The sun is out. The sky is lightly streaked with fine, very thin wisps of clouds, barely there. Yesterday was the first really spring-like day, today promises to be slightly warmer. Seventies. Imagine. All the trees, however, are still completely bare. Not a single blossom, not a single leaf bud. If it weren’t for the ivy, climbing a tree trunk just past my fence, I wouldn’t see any green thing at all. This morning, even the three quite distant evergreens are blended too thoroughly with the dark gray and brown branches of bare trees in the foreground to make any kind of visual impact, any kind of saliency. The muted reds of a female cardinal stand out more clearly as she alights on a bare tree behind another bare tree still hanging on, somehow, to dead, brown, shriveled leaves from last fall. All is dull, except the birds, the little bits of nature already frisking about, and starting now, the sun and its heat will kick everything else into gear. The trees, too, will finally get a move on.
W. and I went to Manchester (by the Sea, if you please) and walked to Singing Beach yesterday. The tide was low enough to walk the entire breadth of the beach. It really is the most beautiful scene: sunlight, deeply tanned sand, golden, the ocean, the granite framing the scene at both ends, even the lovely “piles” (houses) perched on the granite cliffs. These houses are more impressive, somehow, than the ones directly in line with the beach elevation. It’s all about the perch, the elevation.
Yesterday morning A. sent us a most remarkable essay he wrote about Treptower Park, art history, aesthetics, and more.
W. and I also spent some time reading through [company’s] offer yesterday. He has fourteen days to decide, which means he has some time for that other (competing) interview, but he doesn’t want to take the full two weeks to make his decision.
Meanwhile, I am no closer than ever to building any kind of disciplined routine for my work. I let my days get flooded by all the domestic work I have to do – in part because I have to do it. But it expands. This is what drives me crazy. Today and/or tomorrow I should do loads of laundry, including the dreaded linens. Yesterday (Sunday) I cooked and cleaned all morning, prepping a stew after making breakfast and then spending an age cleaning the stove. Then W. dropped a bottle of red wine on the basement floor, and I had to clean it up, which resulted in a load of laundry with bleach for the rags used. I wasn’t going to cook the vegetables for dinner, telling W. he was “on” for that, but then at 6p.m. realized I needed to make a bread. So, boom. I was again in the kitchen.
I think this view towards the ocean, flawed as it is since it also overlooks a neighborhood jumble of roofs and fences, is a bit of a saving grace …but perhaps also a trap. If it weren’t there to escape into, I might let the domestic pressure blow up to the point of just not doing it.
The question is, would I do anything else? Would I do the right thing? But whatever it would be, I would miss the view – any view. I think I realize that “prospect” is key, for me, to having any sense of sovereignty and even glamour. Prospect and refuge, an evolutionarily hard-wired desire.