Golden moment

The mussaenda in front of the porch has been getting yellower late in the day. Lovely.

But actually, yellower and browner and blacker: The leaves have been drying up and falling -- admittedly a better outcome, since more gradual, than last year's sudden denuding in a cold snap.

But the end-of-season-clearance is undeniable. And it means that time is drawing near for the return to Tennessee, which I increasingly think of as my sentence to the Big House.
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I apologize for my absence. In the last week, we had a great bunch of people move in across the street: a mom from Virginia, Teresa, and her sweet daughter, Alex, and Alex's boyfriend, Dom. We had them here for drinks one day and the pool another. And then Robert got the flu and was housebound for a week, with fevers up to 102-plus. This was the first day he really got out of bed.

If you know me, you know that I started a fever chart, with times, readings, dosages. I am the kind who remembers, when Robert doesn't, that he had pneumonia a few years ago, and how much we both dread hospitals.

Crimps my writing a bit, as does the knowledge that I'm going north sooner than I'd like.

But like seasons and leaves, it happens. The fever breaks, and here's life again.
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And if there were some way I could share the New York Voices' version of "Golden Moments" with you, you'd know why I can look past summer in a sociopolitical fistula. But the song isn't on the web, only in my heart. Click on their link up there in the first sentence of this paragraph and see why they make life in exile worth living.