Phone and Internet no longer going In and out, just out, simply that and it got hot today. The kind of hot that's oh-yeah-I-remember-this-hot, makes-us-cranky-hot; I have moved slowly.
I sit on the front porch and painfully type this with two clumsy thumbs on my phone with chickens for company.

Cut collards and mustards today and washed them and blanched them. I did. They're in the freezer. A lot of work for three batches. Pulled the plants too.

Three baby chicks now and I don't know if we'll get any more. The mother hen can carry them beneath her wings. They pop out like fuzzy accessories. She showed them the food and water. They are calm and self-possessed as if they knew they were entitled to life.

Mr. Moon gone out of town and I have sixty more pages of a fine book to read. TC Boyle's *When The Killing's Done* and it's a joy to lay on the couch and read it. If I ever get to the point where I can't read just shoot me.

Please. I mean it.

Tomorrow is Jessie's birthday. My baby-baby turns twenty three and how did that happen? Twenty three years ago right now I was prowling around like a cat looking for a drawer to have her kittens in, knowing that the process had begun, the tuning-up almost completed and the womb and the cervix beginning to do their dance together and I danced with that process all night and into the next day and there were magnolia blossoms in the room when she was born, creamy and filling the room with their ethereal lemon scent.

Oh, that darling dancing girl. She and Vergil will be down next week and I will hold her then.

A day, a day. It's been a day today of heat and greens and boiling water and baby chicks and my feet are black with Lloyd's black dirt and tonight I will wash it all away and lay down on clean white sheets and sleep well.