Because it's no longer the dark time, I stopped reading fiction. Stopped in the middle of The Kite Runner. Maybe I'll finish it next winter. I needed calming rational arguments. Started Michael Shermer's The Science of Good and Evil and Leonard Shlain's new one, Sex, Time and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution.
A little book that Pam gave me, Lost and Found in Acadie by Clive Doucet, makes, at the very end, a startling connection between the Acadian experience and the fates of small third world cultures under globalization.
Poets, activist nuns, hockey players: my famous cousins. My sister Ingrid sent me a book of poems by Darrell Bourque, the best part of which was hardly more than product placement. The mention of some familiar things: magnolia fiscata, "a small round box of Coty" and a mother who took a long time getting ready for Sunday mass, a man smoking a Picayune.

Proustian moment of the day: we are out of milk this morning so I put whipped cream in my coffee and made floating isles on top of the dark chickory. When I was in college in New Orleans, I worked weekend nights as a night auditor at the Royal Orleans. When I hit balance around 3 am, I would reward myself with a trip to the huge kitchen's pastry pantry whose delights included a huge bowl of whipped cream.
New tunes: Patti Smith, Trampin; Mary Gauthier, Mercy Now; Blind Boys, Atom Bomb, the Duhks. Our new neighbor, Steve Murdock, is a blacksmith and he made these ornamental bars for the windows/doors on the sunporch. They are about 1/2 inch thick and spaced 10 inches apart. I pointed the camera down to the ground. Whatever.