I like cobwebs. I like peeling paint. I like my long fingers (piano-playing fingers, I was always told) and my dirty torn fingernails and my dry skin. I like mold and I like decay and I like gray hair and I like a lined face and I like tattered furniture and I like weeds and vines and ancient untouched overgrown places. I like things falling apart. I like entropy. Maybe I will sit here and watch life collapse and capsize and curl around on itself. I like dead leaves. I like bugs. I like spiders in my house (good luck, I say). I like animal hair. I like paper to yellow with age and clocks to run down. I like time defeating itself. And I like stains and I like ash and I like the waning moon and I like the relentless waves and I like algae on this lake. It�s so much work keeping the world in line, so much work forcing time to make sense. It does not make sense, unless you never think of it. Time is a ghost, a figment, a trick of the mind. I don�t like new books or new cars or new houses. I like equilibrium, which requires one not fight against the coming storm, the entrance of the natural world. Life follows on the heels of decay. My house is a compost pile this winter. The coming spring will love me. I believe sterility breeds an illness of the soul, the worst kind of sickness that you can only find in gated communities and disney world and malls. Lord save me from the super stores and the suburbs. I am not a civilized girl.

Oh I just remembered that book, that excellent weird and gorgeous, just gorgeous, book Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson. Lucky me, I am at a library. I�m a-going to go get it. (Libraries are allowed their order. God bless the order of libraries. The smell, that musty dusty smell of the library stacks, tells me all I need know about the soul of this place).

Right. I�m back. Here:

I remember Sylvie walking through the house with a scarf tied around her hair, carrying a broom. Yet this was the time that leaves began to gather in the corners. They were leaves that had been through the winter, some of them worn to a net of veins. There were scraps of paper among them, crisp and strained from their mingling in the cold brown liquors of decay and regeneration, and on these scraps there were sometimes words�..Perhaps Sylvie when she swept took care not to molest them. Perhaps she sensed a Delphic niceness in the scattering of these leaves and paper, here and not elsewhere, thus and not otherwise. She had to have been aware of them because every time a door was opened anywhere in the house there was a sound from all the corners of lifting and alighting. I noticed that the leaves would be lifted up by something that came before the wind, they would tack against some impalpable movement of air several seconds before the wind was heard in the trees. Thus finely did our house become attuned to the orchard and to the particularities of weather, even in the first days of Sylvie�s housekeeping. Thus did she begin by littles and perhaps unawares to ready it for wasps and bats and barn swallows. Sylvie talked a great deal about housekeeping.

Good god I�m hungry. Good god I�m glad today is Tuesday. Tuesday. Day of sky and war. I will always love you Tuesday.