Begins to feel like fall

The participants in my juried intensive poetry class have twice given me a present. I wonder if I did a better job those two years than the others. Anyhow, the first time it was a massage, and that was great. This year it was a gift certificate for a local nursery.  We had gotten most of the plants on that gift much earlier but the last bit went for a big pot of red chrysanthemums we picked up this week. When I buy mums in the early fall, I don’t try to overwinter them as they never survive.  But it’s nice to have a pot of them to brighten the front terrace when most of the perennials have finished except for some phlox and Japanese anemone.  We still have dahlias and some roses and many marigolds.  They make nice bouquets when we have time to pick them. My editor at Knopf wants a rough page count for my new poetry book that’s due this winter and out next spring, so I’ll be extremely busy the next 2 weeks when I have promised her the count.  It’s a lot of work but feels good.  The trouble is, I am still putting poems in and taking poems out of the tentative ms.  I won’t even think about the title until I’m surer about the contents.  I’ve written a lot of poems in the three and a half years since The Hunger Moon, and of course that being a new & selected, a lot of poems from the previous couple of years didn’t get in. Yom Kippur was a time for reflection and remembering our dead.  At the closing, we had a sumptuous feast to mark the end of the Days of Awe.  Roast lamb, potatoes lyonaise and tomato-avocado salad.  A friend gave us a bunch of fresh figs. We’ve been enjoying them and today I’m going to make fig jam before they spoil.  They have a tree in their yard here. Wednesday the Friends of the Council on Aging met. I’ve the veep.  Then we ate at Moby Dick’s with friends, Lois and Ramon. Great seafood.  You can bring your own there, so they brought martinis and proseca and we brought proseca also.  I was loaded by the time we left, but not enough to bother me the next morning.  Went to work early as usual. Puck and Efi went to the vet Thursday.  Puck had not been his usual sprightly self and was eating gingerly.  He is on antibiotics now and goes in for dentistry in two weeks, after the antibiotic is all used up – into him or under the couch. I remember when my dear Malkah was alive and on pills.  The next time we cleaned and moved the couch, there they all were in a neat row where she had spit them out and left them.  The results on Efi’s blood work and urine sample I won’t know until some time Monday.  She is elderly and beginning to lose it.  We’re trying to figure out what’s wrong. I should freeze the last beans today, enough for the year.  I’ve already frozen 19 lbs. One more pound should do it.  I also dried two more jars of tomatoes and another jar of cayenne peppers. We planted lettuce, endive and escarole seedlings I had started. They were frail but I hope they make it.  I started more in containers to go into the greenhouse when it gets much cooler.  We like to have as much fall lettuce as we can manage.  Storebought salads are tasteless by comparison. Going to work right after this on my book; then this afternoon on to the beans and weeding and picking some flowers for the house.