Give me today

Three days down with lone fever bitter headache achey shakey cold. When I knew I was going to die I sent deep and sorrowful farewell letters to all my friends friend. Heard they she laughed. I'm so weird.

The Pathetique started following me in the dark, perhaps only because I was sick - but I am getting well now and I wont give up on it - when I didn't feel better but at least my hands didn't shake I crept to the Spinet with my blankie close around me but only could play Brahms, softly. Brahms over and over and again. nothing else was right.

*

Most appropriate sky for convalescing, God. Clear but 30°. Thank you for blue.
A fat jay plopped just now on the tree out the window across from me - he jumps around very pompous trying to frighten the sparrows but they are quicker and lighter and know it. The Great Bird Flock has come and going. It hasn't snowed yet. I think it is waiting to snow on Beethoven's birthday. No one knows exactly when Beethoven's birthday is so when it is December again we I will celebrate it all month long.

Returning you now to real life

One holiday: survived, though slightly worse for wear with a bruised hand, sore back, a severe case of narcolepsy and the same To Do List I've had for days and weeks. Playing in the annual Turkey Bowl will cause a couple of those symptoms but I should hardly blame the last two on the holiday because I am always tired - now that the days are a string of grey so is my mind and I don't want to do anything at all. Thus my hesitation in posting to Sonatina these days because no one really wants to read my whining which is exactly what I'm doing again, isn't it, so if you've read this far into another grumbling post, you deserve an alpaca photo.

Fed these guys (girls actually) for a friend over the weekend. I know you know they come in more colours than any other fiber producing animal, and that the shy little ones are called crias, but did you also know they hum?
If you did you may get bonus photos.
*

John was home for the week so it was not so dreary. It is a little funny any time he is here because all the little ones show off madly and vie for his venerated big brother attention, John John listen to this watch this!!, particularly the boys. O says it's because they haven't a father. When we are not mad at each other, things with John and I things are pretty simple. Always have been. He laughs at my jokes and I make him cake.

L of the Lovely Quarry Cliffs gave me a scarf on Thanksgiving, with a card that said HAPPY WINTER and a separate letter with a countdown on the envelope flap of the days left until she goes to Hawaii and leaves me to freeze to my lonesome death. I should hate her but can't afford it - besides, the scarf is pretty and brown and warm and Hawaii is probably way overrated anyway. I love my friends I love my friends I love them. If I ignore the countdown the letter was nice. We write often now. Even though we are only 7 numbers or a few miles apart, she is always going going and I am ever staying staying so we have to use every way we can to tie our separate days together, letters phone email and driving, so as not to grow up and apart. The letters I am most fond of. She says lately all my writing has been weird. She tells her Mum she has the weirdest friend ever. And her Mum says Who, Christina? because her Mum hasn't read my letters. Apparently what comes out in words with me is the weird thing, in person I am very ordinary. I only know I am trying to teach L things in all those writings, like colors and thee-soruses and imagination. She tries to teach me things too like never cry alone and how to live lightly and how to dress fashionably. Neither of us feel we're succeeding much.

Hope all had and will have a warm week.

This turned into maybe the nicest post I've written in a while. I guess we should all beware.

Bleak

This morning is not really a morning, rather one of those days that gets it backward and goes to sleep first instead of waking up. See, by night time it will be bright and just beginning to warm.
Won't it?
it won't?
From 75 to 40 overnight is not fair.
Yesterday I was walking in the wind and sun and trees but I remember now the woods knew today was coming, trying to tell me in that silence after a leaf fell. I was standing out an hour ago wrapped in my blanket standing on the wet concrete in my bare feet. I felt clearly and solemn that I was seven, still in my PJ's looking at the grey sky.
Noiseless rain heavy rain cold rain. My hair is a mess and my clothes unchanged, a weak tantrum but a tantrum nonetheless, whatever, I'm not going to wake up. I am going sweep every thing off the piano the light the pictures everything, and open the top and open the cover and unscrew and open the base, and play and play and play with nothing except the Piano and nothing between the sound and me. I might well spend the day trying to untie myself from the day.

