073: impression

Art museums are exhausting. A thousand choices to make—which paintings to stop at, which to stroll past, which placards to read. And at each painting, so much to do—first, to arrive, to pause thoughtfully. Then to draw up a response, a feeling, a thought—some kind of reaction that is both naturally conceived and correct. It is not enough to look at a painting and think, “I like this one”. You must come up with a response that has weight, heft, interest. You have lines to follow, shapes to trace, colors and gradations to dive into. A hundred times you must do this, over and over, for every piece of art, and all while being quiet and not looking at the guards too often and not giving off the impression that you’re about to steal a painting.

072: honeysuckle

The south side of the street is rimmed with honeysuckle. I walked out this morning and caught a richly floral scent, but couldn’t tell where it came from. Tonight I walked home that way, descended into the valley of the scent again—and on my left were the honeysuckle bushes, and I said, “Oh! That’s what I smelled this morning.” Only this time it was deepened, vivified, by the rain pattering around it and dripping through it. It was like tea—flowers and leaves dipped and steeped in a basket of rain, made deeper, more real, more wet, luscious, reverent.

071: river

Sitting on the deck in my not-broken chair. Sunset, on the cusp of dusk. A drippingly, deathly hot day tips gently over into a cool, dry evening. Screen doors open and shut, cars whisper by three stories below. Basements hum. Trees tremble gently. The ocean, somewhere, breathes.

Finishing Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield—a book about a little girl, drowned and then revived again—and then looking at the bookmark I have used from the beginning, a postcard, a drawing of a girl overlooking a body of water. An ocean, clearly, but it could be a river.