Awake into the cloudy, wet day by 5:30. I walked to Farm Pond, to the beach, with the swimmers. It was cool and very wet, low steely gray clouds, but the water was delightfully warm and I had a hearty swim. I took pictures of the boats near shore, and then, walking home, took my time through the soaking wet woods, enjoying the quiet, there was no one else out in the peace under the canopy. Most of the day, despite some fairly welcome interruptions from my daughters, I worked on the poems from letters. Starting was a bit dry and rough. I pushed away the doubts about what I am doing and dug in. In a few hours I had three poems from letters and I liked them, and felt, once again, the pleasure of this project. And, by e-mail, I was invited to do a poetry reading in early August on Zoom, so that was nice. My daughter invited me out in the late afternoon for a walk with the dogs; we both needed a break from our computers and the promised rain did not come. The flowers in the garden all seem a big blown naked from their blooms. The river is high. I am ready for a return of the sun, the groundwater refreshed.

News I looked carefully at today was bad: but there is one sign in this story, I think, that possibly offers a tiny thread of hope: Three officers in Aurora, CO, were arrested for taking photos of themselves, at the site of Elija McClain’s memorial, mocking the chokehold that police put Elija in after he was stopped and arrested for walking home with a bottle of ice tea freshly purchased from a convenience store. The tiny part that gives hope is how the photos surfaced: Aurora police report that one of their own officers told internal affairs about the existence of the photos. You can view the news report here. Then I read and watched another video in The Boston Globe online in which a Black woman is stopped in her own suburban neighborhood by a white man in a BMW who harasses her, apparently, for driving while Black. I appreciated hearing the woman confront the man following her, and standing up to him. I appreciated seeing and hearing a neighbor come out in the yard and confront him too. That video is here.