I shall be reading Emma.

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Isn't music strange? I don't know how to fathom it, and possessing as much as the next the human weakness of being unable to handle what they do not understand, sometimes I am frightened by it. Only when I think about it. The rest of the time I am drawn by it and enveloped in its beauty and quite happy until I try to figure it out. It is everything. And nothing. It can be anything, any emotion, and move you more dramatically than anything else. And yet it isn't anything in particular. Unless you put words to it, it doesn't mean anything you can say. It is distilled emotion. Or is it different to other people? I often wonder, because I don't understand it. And it is too decidedly present tense, which muddles me even more. I don't know what to do with the progression of time. Music makes it more obvious. But here I am thinking about it too much. Thad is reading over my shoulder and telling me I am indeed thinking too much, and we ought to dance instead. So he's changing the music from whatever contemplative piece he has going right now (I can never remember piece names) to infectious dance music. 

So long. I must dance. I will tell you more of what we are doing soon. For now, it is just going to be dancing.

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I don't remember much what I was like when I was very small. I think if I were to be a child now (and my present self being a child could be quite a different person from my real child self), I should be the one to always be saying, "Do it again," and to have the same books read to me every night. I am desperately fond of tradition, habit, routine. I feel like our culture is on a perpetual quest for novelty. It isn't in love with novelty, it just follows after it very hard. We all desire the good and know we don't have it right now, so surely it will be in this new thing, this different way of doing things, this dramatic experience. I wonder how long, if ever, before we figure that out?

I have to tell you about our grocery store. You would go into spasms of joy over it. It's even smaller than you are imagining, in this log cabin down town, with Elijah the Wooden Indian guarding the front door. It stocks only the basics recognized by the 1950s and frosted animal crackers (so no healthy organic options or experimenting with culinary rarities for us). However, I am quite happy, because that includes my cooking and eating necessities nicely: milk, cream, butter, eggs, and cheese. It is run by a family who have all the exactly same faces and wardrobes that consist only of rubber boots, yellow rain coats, and plaid. You'd think they were trying to appeal to a tourist population, but there is no tourist population, so maybe they haven't noticed what charm they possess, or have rustic illusions of grandeur. Their faces are all the same, but they each have distinct voices, so Thad tries to get them to talk so we can tell which is which. (He exaggerates, of course, because they are all different ages and sizes, so we can tell them apart that way.) My favorite is the teenage daughter, who has this throaty gray voice which is what smoke would sound like if it could. Woodsmoke from a nice campfire.

You might want to ignore my Pretending to Be Deep bits of yesterday. You know I write to help myself think, don't you? So lots of times I'll say things that are only half true or the shadow of what I mean or second cousin to the thoughts I am trying to find out. I'm writing to find out, so don't be up in arms. Instead, use your arms to give me a nice little hug and say very softly, in a mothering voice, that what I said isn't exactly how it is. Part of the way I think is saying things that aren't true out loud so other people can tell me the other side that I can't see on my own.

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I am very pleased with today. The sky is the same color as the rather sad snow under the trees in the woods. It is warm enough to take long walks without mittens, so that is what we have been doing.

What are you reading these days? You always used to have something fascinating tucked in your bag, something just ahead of me. I always aspired to be you, although I am quite convinced that if I had ever gotten two books ahead, you would have been the one aspiring to be me. I am reading several books at once, as usual. (I have had some revelations on this matter, which I have presently tucked into an unseen corner of my mind. I will bring them out presently and show them off to you, but not today.)

Aspects of the Novel, by E.M.Forster, is taking up most of my attention. It's very exciting to read a set of lectures and understand everything he is talking about and know about all (or almost all) the subject matter as a matter of course. Topped off by stretching all of the edges of my thoughts and organizing my lifetime of reading into sensible themes. I am very grateful to him. Thad can attest to it. I have been giggling over nearly every paragraph. 

I am in the section about people right now. He says life for humanity is divided pretty much into five categories: Birth, Food, Sleep, Love, and Death. Which seems pretty accurate to me. It is exciting for me to see it so laid out, because I am greatly enthralled with the first four, and I expect my interest in Death is growing, too.  His points were of course in context of novels as much as human experience. Birth and Death are pretty much mysteries, novels don't care much at all about Food and Sleep, and so are mainly taken up with Love. Where real people, he claims, can spend possibly no more than two hours a day on Love (or so?), while we dedicate as much to Food, and about eight to Sleep. (For me it is nine.) So let us think about that for a while. Everyone knows I love food almost as much as I love Thad.

