Love goes right; love goes wrong.

After lunch with new friends who know some of my most beloved friends--proving once again, as if we didn't already know this, that the world can be very small indeed--I decided that the day was too gorgeous to waste on the electric piano. I checked out the key to the room that houses the baby grand. I played it with the top down until I felt good and ready--all the way through my C major scales (parallel and contrary motion), my A minor harmonic and melodic scales (ditto), my C major and A minor arpeggios, and my own special super-speed full-keyboard C scales (through which I'm just trying to get back my deftness); then, several times through the sonata. And then I propped the top up and really let myself go, filling the empty room with what I can do. By the time I was finished, the sun had gone down.

Of course, that meant that it was nearly 4, so I turned in the key and headed off to town to find a winter hat, a fruitless search. (Tomorrow I will succeed, if only because it's getting too cold here for me not to.) On the way there, though, I found the King's College cows grouped on a hillock in their pasture, all four together. One of the adults was tending the other one, licking her shoulder. As I rounded the corner and walked through the gates into King's, I could see all four shifting slightly, reconfiguring; one of the young ones followed one of the older; the other adult went backwards down the hillock.

Just after I crossed King's Bridge, I watched a woman pick up her three-year-old son, who laughed and laughed to be so held, so carried.

But as we all know, when it goes wrong, love can get ugly.