The Slough is Coming Closer

Still rainy; the new flowerbeds love it (see my little camper back in the trees?)

Another wet dark day; puddles in the grass.

Scott leaves to work at the old school in Kuroki, which is now a private home where he has done repairs and renovations. I sent four pots of lambs' ears for the lady's yard. Still need homes for daylilies, shasta daisies, peonies. Two gardeners want some but haven't come for them yet. There is probably no rush when it comes to Scott going through the back yard with a cultivator; a more pressing anxiety, if there is one, is that they are getting weedy.

I make myself a couple large mugs of coffee and come back to bed to read Virginia Woolf's diary.

I think about Grandma Benson, shut my eyes, which water, and imagine her here with me, patting my shoulder and saying in her stoic, slightly clucky and unsympathetic way, "Don't be silly."

Talked to old beau Jeff yesterday; he is enthusiastic about his experiences after smoking salvia and going to send me some, which I may not have the courage to try.

I'm reading Jacob's Room as I go along in Virginia's diary at the same time she was writing the novel, but am more interested in Virginia's own life.

J's Room: "As for the beauty of women, it is like the light on the sea, never constant to a single wave. They all have it; they all lose it."

Among women there is so much discussion about inner beauty being what's important and how we're all "beautiful," and I think fine, but why do we have to be beautiful?

J's Room, re beauty: "No one can count on it or seize it or have it wrapped in paper."

...

"Thus if you talk of a beautiful woman you mean only something flying fast which for a second uses the eyes, lips or cheeks of Fanny Elmer, for example, to glow through."

Diary: "so many smashes and tergiversations."
Gotta look up that one.
Tergiversate: 1) equivocate; make conflicting or evasive statements. 2) be apostate; change one's party or principles.

Tomorrow I take the day off and, in the afternoon, head to the city for a weekend of gospel-singing at a One Human Family choir workshop. I'm all about the singing; love the music; put up with the morning prayer in order to do it.