I think Forster was thinking mainly of romantic love, although he acknowledged it's little roots slinking into every bit of life and all the motivations for everything. So I let my mind run off on the tangents he wisely chose to ignore. I am choosing to redefine it as all love, especially familial, and to prove how we may perhaps spend less than two hours a day dedicated to it, or the desire to be loved, it is the cause of all we do. Work and careers and all that, being too vague and unnecessary (behold, how many books are written about the rich!) to be one of the Main Facets, takes up at least as much time as sleep for most people, but the motivation for it, at least beyond maintaining existence, is out of love for the people in their care or the desire to be loved and valued by others. Isn't it? Or am I romanticizing humanity again?

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Don't you wish you could see all of the patterns in life? I know they are everywhere, but I'm so caught up in the thick of living that I only catch glimpses of them out of the corner of my eye, or when I look up suddenly. I believe strongly that they are in all of the aspects. You hear about them in history. I have been seeing them in people's interactions. We really have no idea that we are doing carefully planned steps in a dance, but I swear we are. I want to choreograph ballets or make those weird, beautiful art films, because I want to capture those dances and say, "Here! Look! This is happening! This is magnificent!"
 
There is a circle of people around a man telling a joke. They lean in, slowly, closer and closer, so that you can see the progression of the story he tells. Closer, closer, slowly, slowly, and then burst! Fling back the shoulders, tip back the head, laugh loud and bright, like a flower blooming. 

Hungry, shopping for groceries. Push a heavy cart down a dull isle of frozen food. Stand long in front of the glass, surveying the too many choices, too hungry to decide. Chicken in front, pizza behind. Here comes another, from the other end, pushing the dull cart through the heavy isle. Stops for the pizza, too hungry to decide quickly. Back to back, bored and starving. Open the door with the little blop sound. Pick something with dissatisfaction. The door behind opens with a blop. Slow decision with the waft of too cold air. Blop, blop, the doors close. With squeak of shoe and wheels in need of oiling, the carts roll apart, heavy, pushed, evenly and opposite.

It's a dance. We can't see it for the punch line and the growling stomach, but we are dancing through our lives, graceful and ignorant.

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I don't claim to think any particularly original thoughts, but I do claim your unfailing interest in hearing all of my second-hand thoughts. I have been cogitating a great deal, but not succinctly enough to write them all down for you. Maybe someday soon they will be ripened sufficiently.

I hope someone cleverer than I has done some figuring out about eye contact and catching people's eyes and all that. There is something definitely prescient or whatever the proper word is about it. It's such a split second job, catching a stranger's eye, because you look away right away. But how do you both look at the same moment with such magnetism? Most of the time, at least for me, it isn't two scanning beams of radar crossing. It's both looking up from your coffee and book across a room at the very same second and immediately glancing far away because, heavens, one doesn't stare at strangers in polite company. Or again, that sense that someone is looking at you, and then you look up and they are. How can you feel it? I think you really do have eyes all over your body, observing and absorbing and aware, and only a little bit of it gets through to your conscious mind.

I saw three deer, a sun dog, and a cloud of birds today. They all seemed glad to grace my day.

Occasionally I will think I ought to write less about the weather, because it's socially agreed upon as something dull. But honestly, it isn't. It's brilliant and fascinating and makes up so much of my life and my thoughts that I jolly well am going to write to you about every drop of rain trembling on the fern fronds when I take walks in the woods this summer and you're going to hear all about the extra sunny sun and the very blue sky. Just like I used to think how nice it would be if there were more movies and books without any girls or without any boys. Nonsense. They aren't refreshing: they are decidedly dull and unclever. Quite parallel to the weather. Without it I should certainly be dull.

Wishing you the reverse of dull, and very much Weather indeed.

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All along I have been discovering all these necessities of life which are apparently great secrets, since no one ever talks about them. I don't think many people know. This week I have been trying to collaborate a list of them, because properly organizing makes everything sure.
 
One of them is stillness. Sunshine. Great windows that show you birds and clouds and leaves bouncing in the winds. Hammocks. Taking walks barefoot. Taking walks at all. Breakfast, of course. Having a pond to swim in. 

I don't even know how to swim, but that was the great bit of last summer. There's this pond a six minute walk to the East through the woods when there isn't any snow, and during most of summer it was just a shade on this side of Too Chilly to Be Borne, but it is always surprisingly clear, unless there's someone kicking up the mud. We'd go and float about or stand in it until we were just too cold, and then sit on the one rock, which isn't really big enough for drying off. We discovered certain exquisite shafts of sunlight and two quarrelsome squirrels and one kindly one. We often combined our dips in the pond with picnics, on our own Box Hill. We call it that, because it looks a bit like it, although it's entirely pleasant and never unbearably hot. Fresh bread, pounds of butter, a nice bit of crumbly cheese, iced water, and you have the best bit of life you ever will. Especially if you can manage to bring some just right peaches. 

