Then sinister neighbor came out of his house and began blowing his yard with his power blower. The air filled with carbon monoxide stench and with clouds of dust, and all sound but that of the blower motor was drowned out. So I put down the rake and went inside leaving the lawn half heaped with leaves and half bare of them. I closed my windows against the blower stench and the dust. Sinister neighbor rid both his yard and rooftop of leaves with about half an hour of steady blowing. Raking the remainder of my yard (the same size as his) will probably take three hours. Totally worth it to spew no blower fumes. The remaining raking will have to wait for another day, though, there being no daylight left to this one.
Gray kitty appeared about seven o'clock and began napping in the back porch chair he favors. I wonder that a cat who flees when a person comes within twenty feet of him outdoors will calmly go to sleep after seeing me moving about in my kitchen not ten feet from him. Maybe he thinks the kitchen is like a fish tank and I can't get out. Kitties are odd.
Sunday Verse
Saint Francis And The Sow
by Galway Kennell
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath
them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.