I began working on a CNF piece a few months ago based on an interaction I had with a woman in the jury lounge when I was called up for Federal jury duty. The first three paragraphs flowed out easily. The next couple came weeks later. Now I can’t stand the thought of going back to work on it at all. There are memories of the aftermath of Katrina interspersed and I just don’t want to think about it. It’s Spring, new beginnings, a time of optimism. The thought of revisiting that time is just abhorrent. Hopefully, this is just a temporary aberration and I’ll get to it again soon.

I had a day last week that was just like the song “Mamma Said”. Isn’t it funny how you know as soon as you get up in the morning it’s gonna be one of those days? When a  bug flew up my nose on my morning walk, I just knew it.

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Yesterday I spent part of the afternoon  just lounging in a reclining chair on the patio watching squirrels. We suspected there was a nest in the fan palm and now I’m pretty sure there is. I watched three small squirrels and one larger one as they ran down the fenceline into the pear tree, then the magnolia, then the fan palm,  then did it all over again, over and over. The little ones did, anyway. The larger one, the mamma I think, stayed lower in the pear tree so that every time one of the little ones got too close to the ground, she barked and ran it back up the tree. I remember those mamma barks from when I was a kid.

I had a couple of vivid dreams last week during which I commented to myself (in the dream, yet not) that this would make a good poem. Once, I woke up and wondered why the words that just seemed so spectacular in the dream were so mundane in reality. Has that ever happened to you? Naturally, upon full awakening I didn’t remember a single word I’d dreamed. Drat.

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I’m reading The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick. I read about it in a piece about books about New York. It’s a  memoir of her life in NYC and she’s really good at describing the characters, places, and moods  that make up her urban  world and friendships.The stream of conscienceness style of her writing is very interesting to me.  I especially like this passage:

As I saw myself moving ever farther toward the social margin, nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like a walk through the city. To see in the street the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human—the variety and inventiveness of survival techniques—was to feel the pressure relieved, the overflow draining off. I felt in my nerve endings the common refusal to go under.

 Yep. That about sums it up.

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The photos in this post are from the #photoblog365 project I’m doing on Instagram.