khaki-colored breakfast

When I finally sat down to eat this morning (things distract me, things like trying on old clothes I'd forgotten I owned, or vacuuming out the old Smith-Corona Secretarial) it was to a delicious meal of my own devising: oatmeal with raisins cooked in and soy milk, whole-wheat toast with tahini and honey, and the pièce de resistance, a sculpted glass with Devil Sauce* in the bottom and foamed soy milk on top, with just a dash on cinnamon.

*Devil Sauce is the following: butter, icing sugar, cocoa, soy milk and Jack Daniels, cooked slowly and beaten with a whisk to create the best chocolate sauce ever.

Anyway. It was a filling, sweet, khaki-colored breakfast eaten at noon. While I took it in, I read Toni Morrison's Jazz, and suffice it to say Morrison has quietly won over another fan with her robust and succint and just plain gorgeous prose. She writes about NYC in the 1920s, the lives of various Black characters there during that time, and the jazz scene that was emerging to intertwine their lives and change the world. After this I have lined up Carol Shields' The Republic of Love, and then Richard Heinberg's The Party's Over.

Life is good, and for living these days. I have a hard time with the fact that time passes, with accepting that what was, yesterday, is today only memory. I was reading back in my old journal from travels today, in Melbourne I wrote: "What I fear above all else is losing my memory." And then I went WWOOFing and learned in Lorinna, "...that life is beautiful, life is to be lived. Death comes! Death steals us away in bits or it comes bang! unnoticed, but it comes. Grey sneaks into hair. More color must be worn in the clothing and wrinkles in skin are to be worn with pride. Love and honesty are what matter the most..."

I'm not saying I've reached any pinnacle; I realize there is no pinnacle to be reached. As Pema Chodron, nun from Pleasant Bay's Gampo Abbey, says: "The day you die you will still have a to-do list." What I'm saying is that each day I become more acquainted with the fine grain of life, with the way days go and come and go, and with the precision and love that is required to bring the wandering mind back to the present. With how important it is to do things you love because time will pass regardless of your filling your time with joy, and you might as well be in love with your own life. It's yours!

So. That is why I am going to uni in the fall. I will be taking English literature, political science, biology, psychology and Latin (yes! Latin!) in the first semester. And in the second, much the same, only for poli sci read economics and for Latin read philosophy. This is as exciting to me as the thought of seeing a foriegn country. I will be living in a small, agricultural town with a good farmer's market, on a leafy street, 15 minutes from school. I will see Winter again!

But I'm getting ahead of myself. At the moment, July is just ending. There are new kittens in Mum's house, little scampering bundles of fur and bones and eyes and meows, Ginger/Hobbes and Garou. And there are poppies, luscious and red like crinolines, in the garden, as well as lobelia (purple and bell-like) and mock orange (happy and white, a little tree at the edge of the garden), and the tomatoes are getting long and leggy, hiding the little green buds that will be fat and red by summer's end. I sell pottery and bicycle around and see old friends (the other night I was able to hang out with Sarah Hart, my childhood best friend, in the home of our old teacher, Judy King...I found the old Asterix books and we felt like giants in the old haunts) and meet new ones and swim lots and paint my toenails splashy colors, and make plans to dye my hair.

Maybe red. We'll see. Next week is a long way off.