A warm, still night, with smoke enough to twitch the nose and rile the passages — but by four this morning, the atmosphere had lightened considerably, and the air was clear enough to go out for a run. At present, it feels like there’s more smoke inside the house than out. I saw no one save two cats, one black with a bell — a bell-black inky tinkler — one orange-cream, pale tangerine, as motionless and silent as a streetlight sage. Both were aware of me, and each of the other. Sum total, minus raccoonity and skunkosity, and no hint or sign of oppossumness: fall-dust, zen-calm.
Found under the fir tree: the dessicated remains of a rat, only slightly larger than a mature cone.
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I met a kind snail — wise book in a shell. Bragged not his colors — wept when I fell.
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Sunflower visitors: housefinches, goldfinches, nuthatches, chickadees, and scrub jays — talkative, squawkative.
Read the twenty-first and twenty-second chapters of Middlemarch, finishing Book II of Vol. I, “Old and Young,” bringing me to Book III, “Waiting for Death.” Page 313. The author has great sympathy for her characters, which of course are not characters, but real people, born of her life, born of herself.
“. . . It is no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight, — in art or in anything else. . . .”
September 16, 2023.
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[ 1869 ]
Categories: If It Had A Name
Tags: Birds, Cats, Chickadees, Colors, Dust, Fall, Finches, George Eliot, Middlemarch, Nuthatches, Opossums, Raccoons, Rats, Reading, Running, Scrub-Jays, Skunks, Smoke, Snails, Street Lights, Sunflowers, Wildfires, Wisdom, Zen
William Michaelian 