Honeyed nutmeg.

Rain has been falling most of the day, so I slip back to yesterday's photographs. In my usual cyclic way, I am now slowed, regrouping after last week, recharging for the next charge. What was it my friend said this weekend? "You don't do moderation well"? "You don't do moderation"? Both are true. I could perhaps retrain myself, or restrain myself. I could perhaps not want to do either of these things.

Today, I carried armloads of everything, repeatedly. Armloads of computer parts. Armloads of papers. Armloads of books. Armloads of woe. I can only hope that this schlepping will become productive at some soon point. I am startled, still startled, by how much a computer's failure has disrupted my daily work. It turns out that my computer has become an extension of my hands as I do my job; I have spent much of the day learning how to feel with a new set of fingers.

I have emptied my mug of hot milk. On nights when I most need sweetness or settling, I bring in the additives: honey from the bear's head, nutmeg from the little jar. Remembering whole nutmeg in youth, breathing the smell, rattling the bottle. Remembering breakfasts in the yellow kitchen, toast hot from chrome, honey drizzled out of the inverted yellow cone, its pellucidity butter-clouded by knife stroke.

The browning of my world--the quick slip from green through yellow and red to the downed rustiness of what must be crackled through and kicked and then raked--is an unwelcome thing tonight, going on in the dark beyond the house. I have tired too soon but waited too late to sleep. And yet somewhere--somewhere, I think, near those loose knobby ends of my lowest, littlest ribs--is a lightness too steady and serious to be stopped by something so passing as the rain, or a season. And it's that honeyed lightness that lullabies tonight.