Sunday morning, smoothing her curls into layers of barrettes.

"Growing old... what is the opposite of "growing"? I ask myself. "Withering" perhaps? It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it. .... Growing old is certainly far easier for people like me who have no job from which to retire at a given age. I can't stop doing what I have always done, trying to sort out and shape experience. The journal is a good way to do this at a less intense level than by creating a work of art as highly organized as a poem, for instance, or the sustained effort a novel requires. I find it wonderful to have a receptacle into which to pour vivid momentary insights, and a way of ordering day-to-day experience (as opposed to Maslow's "peak experiences," which would require poetry). If there is an art to the keeping of a journal intended for publication yet at the same time a very personal record, it maybe what E. Bowen said: "One must regard oneself impersonally as an instrument." May Sarton, The House by the Sea, p. 27-28

I think her conclusion falls flat... but I really do agree that there is "an art to the keeping of a journal intended for publication" or otherwise. Perhaps she unwittingly invented blogging in 1974.

I'm laying on Jesse's side of the bed, the window is cracked and the outside air is drifting around me. It's not even a breeze--just a cool, liquid softness, tripping over coldness. My chest has that heaviness from splitting two bottles of wine between three adults last night at our Tuesday night family dinner (Charlie brought a bottle with a mouse named Gertie on it). My toes are getting cold so I will get up soon to make a second mug of tea. But the sun flexing gently in a cover of clouds and a helicopter is hovering distantly and the hardware store across the street just lifted their screeching gate. Which means their fat cat ran eagerly to the door and is now getting fed. Someone is coughing mildly on the sidewalk four floors below. Its all mildly muted. I even vaguely have to sneeze. So vaguely.
Margot and I watched pigeons mating on the roof across the street earlier. Earlier today.
I'm vaguely researching a new to me writer. She wrote a perfectly named book : Novel on Yellow Paper". I found it at the Strand a few weeks ago and instantly wanted to buy a legal pad and write feverishly on a hot afternoon. But then there was a weird racial bit when I flipped through it so I didn't get it for the cart. I'm so afraid of inadvertently endorsing racism with an old book in the cart. In my research this morning it sounds like she publicly apologized and/or expressed regret for it. I suppose thats a good thing as long as people know the context. Mistakes out-grown and accounted for can only be a positive thing to witness. Mistakes out-grown.

A favorite thing I saw last week: the sad man in a pastel suit that managed to look a tad frumpy and ordinary despite the palette choices walking one hand in pocket, briefcase over shoulder, smoking morosely while walking through the most beautiful spring exuberance. No, scratch that, spring is a much moodier creature here in the northeast. Where I grew up we got rain instead of snow, so spring was a shocking, almost garish creature. Here it’s like this photo, twiggy, warm only in the sun, and only if it’s not too windy, thrusting shocks of green from the bulb families through the grey and brown. Kind of like that sad man. Just trying to muster a springy mindset by donning pink and white and strolling through the woods but also smoking rather tragically, clinging to his work. And the smoking was the springiest part.