A dead hen. A tree fallen on the driveway. Cats with diarrhea. I thought I had it together. Carl had made it alive up to Saddleback skiing in Maine, but the snow storm here had turned to rain and left the trees all around Darwin’s View—and the solar panels—covered with ice. As the sun rose, everything around me twinkled.

A few days ago, on a Saturday morning in the midst of a storm, I went out to tidy the chicken coop. I noted that Rosie was not well. She huddled, hardly lifted her head, and her wings were drooped.

My begonia, that I got from my mother’s mother or was it my mother’s cousin? In any case, it is quite suddenly ill. To the point that I think she won’t survive…

It has been pointed out to me that I spend more on my email provider than I need to. That it would be easy to switch to a different provider and way more cost effective. Thus, last week, I debated whether to switch. I mention this because it was during my debate about what company to switch to that I remembered the reason I originally went with GreenGeeks.

We went to Firelight Theater’s reading of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s play Aria da Capo. She wrote it in 1919 and one of the most impressive aspects of Aria da Capo? It is timeless. Written over a century ago, yet it is entirely applicable to our current reality.

Last week was on the windy side here at Darwin’s View, with 35 mph winds buffeting the house on a fairly consistent basis. Our large garbage can kept flinging itself out from its position against the tool shed. Having broken free, it would skid down the driveway as if it were late for an appointment.

I mentioned my detour to Pet Finder in a recent post, a detour that took me to possible pet bunnies. Lo and behold the next day, as he was hopping into the shower, Carl mentioned that Tinkerbell’s friend was back.

I went to the coop for a photo shoot. I haven't been spending enough time with the hens and they let me know it. Squawking, pecking and staring at me mournfully, as if to say, “We thought you had forgotten us.”

Susan Orleans’ book On Animals has been in my To Read pile for months, so when a friend mentioned it during our weekly call, I took note and brought it down to the basement to read during my biking workout.

I set up my new old manual Smith Corona with a view of its own, out the window. When I sit down, I have my stuffed animals about me and the cats who, surprising but true, don’t react when I start to tap as they do to my flute playing. I would take that as an insult but, in fact, it’s a relief.

Another month gone and my mind is still on holiday. Or maybe it’s just stuck half-way up the wall I went splat against when we got home from the Cal/Can trip. That’s how it feels, I guess, when up against one form or another of writer’s block. As if you are getting nowhere even though those little gray cells in one’s mind are probably working hard, be it for or against you and your fabulous concepts.

Last week, Carl broached the subject of the hens and their egg production, or lack thereof. I stood up, alert. Was he suggesting a slaughter? Which just shows how quick to the negative I go these days. In fact, he was pointing to a happy fact. It isn’t just a lack of feathers and short days that might have caused the hens to take a vacation. Carl was suggesting in a very respectful way that the hens are not young chicks anymore.

A note on practice. In the last post, I wrote about playing a few pretty notes on the flute. Unfortunately, during my next practice session, the memory of those pretty notes dissipated, then disappeared into the distant past. Especially because I still don’t know how my lips are supposed to pucker to play in the new way; the old way is much more familiar.

For years, I have been lackadaisical at best with my flute playing. When my mother moved here in March of 2020, eventually dying, I left my flute to molder, bringing it out a handful of times but to no avail. So how odd that when Carl and I got home from the Cal/Can trip something clicked. I reached out to an online teacher. I’ve started lessons again.

Travelmap and Wayward are very cool apps. But I never figured out how to get them to talk to each other. For example, the second day we were in Vancouver, we took a car tour. The driver, Brant, drove us all over Vancouver and, with over twenty years of tour guide experience, he had a lot to share and teach.

Out the door we went. Twenty minutes into that 6-ish hour drive, with rain and trucks to keep us company, we got a text from Amtrak saying the train was disrupted. Wha-!

They aren’t called sh*tty first drafts for nothing. The writing process, it ain’t easy. At least for me, the daily quest to express myself frequently feels like a muddy slough through a morass of ideas that seem so stellar, only to note their fall into a pit of snakes and swampy doubts. For the past—has it been four years?—I have been attempting to write a play.

After nine months of anticipation, our Cal/Can trip is coming up. Have you heard about it? We leave Saturday, October 21st to go from the east coast to the west coast, and back again, by train. Why the train? Traveling is stressful enough for me. I don’t fly — think carbon footprint and lack of feathers. Carl, ever patient and obliging, would prefer to drive. Our compromise is the train. I am creating a map blog of our trip and will be uploading photos and notes as we go along. I hope you’ll check it out at this link.