Thinking tonight about that long trip home. . .

Where I left this terracotta smile filled with succulent Ghost Plant. I wonder how the garden fared over the summer. R takes good care of it, so things should be OK. Still, I have a tenderness for things I planted.
I think we finally got the Internet access mess fixed, and have the same kind of smiling hopefulness as this pottery pig. But we shall have to wait and see.

We took a long drive today: through the Tunnel of Trees to Cross Village, where so many people were parked near and standing to wait by historic Legs Inn that we fled. We wound up eating the famous Broasted Chicken at the Levering Cafe (home of the Big Chicken). It was OK, but not astonishing, I have to report.

I meant to take two cameras and my iPhone, and put the "pancake lens" for the Samsung into my purse and left the camera on the table at home. And then it turned out I never took pictures, except a few of the Big Chicken, which I have already photographed several time.
Lake Michigan glimpses through the trees glittered on a base of deep, shining blue, but the road is very narrow and there aren't spaces to stop, so we didn't. Autumn color is nice, but still quite patchy and incomplete. Every year is different.

I never had an ayah, and most likely you didn't either, Faithful Reader. From Michael Ondaatje's Handwriting; Poems, Vintage Random House, 1998. Here is the middle section of a three part poem:

Wells
ii

The last Sinhala word I lost
was vatura.
The word for water.
Forest water. The water in a kiss. The tears
I gave to my ayah Rosalin on leaving
the first home of my life.

More water for her than any other
that fled my eyes again
this year, remembering her,
a lost almost-mother in those years
of thirsty love.

No photograph of her, no meeting
since the age of eleven,
not even knowledge of her grave.

Who abandoned who, I wonder now.

          *   *    *   *   *

The other two sections of the poem give other narratives related to water. There is a wonderful economy to this poem. I plan to spend more time looking at the strategies of it. In "part poems" I have written the linkage is either more specific, or completely off-the-wall (you figure it out!) seemingly unrelated, The use of the theme of water linking three otherwise unrelated stories is a wonderful idea! And the economy of the tellings is something to be deeply admired, and emulated, I think.

Another autumn is upon us. Sleep well.