Relative normality

No friends or pets died this week. My workshop is over and almost all the poets seem to have enjoyed it and got what they hoped out of it. I finally got into the garden, weeded bushel baskets full. I have been dehydrating zucchini and catnip, freezing broccoli and beet greens. I’m hoping to make strawberry freezer jam Sunday afternoon, when it’s supposed to rain. I started freezing rhubarb yesterday as I weeded half the patch; this morning I’ll finish it and probably freeze more. We have lots of zucchini, lots of patty pans and yellow summer squash. I pulled lettuce that had bolted, but most of the lettuce is still good. We ate our first cucumber in a salad a couple of nights ago. Woody cut the scapes off the garlic today and I’ll be using as many of them as I can. Tonight Dale and Stephen will come to supper along with Paul, whose partner Dan is up in Canada. His cancer may have returned. He has to wait twelve days for an answer. Medicine is so often unnecessarily torturous. I’m going to make a chicken-oyster-mushroom-rice dish. Also a Julia Child zucchini recipe I’m modifying with lots of garlic [scapes of course]. I’ve started rereading my novel published in 1973, Women on the Edge of Time. After two decades of begging Ballantine to publish it in trade paperback, they are finally doing so and they want me to write an introduction – gratis, of course. Why should a publisher that has made thousands on that book have to pay me to write something? I’m slowly rereading and making notes. I have to finish before the end of July – probably well before the end since I’m giving the keynote address at the Cape Cod Writers Conference. Woody and I are also teaching a short memoir workshop at the conference, August first in Hyannis. Willow continues to assimilate into the cat family here. The slowest to accept her was our huge next youngest cat Xena. It turns out she has no maternal instinct, unlike my long gone big rescue Malkah, who took Efi as her kitten as soon as she arrived. Or Sugar Ray, who immediately took to Mingus. Willow gets on with the brown bros, Sugar Ray and Mingus, but Xena has been slow to accept her. I guess it hasn't been long. It was Thursday two weeks ago that we brought Willow home. Yesterday Xena groomed Willow for the first time. She seems to see that Willow although she plays with Mingus all day has not stolen her little boyfriend and is not replacing her in Woody’s affection. I am writing poetry again, now that I’m not dealing with the participants’ poems every day. The vegetable gardens are in pretty good shape, but some of the perennial gardens are overgrown with weeds and we haven’t gotten to the roses at all. Not looking forward to the July 4th weekend. We’ll hole up as much as we can and avoid Route 6 and town.

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