There is much, much more to go on the list of Obvious, Unknown Necessities, but for now, I can only think of about every kind of food and milk glass. Sometimes I confuse my love for life and my love for milk glass. They are easily mixed up, both being so strong, the objects both  magnificent. And then there is Time. I think there are others, but time is what makes them all lovely. Oh, and books! Everything is something I missed before we came out here, or if I had it, I didn't have the time or the heart or the eyes to take delight in it. But here we live slowly, with grace, with joy, with deep love and always expecting to land upon some new island of beauty.

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These months have opened my eyes to what a charming custom breakfast is. I'm never hungry for the first several hours after I wake, so I never really ate it and never missed it. But ever since we got married, it has become a Great Thing Without Which We Cannot Do. So we often skip lunch. Or, I do. A really good breakfast takes a bit of time to make, so it isn't eating as soon as you get up, which solves most of my objections against it. (My objections were all practical and flimsy and unemotional and therefore backed hardly at all.) There are a few which take no time, and of these we accept half. Toasted muffins, cheese, pears, and tea, and variations thereof, are swift. I think I like them best, too, though Thad prefers the ones that take time and flipping of pancakes and frying of bacon just so and slicing potatoes and all that.

We love food more than anyone else we have ever met, so everything about it is magical and splendid.  There is the morning light, which is shy and still. There is the sitting across from each other, still a bit bleary eyed, not saying anything. There is the marmalade and the warm tea and the slouchy socks and informality and delight of being alive. I haven't words for it, as I seem to be in most places these days, but I have acres and acres and acres of feelings. I am feeling more intensely. I attribute this to the fresh air.

We linger about breakfast. Linger making it, linger setting the table or getting out the dishes or carrying the tray to the bedroom, (slowly, so as not to spill the little pitcher full to the top with milk) in the eating and the tasting and the sipping, and in the washing up afterward. I think breakfast may be the clearest way to say “I love you,” both to a person and to life.

I don't think a person should ever eat breakfast unless they are going to go about it slowly, with love. Never in haste, never with a crabby spirit. Well, I admit I am often crabby in the morning, especially if Thad makes me breakfast in bed (which is just tea and fruit and toast which I don't eat because he doesn't put enough butter on, no matter what I say), but it's never crabbiness against food or Thad or even really morning. Morning is the very best.

You know how I used to loathe mornings? I'd hate them, or think I did, because I hated everything I clapped eyes on, especially the people who were so cheerful. But here there is such stillness and not a hint of bustle, and morning blossoms in her shyness and touches me with such love. It helps that we have so many windows and the only other person within about four miles is Thad. He is sufficiently standoffish to keep me happy.

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Thad and I are being home bodies, as ever, and my thoughts aren't particularly brilliant, as ever, but I know you like to hear from us none the less. (I like that phrase. None the less. I often think of it as a single word, like Therefore and Henceforth.)

I take great delight in the change of the seasons, although I may not look it. Or at least get redundant over it. But they really are delightful, and I really am surprised every year. Winter into spring is of course the most dramatic, and, for me, always surprises me the most. I can remember what it is like for everything to be stunningly green and to have the sun beat down (only barely, but I can remember it), but I forget every year the sound that that slushy ice makes when you step on it and crack it, and so it comes as a great surprise. Delightful, beyond anything, to remember the sounds and smells you hadn't thought about for a year. There is that satisfying crunching sound on occasional days when we walk down the drive to see if any mail came, and new birds singing when we forgot there were birds and that they knew such sweet songs. Last week, we heard thunder, and once smelled Spring, although we can't now. All this you know, of course, because everyone, since the seasons began, has been exclaiming over them. But it doesn't matter, because every spring is the first, and it is also the first thing we learned. I don't know how to say it, but I know you know it is true.

When I was young, I had this vague, sure understanding that there were Smart People. I guess intellectuals. And I thought colleges were teaming with them. Maybe I circulate the wrong groups, or maybe I've gotten to be too smart myself, but I am being strongly disillusioned. Colleges are full of normal people, if not, in extremity, dull ones. I guess I have a great desire to look up, and so far it seems I only get to look around. I know I'm not too smart, so it's disappointing to think that intellect is on the decline. But again, perhaps I just don't know how to find it or how to see it.

My window sill plants are thriving, which is beyond me. I thought they would have a fear of the cold that comes through the window, but they don't. What have we to fear but fear itself? Snakes, of course, but other than that? I'm just talking nonsense now, so I'll wish you well and go see if Thad is making dinner like he said he would.

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I have been carefully reviewing my life, and find that I have been quite wrong about it all along. I lived under the assumption that my life is normal and boring. Maybe it isn't that my life isn't normal. Maybe it's my definition of normal. I believe the cause of whatever my misinterpretation is created by the joint influences of having a phlegmatic temperament and being a rather horrible storyteller verbally. Oh, and my memory isn't anything significant, either. So when odd things happen to me, I forget they aren't the sort of thing that happens normally because I have little emotional response, and immediately after I forget about them because I don't tell them to anyone, and then I just plain forget forever. But I have experienced many remarkable things, and I'll tell them to you, if I ever can conjure up some memory. They've been happening all my life, not just this past year, and I just didn't have eyes to see them. But maybe they happen to everyone, all the dramatic coincidences and weird, delightful interactions with strangers. Maybe only some have the gift of presenting them with enough fanfare to make them seem out of the ordinary. We all of us have such clouded eyes.

