Sunday Salad

The moon, hidden by a bright, sprawling cloud — an illuminated island, complete with inlets and shore, a drifting, conscious continent.

Yesterday evening, and into the early morning hours, there was a very active thunderstorm. What was left of the day’s heat was quickly washed away, the air sweetened with rain mixed with small hail. The crickets became lightning bugs. At one point we heard laughter in the street; this happened not long after a flash of lightning was followed almost immediately by thunder, which sounded as if it were almost directly overhead, but must have been about half a mile away. Certainly in our history, someone must have been struck and killed by lightning while laughing, thus having the last laugh.

Read the sixth chapter of Middlemarch, which is headed by this epigraph: My lady’s tongue is like the meadow blades, / That cut you stroking them with idle hand. / Nice cutting is her function: she divides / With spiritual edge the millet-seed, / And makes intangible savings.

This afternoon I came face to face with a hummingbird, which stood on air at slightly more than arm’s length. After I’d been thoroughly studied, she came to rest on a bare maple twig two or three feet farther away. There she sat, and there I stood; we looked at each other for a full minute, with clover on the ground, and flowers all around, until I decided it was time to go inside and make our Sunday salad.

September 3, 2023.

[ 1856 ]