More blossoms and blueness.

About the day I've had with my parents, drinking too much coffee and eating Italian food for lunch and tracing out the lineaments of deep, startling disappointment and acquiring new semi-necessaries at a variety of stores and watching a Top 100 Songs of the 1980s countdown for hours and hours with a deaf dog at my feet--about this day and what it has meant, there are few words.

We visited a snake at a pet store. We three gathered around the glass tank wherein the snake coiled loosely, and when it shifted, I jumped a little. It raised up its head and reared its neck up into the air, and we stroked the glass and flickered our tongues in greeting. Later my mother and I watched a moustached parakeet long enough that my father left the store without us and stood in the sun outside until we realized he'd gone. "We were trying to get the bird to come down," we said.

Now the dog is sleeping, her legs kicked out over my legs. Now I too will sleep.

This place's quiet is utterly different from that other one's. And this will be a week of at least four different quiets: I'm on the move no small amount in the next seven days. Which is a good thing, I think, because otherwise I might find myself spending a lot of time back in Ohio yearning for my maples to start doing what this tree has been up to.