#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

East of me, west of me, full summer.
How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.
Birds fly back and forth across the lawn
                                        looking for home
As night drifts up like a little boat. . .

~ Excerpt from “After Reading Tu Fu, I go outside to the dwarf orchard,” by Richard Wright

Almost done with another excellent book, this time nonfiction, on Audible: Grandma Gatewood’s Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail, by Ben Montgomery. I’m in a reading frenzy. Just downloaded three more new titles. I need my library to be full of the books I want to read next. Emma Gatewood was 67 years old and mother of eleven grown children when she was the first woman to walk the entirety of the Appalachian Trail in the summer of 1955. She had no prior hiking experience. However, she did survive years of domestic violence in her marriage before she was able to get away from her husband and divorce him. It’s a fascinating book. I listened late and woke up at 8. Leapt into action to do some housework. Then, to the garden to dead head the rest of my daisies and did about an hour of weeding and yard work. No walk for Charlie. I was concerned about how hot it was. At my desk, was happy to get some work done. Wrote an artist statement for an upcoming publication. And I have had three queries accepted for craft articles in journals and I need to write them now. Resistance. I procrastinated for a bit. Then I just dug in and got almost a first draft done for one of them and felt good. Time for my swim at Farm Pond before a thunderstorm with my youngest. Lovely lovely July swim in the cool water with the sun on my back. Home to pick tomatoes and I made homemade pizzas as the thunderstorm blew through scaring poor Charlie (and me, and Wave). But the pizza was delicious and helped to cheer us up. “The garden loves thunderstorms,” I told Wave. Tomorrow my youngest and I are going to perform a story for him and a group of his friends in the yard, and she has written the script and chosen our costumes, and found a fake fur cape and hood hand-me-down from my mother-in-law that I must wear to play the wolf, in the 90-degree weather. Also, there will be cookies, freshly baked. The batter is in the fridge. Yoga and wrestling and a story in my room tonight, and then a rainbow in the sky outside my wondow.