O, I haven't been here much lately. It happens in spring. One of the nice things about winter is the way it forces you to narrow your focus. Instead of inside and outside things, you can only do the inside, for the most part. The spring happens and, as I said to my friend Clare the other day, I see all these perennial weeds popping out early and I feel like my laundry has been scattered about the yard. All I want to do is be out there doing the yard laundry.
I need to start a demanding book of some kind is what I need to do. I'd been avoiding a novel because anything I started would have lain mute in the shadow of Adam Bede, so I went to anthologies like the new Pushcart, short and funny memoirs like Scott Carrier's odd ramble Running After Antelope and this other one I forget, plus some other stuff like Mark Doty's The Art of Description and Michael Schmidt's Lives of the Poets. And they are okay, but without some novel going at the same time I feel a little directionless.
So today was warmer than they said it would be, and I was able, after a hearty Easter brunch and a damp egg hunt, to do enough yard laundry to ease my conscience, take the whole family to the driving range, and then come home to start The Leopard. I can already tell it was the right thing to do. The prince has an overripe garden outside, and even the decorated walls of the palace itself are described like a something growing out of control. It feels a little familiar, that is. And now, to go read myself to bed.
