Heat and Mice

This week, I received three sets of comments and critiques on my boo:k one set from the managing editor, one set form the prose editor, and one set form the poetry editor.  It’s very slow going with having to look on every page for three different sets of comments. I got started Tuesday and so far have only managed to work on 30 pp. I figure it will take me into the fall.  I always have chores, garden work and paying bills; inventorying and ordering what we need or have run out of. Many, many emails to deal with. Submissions of poems, acceptances, rejections, requests. I imagine leisure, but there’s never much of it.  I’d enjoy revising if I didn’t have to deal with three sets of comments.

Until Friday, it was so unbearable, we did no garden work. We did go out one day very early in the morning. I weeded my garden, the herb garden and the pollinator beds. That was the sum total of what I could do until iot just got too hot. Then I planted coreopsis on the porch to replace the pansies the heat killed. I also planted some herbs on the porch and celosia in a big  pot.

The cats are frustrated. A climbing mouse got inside. When I came into the bathroom this morning, cats were staring up at the ceiling, I thought. Then I saw a grey climbing mouse perched on the slower curtain bar. Somehow Shaman knocked it down and it ran into my bedroom where it is running around on shelves and sills just below the ceiling. Climbing mice are the most difficult to catch and I believe they don’t taste good, as opposed to delicious field mice, the cats tell me (when I had pneumonia, and illow tried to feed me one, still warm).

I’ve been reading my British archeology zine.  I’m very interested in archeology – how people lived, how they governed. What they believed and how they celebrated their beliefs, their art, their crafts, their way of dealing with the dead.I get both American and British magazine’s, but prefer the American. Still, they cover different digs in different places. Woody says I have more curiosity about more things than anybody else he has ever known.

When the humidity goes down, as it did Friday –finally—I am far livelier and I get far more done. The same is true for Woody. We’re both very sensitive to high humidity. We had to sleep with air conditioning until Friday night. We’re grateful for the privilege, of course, but both us prefer open windows and good sea breeze.

The Cape will be hard hit by every nasty and terrible thing Trump is doing. Our only health provider out here is OUTER CAPE HEALTH SERVICES, required to serve every patient whether they have insurance or not. Many folks on the Cape are losing Medicaid and SNAP and the president’s ‘big beautiful bill’ may bankrupt our only health provider.