I was reading fortunes by the moonlight.

Not so long ago, I offered you a line from an early-summer notebook in which I called myself a thing of ceaseless hoping. Tonight I have been a thing of ceaseless impatience. I keep a much-magnified fortune cookie fortune on my office door. "You are filled up with a sense of urgency," it says. "Be patient or you may end up confused." I leave it on the door because I pass through that door so many times each day that I figure eventually the lesson may sink in.

Tonight, working in the officehouse, I heard a light tap on the window. I looked over and saw a taupey moth, its wings flickering like an early film. The moth hovered just beyond the surface of the windowglass, facing into the office, suspending itself tightly in the air. It never landed on the glass, just kept treading the atmosphere just beyond my office. A second moth joined the first, their wings working together in stop-time motion. I watched, trying to make sense--to make a narrative--out of their hovering. The romance plot is a strong one, and so I tried to imagine that one moth was attempting to woo the other. Only I couldn't see which was which. And rather than simply near one another--as if that process could be simple--they would occasionally just collide outright, almost making a little click sound as they hit the window. I watched, rapt, until one finally escaped the seductions of light. And then they were both gone, and I still didn't know why they'd come, or what my office looked like to them, winking their wings just beyond the window, in the no-safety of night.

This afternoon the weather was lovely enough that I ditched my office and worked on the officehouse's front porch. Sometime around 1:30, a stick walked onto the table before me. At first, I thought it was a praying mantis, but it was far too stickish. When it started walking along, I dashed to my camera. I came back just in time to see the insect prospecting my computer


on its way to some other place. I hope he found it and that it turned out to be grand.

Tonight the sunset across the valley was worth my prospecting for.