Greenland, NH

Once again it's midnight, and I find myself typing, typing, and not writing much of anything. It's frustrating, I suppose - I've got all sorts of half-written thoughts and half-thought scribblings to shape and polish and fling into the void - but until I figure out how to sync up the palm pilot with the computer, those proto-posts will just have to stay up there on my mental shelves to gather dust. It's okay, though: pictures can wait. Posts can wait. What can't wait is the present moment, the here-and-now, and all it offers up if we just stoop down to take it in our hands.

And so I do.

And it is glorious.

I love it when everyone else falls asleep and the house settles into stillness; love how the tensions of coexistence slip off my shoulders, leaving me naked and fragile and ready to ease into solitude like it's water. Daylight is home to so much hive-like activity, and we spend it scrambling and buzzing and flitting about, intent on our insect missions. By the time darkness strokes us into stillness, there's a certain grace in simply sitting down and letting the lamps coat our shadows with their meager, golden aureoles of stolen time.

I'm sitting in my mother's office, about to go upstairs to the bedroom I spent my childhood nights in. The ocean I grew up on and in, the sands and rocks and spartan, salty plants, all lie about six miles to the East. Outside the front room, the crab-apple tree quietly pumps today's sunlit memories from leaves to fruit, heartwood beating with September's familiar rhythm. Feverfew stands sentinel around the old apple stump, and there's a new batch of pixie-like spearmint spiking its piercing, persistent way up through the ground by the outdoor tub. The pines between the woodshed and the studio lean against each other like old men, dripping aromatic droplets of sap onto everything below like they're stories of the War.

The night air sings with the scent of almost-Autumn. What was it Keats wrote, "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun..."?

Fall and all, it's only a matter of time...