~ Farmbeau chops wood;
Pa in his truck on the driveway behind, stopping to chat ~

“Another day,” I thought while waking up. I tried to think of five things about yesterday to be glad about. It was easier than I expected:

1. Don and Barney came home from their weekend with their dad.
2. Farmbeau and I, bedroom, afternoon delight.
3. Walk beneath the calm grey sky.
4. Two hours of freelance work.
5. Vegetable broth made.

And what to do today?
More freelance work.
Puree the broth and put it in plastic containers for freezing.
Go for drinking water.
Bake bread — if there is water before too late in the day; the last of it was used to make two cups of coffee this morning.

I could go to the bank and deposit three cheques.

Two of my winter coats need to be picked up from the drycleaner’s, where they were left for repair.

I could have done the repairs, but would the seam have lasted, would the buttons have stayed on? They don’t when I sew, though I triple- and quadruple-knot.

Would I have gotten around to the sewing? More likely the coats would have hung in the closet another winter and been worn with tears and missing buttons, like last year. Makes more sense to pay a seamstress 10 bucks and be done with it.

I am reading a book called Blue Jelly, by Debby Bull. It’s about healing depression and heartache through canning; folk wisdom shared in a humorous deadpan way. It’s a book I gave to Petra some time ago; I doubt she read it. She goes for murder mysteries and little else.

There is a huge stack of books I am in the middle of. None are keeping my attention in the white-heat way I love to read, where I don’t want to put a book down and can’t wait to pick it up again. Books like that are few and far between. Murder mysteries are some of the best for that. Some of them are terrible -- the writing is so bad.

I just read — well, skipped the entire thing but for the beginning and the ending because it was so tiresome — Ann Prospero’s first novel, Almost Night. This author has won awards for her poetry, the bookjacket says. Maybe this was her first time out, writing fiction, and she’s not very good at it yet. I could not have cared less about the characters, and the writing did not flow easily, but was clunky.

I wonder about the discernment of publishers and editors; I really do. Having your writing published is not necessarily a compliment; sometimes it’s an embarrassment that could have been avoided if an editor had done a good job.

* ** * *** * ** *

“Life is a series of neverending changes.”
- Feng Shui Made Easy, William Spear