It may be time to shut down this place.

*
Nothing here to fear I'm just sitting
around being foolish
when there is work to be done
Just a hang-up call
and the quiet breathing
of our Persian we call
Cajun on a Wednesday

so we go from year to year

Tori Amos

Excuse the absence

Things go by so fast I can hardly even see them, and much less give them words.

Every day I feel

I am just now learning how to learn.

Everything wakes up so slowly now. I braved the cold and went out early to see the sun but even He opened one eye and then crawled back up under the covers. So I came inside thoroughly disgusted with it all. And have been dozing since.
Everything wakes up slowly now.
Me, too.

Life is presently Cheerio aftertaste.

The Great

I noticed a minute ago that the word MOZART is written in faint faded blue ink on my left palm, so faded and faint it looks more like the jagged streak of a vein. For the life of me I can't figure out why. Everyone knows Mozart is not blue, but saffron. The rest is easy to interpret. It would seem to say I loved an Amadeus once, I pressed my hand to his heart, and I moved away, but still he is under my skin.

But today! Bach.

(I was always in love with a Composer. For a while I was not aware there existed anyone but Claude Debussy but then came Chopin, and Beethoven - with brief trysts before between and after with Mendelssohn Mozart Schumann Saint-Saëns Granados MacDowell and Brahms and him and him and him and now Bach. But I cannot say trysting with Bach. He was always a capital letter. He was holy. "OK and now the Bach Invention" and I would shrink under the piano bench because I had not practiced it and maybe even put a match to it. JSB was exercise.)

There is no transformation to write.

"No winging out the way of butterflies"

Since last week the Well Tempered Clavier has been on my Spinet, skin to skin with the Pathetique. The (slightly charred) Inventions I hadn't touched since I was 13 appeared today. If you ask me whence came this change of heart, I won't hear you, because I don't know, and I wonder too - I look at it and wonder how on earth my mind changes like it does.
I hear it and everything makes beautiful sense.

*
A sweet sun returned today. Autumn on her last days is singing me gently to sleep.

As at Meribah

Behold, I will stand before thee there upon the rock in Horeb; and thou shalt smite the rock and there shall come water out of it, that the people may drink.
*

There is water in the well. It was only a fuse. REPEAT, IT WAS ONLY A FUSE, a something starter something fuse that did something and was loose or bad or broken which made it stop doing whatever it did that made pretty water come out of shiny faucets.

deep down, just a doo-hickey deal.

So the emergency lasted only hours, but oh! there was an emergency alas-in-this-dry-and-thirsty-land-we-will-strive-we-will-survi WHY ARE YOU USING THE BOTTLED WATER FOR OATMEAL DON'T YOU REALIZE WE'RE IN A CRI-SEES!!

It wasn't half as good as the last time this happened, when the Pater Familias was in the shower and it ceased! and his hair was full of soap and we had to break out the reserves and hand him bowl-fulls through the crevice of the door all the while making wretched attempts to control ourselves until he was de-sudsed, and all day after that he looked "mad, and silly".

*
All the excitement is over now. Please return to your houses your haunts or wherever you feel at home and safe.

Have you ever done some laughing that makes the contrast between that and the next feeling you get, stark, and staring? It is still and a few grey degrees outside. I am so cold and the thought of Winter makes me want to cry.

News from the backwoods

It's Wednesday, overcast, a chilly 54°, and I've just been informed the well's run dry.

Good morning!

Special delivery

K: Do you know how I got here?

C: Yes.

K: How?

C: Well...

K: EWW stop, I'm just kidding, I already know!

C: Do you?

K: Yes, I was brought by a falcon.

C: Hmm. Most people get storks.

K: Well, I was an UNUSUAL child!