Gasping

It's been hot today. Not hot like it's going to be hot- the sort of hell hot that is very much like opening the oven door and if you put your face in it, you would gasp and it'll be that hot before long but now it's just hot. Regular hot.

I worked outside and I weeded and mulched and I'm already filled with the existential pointlessness of it all. I know from all these years' experience that the weeds will catch up and overcome, the insects will have their way with things growing there. It's a little early in the season to be feeling like this but perhaps I am finally learning and what I will eventually figure out is to grow two tomato plants in pots and leave it at that and buy my beans in the store like everyone else.
I don't know.

I did other outside things too, all of them too boring to relate.

Mr. Moon did a fabulous job of cleaning off the roof, though, and you can see the results, clear and shiny like the tin of the roof he cleaned.

I wish my work were ever like that. Clear results, obvious and bold. Instead, my work always seems to be made up of things that are so ephemeral. Cooking meals, doing laundry, weeding the garden which will be filled with weeds again in a few days.

Well. You know. That IS life and this is life and I'm not complaining, I'm just saying that this is how I feel at the moment and speaking of meals, it's time to make another.
I sort of wanted to make a corned beef and cabbage dinner, not because of any sort of Irish tradition, but because dammit, corned beef and cabbage and carrots and potatoes are delicious but I'm not doing that. I'm not cooking corned beef. Often this time of year I am at Gator Bone like I was last year, cooking vast quantities of corned beef and cabbage and Irish soda bread and hanging out with the best people in the world and listening to music and then going to sleep at night and waking up in the beautiful cabins down the road at the state park.
Ah well. No Gator Bone party this year and no corned beef and cabbage either but that's all right.
Soon a baby.
That word keeps coming up and it is truer every day.

Time to go cook and yes, it was hot today and it's going to get hotter and if Lily doesn't have her baby tonight or at least go into labor, she and Owen might come out and have pancakes in the morning and that will be lovely. We'll sit under the Bradford Pears and their white blossoms and the oak tassels, too, will fall in our plates, and we'll pick them out and we'll drown our pancakes in maple syrup and Owen can run around naked and I'll get out the big, huge pot I use to cook corned beef and cabbage in at Gator Bone and let him fill it up with water from the hose and he'll get in it, and he may gasp at the coldness which is funny- we gasp at heat, we gasp at coldness, we gasp at beauty, we gasp at pain, we gasp at joy.

We are humans. We gasp and we grasp and sometimes we just unfold and put the silverware on the table and shred a cabbage for coleslaw and we sit down and we eat and then we clean up the kitchen and we go to bed and we lay down and we dream and we snatch those dreams from night time and we carry them with us during the day.

Sometimes we do.

As if we had planned it that way. As if we had.