The painting continues. I continue to be a bit discombulated by the upending of my routines and the constant shifting and reshifting of things about the house.
1. But I love the newly painted rooms, both the colors, which aren't actually radically different from what was here before, but also the shifting patterns of light on the walls.
2. Even the gray that I had before, (elephant gray) looks more beautiful in a better quality of paint, with a soft sheen. I think you can get a small sense of that comparing the gray around the doorframe in the top picture, which has not yet been painted, although that wall will be the same shade of gray, with the wall around the vanity (left) shown above. I may have to take another version of the first picture above, once that wall is finished, just for the sake of comparison.
3. The temperatures are to drop to very close to the frost line tonight, or, actually, in the wee hours of tomorrow morning. I harvested a good sized bowl of habaneros today in preparation, and will be making salsa or jam. It has been a good summer for peppers, and the plant is still laden with green unripe fruit, which may well be lost, But I do not want to bring the pepper plant indoors at this point, and I probably have more habanero peppers than I would otherwise have ever used.
4. I suppose this may be the end of the rose blossoms as well, but perhaps not. They are pretty much the only things left blooming in my yard. The sprinkler system has been shut down for the season, And aside from watering some new fall plantings I am not inclined to water. The ground is so dry that it is like concrete. I am planning on moving some laurels that are in a spot that is far too sunny for them. I have new shrubs to put in their place, but the dislocated shrubs may just be temporarily relocated into the flower beds until it after the rains, whenever they come.
5. I just finished reading Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing and it was a both deeply beautiful and deeply unsettling book. Although the structure of the novel itself is in fact fairly conventional and linear, the language is anything but expected or conventional. There are few coherent sentences, and yet the story itself has a coherent flow if you allow the words their own space and their own musicality. I suppose one might think it the author was attempting to write in a stream of consciousness mode, but that is not exactly it. More likely the language seems to be attempting to explore that indistinct bridging between the inner primitive instinctual reaction and conscious thought. The language of the novel seems to float in shifting sands between the rawness of instinct and the music of poetry. In fact I would say this novel is far easier to read if you approach it as it was an epic poem. Then the language can capture something elusive, and beautiful, in the story, even though the story itself is tragic. Another point, even though one feels one knows the main character here, this too is an just an impression. We read, and think we know the narrator's thoughts, but just as we ourselves are more than just our instinctual selves, so too this narrator, but we never really see her fully, just as we are never told anything about the physical being of any of the characters. It is a haunting novel of pain and suffering and love, but also of knowing and not-knowing, and as such, I think it will remain with me for a long time.
