Baucis & Philomen

We're due to dry off for a couple of days, say the weather gurus.

BUT lest we grow too sassy, the winds are blowing counterclockwise again.

Welcome back, Canadian Wildfire Smoke!

I would whine about it, but what good would that do?

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I would also whine about the fact that apparently I clicked the wrong box on the online French press ordering form, so that the French press I received yesterday turned out to be this adorable pygmy French press that looks like it was designed for an incredibly hip three-year-old who would rather serve coffee than tea to her imaginary playmates.

I mean, it brews less than a cup!

But I’m not gonna whine! Since my deeply embedded inshallah fatalism has already decided that receiving a pygmy French press in the mail is the Universe’s way of telling me I need to cut down on caffeine consumption.

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And while we’re on the topic of magical thinking, I have decided that if I finish the current monster Remunerative Project in Process by July 6, I will go to India in November.

And if I don’t finish, I won’t.

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Anyway, I was quite diligent on all accounts yesterday. My nose got abraded from all that grindstone rubbing.

Knocked off in the late afternoon to go for a tromp: the Vanderbilt estate since it’s close and a known five miles.

The trees were in one of their anthropomorphic moods:






And I was approached by this fantastically beautiful couple. Elderly but fantastically beautiful—they seemed to glimmer in one’s peripheral vision. (Difficult to describe.)

“Excuse me,” said the man. “We’re strangers here. We would like to know: Where should we walk?”

So, I prattled on for five minutes. Blah, blah, blah. If you go in the direction of my right hand, you will walk down a hill—I saw a coyote once on that hill in broad daylight, and it looked at me as though judging me with its luminous yellow eyes, can you imagine?—and you will come to the River Primordial as it once must have looked with shores of polished stone and floating banks of ferns; but if you go in the direction of my left hand, you will come upon the old Vanderbilt gardens where the lilies are in high bloom, and the roses are scattering their scented petals so that you will have a magical carpet to walk upon…

The couple thanked me profusely.

The whole encounter felt very much like one of those episodes you read about in Ovid, the ones where gods come down to earth to test the politeness of the mortals.

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Came home and watched documentaries on Jennie Jerome (Winston Churchill’s American mother) and Consuelo Vanderbilt.

Contemporaries of Edith Wharton.

I plan to knock off paid work today to work on the Edith Wharton story. I want to get the period details right, and today I'll be working on first-person stuff (letters to EW’s mad X-Husband Teddy.)

I suppose if I really wanted to get the voice right, I’d check The Collected Letters of… out of the library or reread The Age of Innocence.

But, nah. I’m not that diligent.