Confession Tuesday (deb)

This week's trip to the confession booth will have to be quick.


Not that there isn't lots to get off my chest, but that time is short. I have a big deadline at work (was supposed to be last week, but now it's this Friday) and I am leaving for Arizona (by way of New Mexico) tomorrow (which was to have been post-deadline, but is now not.)


I haven't been writing much.


I did finish Mark Doty's book. I liked it from beginning to end. Now on to his poetry and other books.


But I also picked up Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy again. I started it in the fall, got half way through it, and just after Angel tells Tess he can't be married to her I set it down. It is so difficult to be a modern woman reading such an old story. It was shocking at the time o fits first publish date (1891), and is quaint, now. This would be a good read with a friend, or a class, but alone, at night in the bed of my third husband, it is not terribly engaging.


Last night's writer's book club was a planning session. We have mostly novels through the year - happen chance, really - but my selection will be 3 essays from a recent Best American Essay of book, looking specifically to Cynthia Ozick. I picked up Quarrel & Quandary at Powell's last night. I also picked up At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays by Anne Fadiman. It was an impulse buy.


Look at the cover:













How could I resist a drawing of an owl trying to catch a dragonfly with a net?


I saw an owl in my garden last week, six days ago.

Scout the super-cute-puppy got me up early, we went outside and jays from three quadrants of a compass were shrieking and making wild. I followed their sound to the backyard, where, perched on a 36" high chain link fence, sat a small owl. A fledgling Western Screech Owl, I would find out later. Two scrub jays were dive-bombing his stoic form. When I cam closer they all flew off. I returned Sport to the house. And then climbed a 5-foot wood fence. In my pajamas, bright yellow garden clogs and fuzzy green bathrobe the color of lichen, I followed the sound of the jays to my neighbor's end-of-the yard, and below tall shrubs found him again, nudged into the recess of a wood fence, looking a little startled to be there.

A step forward from me, and he flew over another fence, and was gone. I hope the jays didn't torment him and that his parents found him (it was early dawn and he ought to have been back "home"). These are nocturnal birds, and the fledgling will continue to be fed by parents for the summer.


I love birds.


I'll be back. Later.