Picture a woman in an Adirondack chair next to a pear tree.

I have just washed the kitchen floor.  I am taking a reading break.

I wave.

it is colder today.  I’m in jeans and a hoodie.

My hands are crepey from the sun and Pine-Sol.

I am careless about the sun and Pine-Sol.

I love the summer, but this is the last day of summer.

I understand perfectly what Elizabeth, the narrator of Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Solitary Summer, the sequel to Elizabeth and Her German Garden, means when she says to her husband, the “Man of Wrath,”

I want to be alone for a whole summer, and get to the very dregs of life. I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow. Nobody shall be invited to stay with me, and if any one calls they will be told that I am out, or away, or sick.  I shall spend the months in the garden, and on the plain, and in the forests. I shall watch the things that happen in my garden, and see where I have made mistakes. On wet days I will go into the thickest parts of the forests, where the pine needles are everlastingly dry, and when the sun shines I’ll lie on the heath and see how the broom flares against the clouds. I shall be perpetually happy, because there will be no one to worry me.  Out there on the plain there is silence, and where there is silence I have discovered there is peace.”

We live on the plains, actually the prairie, so there is silence.  Next summer I want more silence.

This summer I’ve been sociable.  I’ve chatted endlessly, cooked 80 vegetarian meals, and biked with the “Man of Wrath” more miles than I like to count.

I am still grieving over my mother’s death.  I think about the funeral when the priest swung the censer and it broke.  A sign, don’t you agree?  That the family was broken… that the behavior needed to change… that she wasn’t at peace.

I wish I had been a pall bearer. Why didn’t I think of it?

My “Man of Wrath” is in perpetual motion, exercising mostly. His disbelief in organic food is a problem for me, a 90% vegetarian cook. He scorns my favorite cooking show,  Christina Cooks.  He muttered to Christina the other night, “Shut up about organic!”

Though our garden is organic, he refuses to buy organic vegetables.  He buys what’s cheap.  I picture the cheapest of cheap vegetables sucking up the pesticides.

And so I am plotting new ways to bring organic vegetables into our home. I’ve decided to put my book money back into my housekeeping fund.  I’ll make trips to Whole Foods and bring in a few organic greens at a time.

If only we had a co-op…

Can you believe there’s not a co-op here?

I’m even worried about the vegetables we grow.  Does the poison from our neighbor’s lawn blow/run off into our yard?

MY READING LIFE.  I finished Viola Di Grado’s 70% Acrylic 30% Wool, translated by Michael Reynolds.

In this short, surreal novel, winter has taken over the city of Leeds. Di Grado’s hyperbolic description of winter is very funny.

It snowed all day, except for a brief autumnal parenthesis in August that stirred the leaves a little and then went back to whence it had come, like a warm-up band before a headliner.

Since her father’s death with his lover in an accident, the Italian narrator, Camelia, and her mother, a flautist, have ceased talking and developed a silent language of looks.  Camelia has dropped out of the university; her mother has ceased to work.  When Camelia occasionally goes out for supplies, “an icy muzzle immobilized my jaw and the wind whipped my umbrella inside out.”

Much of the novel is a deconstruction of emotional emptiness.  Her mother begins to take photographs of holes.  Camelia finds discarded clothing in a dumpster with sleeves on the seats of pants and shirts with underarm buttons.  She cuts holes in it.

I picked up the scissors and sent the blue sweater to 70% acrylic 30% wool hell.  I amputated cleanly the whole part that hid the breasts that Wen will never want to see.  What is there to see anyway, my bosom is an A at the most.

The relationship of language and symbols is also explored.   Studying Chinese briefly makes Camelia bloom : Wen, the store owner whose ruined clothes have been discarded in the dumpster, teaches her Chinese.   She writes ideograms on thin paper and covers the walls with them.  She is in love with Wen.

But when Wen rejects her, she has an affair with his “retarded” brother Jimmy.  She begins to fear death, because Lily, another woman rejected by Wen, apparently died.

The language is stunning, even in translation, and the comical, angry tone is inimitable.  The novel ends with a twist, and honestly I thought it too abrupt, but the language is brilliant and bold throughout.

This won the Campiello Prize for First Novel in 2011.