Warm, Sunday

This is the bedroom-in-progress. The blush pink dress is one that I love so much that I wore it to tatters; the plant is from Lowe's; we are getting a bed frame, but until the bed frame is delivered, the mattress will be on the floor. Chris put up curtains yesterday and felt so proud as a result -- to the point of sending pictures to his father, who replied: "Good job!!"

I worked steadily on editing the last chapter today. Rarely do I ignore hunger to do anything, but I was caught up in work and kept putting the whole Eating Food thing off until I had a reworked version. Oh, how editing is so much more fun than drafting. So it seems. And then I read half of it out loud into Voice Memo on my phone to listen to, for the sake of smoothing things out. (I recommend this. It's helpful.)

    The roads turn to highway and they are moving quickly again with the valley all around them, hills the color of awakening grass, Gillian’s head turned with a wet face, pretending to sleep but really looking and thinking, There is so much of the world. Again one of the Nowak books, the World Atlas, comes to mind; Eden was a place, and so, too, were Greece and Rome; so, too, were Africa and South America. And here she is seeing the spaces in between the only places she knows. How much more of it can there be? The possibilities feel unfathomable and infinite. She pictures herself playing her piano and peering over the top to see William, his head bobbing, his ecstatic fingers leaping, and she remembers him pressing his face against the warmth of her back in the sun in the endless meadow, and she remembers her father and mother and William and herself sitting around the dinner table with golonka and a broiled fish and mustard greens. In her memory William pelts an insult at her when she was being grumpy: “The crabbiest crustacean of them all.” -- from today's work