With the end of the grading period at hand, Dark-haired Daughter has been inundated with schoolwork. She’s read a couple of books (think procrastination); I’ve helped her revise three portfolio pieces (at last she let’s me!), and we’ve tackled the latest hands-on project in her school career - a model constructed just this evening.
So do we get an A? Can you guess what it is supposed to be?
The cat sleeps, dreaming of hunting. Paws twitch in the chase; claws flex to catch the dream bird rising on sudden wings from depthless pools; teeth and tongue work, tasting and devouring, nose and whiskers quiver. Then the deed is done, to the last ticklish feather. The cat’s tail switches slowly once or twice, and he is still again, crouching in tall dream grasses, awaiting a flurry of wings.
Before retiring, I stepped out into the mystical moist night air, aflutter and abuzz with the all denizens of the night - cricket, moth, locust, gnat. I breathed deeply - and swallowed one.
Most of the school year I function on six hours of broken sleep nightly, sometimes less. I fight leaden fatigue by about mid-week, especially by evening. But summer’s here, and I’ve had two good nights’ sleep in a row. No alarm to wake me at 5:00. I may as well have been resurrected - energy and joy - yes, joy is the right word - well up from within like a newly fed spring.
Thus restored, I begin to plan the whimsical adventures of summer (OK, along with staining the deck). Next week we hope to visit a farm that raises llamas, miniature donkeys, servals, pygmy goats, wallabies, and horses. I’m keen on the pygmy goats. (They make companionable pets, they eat grass, they produce manure for fertilizer, they can be milked. And they’re cute - that one always gets me.) There’s little danger of my coming home with a pair, though, because the Homeowners’ Association is unlikely to mistake them for dogs or cats.
There’s also free Shakespeare in the park, the wildlife education center down the road about 20 minutes (likewise free and suitable for picnics), the Big River - no cost possibilities abound.
I looked back at posts in my “Writing” category today. There are a whole batch of moon poems, so many that a reader might easily tire of them. In fact, my mother tells me that my very first word was “moon,” so watch out - there could be more. That’s the joy of blogging really. There’s no one to tell me that I can’t write one more moon poem - or anything else I so please for that matter. That’s really the point of the thing. I don’t have to come here to be who I am not.