I just baked cookies and have eaten an unfortunate amount. Thad is supposed to be helping me learn self control, but he brought the pan in and put it on the couch next to me instead.

I have such a plethora of thoughts that they all together switch back and forth between all crowding forward and all hiding behind each other. Not much has been happening here, and so I don't have much to say, as my thoughts are on the decline at the moment. I asked Thad if he had anything he thought I should write about, and he said, "Please pass the cookies." He's drawing up the blueprint for some idea, but I can't tell what it is yet.

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Today was an exceptionally bright day. Whether this was because of the extra vitamin D I have begun taking, the beautiful British alternative rock and Baroque piano music that played all day, the fact that we neither of us tried to accomplish anything today, or just because our bones know spring is coming, I do not know. It was just a very good day, and my mind is agog over the thoughts that are about to pop into my head.

When we went to France and Italy for our honeymoon, we went to every cafe we could find that had those tables outside, right on the edge of the street. Therefore, I have forgotten the name of every single one. At one of them, for seven minutes I leaned over the back of my chair and spoke very bad French to a four year old boy. We debated what constitutes a Beautiful Day.  Apparently my interpretation has always been too broad. But today really was, honest.

I have been feeling very fond. I don't know if this is the effect of the great above listed conglomeration, or because I've been watching movies about family, or if I am really loving more. Thad has noticed. He says I am like a reverse aging cat, with my solemn superiority era passed and the cuddling kitten phase on the rise. Which just means he has improved at everything so I give less advice and I do more of the staring at his profile and giving squeezy hugs whenever we pass in the kitchen or hall. For all we've been hunting how to open our eyes wider, it always comes when we least expect it. I am seeing this week how precious and finite everyone I love is. I want to hold onto them a little bit tighter. So it makes it hard that we haven't seen any of you for such a long time.

I always say "I miss you" in the middle of a conversation, after spending a long time with my beloved ones. Tenses, what are they? I have missed you, I will miss you soon, I will miss you for ages and ages when you are gone, and the burden will be too much to bear because of the beauty of your soul.

Stay a little longer, my lovely ones. I haven't held you long enough.

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I suppose you should like to hear from us and how we are. I'm not very good at this, as you well know. Maybe I am good at the writing part (I don't know), but I am intimidated by the communication. There is this great high wall I have to get over to reach you, and I am very afraid the sincerity and truth will be lost, and then what is the point? So that's why I haven't written until now.

We are in excellent health and comparative peace. It rained a great deal today, which was joy for me (to sit by a fire and read and see flashes of lightning and hear thunder after a winter of phlegmatic, silent snow!), but I guess it wreaked havoc with various things concerning Poorly Shingles and Ice Layers. Thad was very preoccupied with them, but as I didn't seem to care (as indeed I didn't really), he kept it to himself.

Remember how my hands used to be all smooth and lacking character? Not really pretty, of course, because my skin isn't anything other than useful, and I inherited rather stocky fingers. Things have changed a lot. I'm not sure what, although I guess that's an idiotic thing to say. Everything has changed, so why shouldn't my hands? The veins stand out now, a cross between what we used to admire in strong men's hands and the soft hands of my grandmother. Remember that one time when we stayed up too late and talked about hands? And the next day we went shopping and stared at everyone's hands in the quest for finding you a perfect man. When I was little, my grandmother would come to visit and I would sit close beside her and hold her hand while she talked with my parents. I would just sit and hold her hand and stroke it and look at it. They were very soft but used to work, and freckled softly and the veins were distinct and she had three really pretty rings. My hands are neither strong nor elderly, but you get the idea. You can see little bumpy intersections of veins, and I find it fascinating. I like to watch my hands do things, because they are express and admirable in movement, but they know they are being watched and that takes something away.

I have stayed up too late writing this, and I will miss out on dreaming tonight. I shouldn't mind so much, because I get to live such a nice life in the daylight, but I do. I figured out a little bit about why I like dreams so much. They let me live another life. All sorts of lives in all sorts of places, to see all sorts of architecture and colors and textures. That might be what intrigues me most about dreams. I have the surroundings of my life, these exquisite surroundings, but they are set and can only change so much. Books certainly take me to other worlds, but those worlds are peopled with people, and the landscape is vague. My mind falters and is hedged in. When I dream I can lay hold on anything to see or touch, and so much better than I can in any other place.

I wish you ever fresh dreams and the taste of spring you are looking for.