Birthday report

• Rode in the rowboat with on a sunny day on a lake surrounded by bright trees reflecting on the water, with my love and one of her dogs, who was too interested in ducks and kept positioning herself to get bumped on the chin with the oars.


• Climbed the fire tower like an unexpectedly robust mountain goat (or so it seemed from the inside -- I've been scared in the past, but this time I didn't look down until I got to the top. and I went up pretty easily on my trike-seasoned legs, breathing hard, but filled with joy.) The hills unrolled until they went from leafy to blue. The dog, on the ground, looked worried. Perspective is good.


• Picked gorgeous, perfect concord grapes at E's. They smelled amazing, and tasted tart, but the first cluster I reached for had wasps crawling all over the top of it, sucking out the juice and leaving dried up skins hanging on the vine. I took a breath, started picking elsewhere, and the smell got more intense as I picked, and more and more wasps came. I had to select very carefully so as not to disturb them. There were wasps crawling inside of grapes, visible through the dark skin. Wasps were going after the grapes in my bag, and were thick on the grass where grapes had fallen. If a few started buzzing me, I stopped, and moved. It was intense and meditative and the sun was out and the fruit stained my fingers. The sun was behind a really lush stand of kale in the garden, so that leaves were alight. I didn't get stung. Probably, it helped that, until I was told, I thought they were bees. I stopped picking when one of the dogs began bringing her ball to the wasp filled grass.


• For a present, E. bought me a grey carhart jacket, which she wanted me to try on to be sure that it fit. It turns out that the daughter of the owner of Pat's Package, where she got the coat, is doing embroidery now, so she's getting a spider stitched on it for me in honor of the book I've been working on, Spider in a Tree. Which is, truly, a beautiful thing.


• Special dinner, good talk. Plus, cake! Chocolate with cream cheese frosting.


• There have been other splendid and companionable activities, but those were the events of the day.