I tracked Lily with my phone, especially when she was traveling through Europe, clubbing in Barcelona for example. I wasn’t proud of it and tried not to look in a snooping way but it was hard. I was glad she was back at her dorm in Strasbourg and I could picture her there since I’d seen it myself, had walked the grounds around the château with her one Sunday night at dusk. The look of the sky with the château in the foreground was like the castle in Scotland where we’d stayed one Thanksgiving. Something really deep and timeless about it.

The deer came by and destroyed things. I didn’t mind them nibbling so much; it was the buck who rubbed his antlers against the shrubs so hard he broke the branches. They did that to the California lilac: a whole year’s growth gone in an instant. I gathered the broken bits and stuffed them in the compost. The buck was beautiful, barrel-chested, but that pissed me off. I sprayed the last of the coyote urine on the trees and shrubs I knew they liked. “Pissed off” was a funny expression.

Every year when the time changes it puts me on an earlier schedule; I get up at the same time which is now an hour earlier. So here it is 0400h and I’m sitting in the dark. The bistro lamps haven’t even come on yet. For a period there’s an exotic romance to it but then like anything it gets dull. At least now with more light in the morning I can think about going back to the park with the cougars, though I’ve lost the bear spray and just have my stick.

Charlotte and I got our ears done and it hurt less than getting a vaccine or even a blood draw. When we checked out and they flipped the payment screen the lowest recommended tip amount was almost $50 so I quickly X-ed out of that screen and entered a lower custom amount. Both of us kept looking at ourselves in the mirror.

I made an East African curry fish stew with a spice blend called xaawash which I won’t even try to pronounce. It’s cumin, coriander, cinnamon, turmeric, cardamom, black pepper. Basically a curry so why don’t they just say that. I asked AI for recipes with xaawash and it didn’t even bat an eye, in a second there they were.

I changed out the tablecloth to welcome in November with a copper-colored fabric and took down the witches. Removed the last of the patio furniture and tied a tarp around it. Eberhard has a complex way of doing this in mom’s Hof in Germany, it’s a bit janky-looking the way he tangles the chairs together but still has a distinct German vibe; it’s precise. I was going for that with my tarp too. I balanced the table and chairs on themselves and bungeed them against a tall bench, using the lattice in the privacy screening as a brace for the bungee hooks. Hard to explain but impressive looking. Just wait until the first winds yank the tarp off though.

I continue with Jonathan Franzen’s epic novel Freedom, which came out in 2010. I remember only the outlines of the book, having first read it in the days I drank. He and David Wallace were friends and there are bits of David’s letters to Franzen that have been shared after Wallace’s death, the times he was struggling with his writing or living, or both. Wallace was dead by the time this book came out.

Franzen goes deep on character, especially the cracks between loved ones. He does it so well it’s captivating but sometimes just sad, all the hurt and loneliness. To think he carried that himself. I’d read something about his personal life but didn’t care; it felt like snooping. Like using GPS tracking software there are things we could know about people maybe we shouldn’t.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, prose

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, Memoir