hanging out

A few days a week, here in the cabanon, I put things to soak in Genie (miracle soap powder, "sans frotter," it says, and indeed you don't have to rub it a lot), and then -- later, oh yes, lots later -- I hang them out on the clothesline. They flap in the sun and wind a bit, which sound I love, and then I walk back by the high grass (the part I didn't let anyone mow down) past the mulberry trees to the long table which sometimes seats just us, and has in the past seated a dozen assorted guests. Very assorted. Like a biscuit box: you like them all, and they are forced to like each other as long as they are at your table. When I was editing Joseph Cornell's diaries, i loved reading about his affection for the ones in the Huntley Palmer biscuit box with pink insides -- what a grand enthusiast he was!

We walked to the end of the field yesterday to rip off the climbing vines that want very much to choke off the air from all the trees and bushes, including the lovely large yellow weed bushes (I never knew their names, but I can indeed tell a cherry tree from an oak, yes.) Thorns are of course everywhere, from the blackberries to come, and my gloves (one of each pair that the neighboring dogs didn't get) do have holes, but I am attached to them, and they, sort of, to me.

Then we deserved, methinks, our dinner of hot potato salad with sauteed red peppers (one of the artists' recipes I was trying out), and the country ham provided by the ham and cheese man in the Sunday morning market in our little village. He just remarried his wife after 20 years in an orthodox Russian ceremony, so I got to try out my one church Russian chant on him:; it goes something like hospodi borge moi (not right, but if it were, and I can chant it in a low voice, it means Lord have mercy on me.) Right on. On us, preferably.