First the tease.
Just when I thought there might be little left to say about the Charleston quilt blocks, I spent some time with this panel. It was stitched by Kristin McNamara Freeman, of Montana. I can’t wait to share it with you this week.

  Now — the first of two Ta-Da’s. One of the ‘undone’ from the “last September post” is now done!

It’s one of two “LA Circle” quilts — inspired by sunny, warm visits to my brother in California, where I also picked up one of the key fabrics (a burnt velvet of pink and black).  

   I went for fairly uniform sizes and was pleased to discover that they’re pretty close.
ALSO:  I found the book by Stephanie Camp on resistance by enslaved southern women (whose opportunities to move about their confined geographies were more limited than the men’s, thus changing the nature of their rebellions). It turns out, I had in fact read the entire book. TA-DA!Meanwhile, the garden is as dry as a bone. It feels like it hasn’t rained all summer.


For some reason, it felt like the eclipse last night signaled the real end of summer. We stepped out to look a few times.Our attention was episodic, rather than sustained or worshipful (as it might have been).

But being out on the curb in the moist night air was something, and hearing crickets striking their chorus prompted me to say to K, “I feel like we just stepped into another life.”

He said, “I know.”

As a child, this was common — smelling the earth, hearing the insects and marking the change in seasons by them. I am too much inside.  Last week I had dinner with C — a friend from eighth grade! I used to walk across the cornfields that separated our developments at all times of day and night and In the summer, we rode our bikes to the pool way on the other side of town — things I’d never have let my boys do at the same ages.

(In fact, when I read the novel “The Lovely Bones” a few years ago, I pictured the crimes taking place in that cornfield  —  a kind of retroactive terror?)

C. laughed about my stay-at-home life. She has never married or had children and the contrast yawned between us. “Back then, you really pushed the edges,” she said. I laughed. But I wonder too: “how did I get here?” and “do I belong?” Meanwhile, I continue with the writing and let it take me places, which is an adventure of a kind, for sure.