Yesterday

[rejectomorph]

As little as I like going out of the house when the entire world is wilting from heat, it was worth braving the sun to go shopping yesterday. Now I have watermelon, cantaloupe, nectarines, bananas, oranges, and an apple. Some of them will be going into a fruit salad I'll have for dinner one hot evening, so I won't have to cook. I'd have gotten cherries, too, but they are still to expensive.

I miss having a cherry tree in my back yard. Had I thought to plant some seeds when the tree first showed signs that it was dying, I might have a young tree bearing fruit by now. I might have planted seeds from store-bought cherries at any time since, too, but never got around to it. One of my many ongoing oversights.

Anyway, the store had a sale on Dreyer's lemon flavored frozen fruit bars. They were a bargain for 2012, but way more expensive than the three-cent Freeze-ee bars (a low-budget Popsicle knockoff) I used to get at the corner grocery store when I was a kid. Freeze-ee made a lemon bar that tasted exactly like frozen lemonade. I hadn't thought of them in years, but the sight of the package yesterday led me to make an impulse buy, and I pulled one out as soon as I got home. Frozen nostalgia on a stick, and the perfect complement to a sultry evening.

But once again the heat put me to sleep not long after dinner. Well, the extra bottle of beer probably helped, but in any case I ended up sleeping until three o'clock in the morning, and failing to make a Sunday journal entry again. Now I'm awake at this ungodly hour (or the sungodly hour) with the front of the pale house across the street glaring in my window. I'll probably collapse about noon, but right now I'm hyper. Maybe I'll deal with the dirty windows. Cleaning them will make the glare even brighter, but it will be nice to have a clear view of the world.






Belated Sunday Verse

What the Living Do

by Marie Howe


Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

Comments

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

Oh, that poem. It hurts, it's so real. Thank you for posting it.

The lemon bars sound delicious for a hot day. :)

[rejectomorph]

Howe wrote it for her younger brother who had died of an AIDS-related illness. It captures the sense of living with loss as well as anything I've ever read.

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

It does for me, too. I took it from here and put it on my facebook, where several people reacted like us. Thank you again. I'm glad to have read it.