Reading: Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

Moving: NT 15', 1.57 miles. 100 crunches. Not much but it's a start.

This morning I got up to the 6:00 alarm (after waking at 5:45: almost back to normal) and did my crunches on the exercise mat at the back of the bedroom. With all the windows open, it's well below 60 in the bedroom before dawn, so I keep a flannel sheet there to lie under while crunching. This weekend I replaced the cotton blanket on the bed with the down comforter, and this morning I huddled under the blanket instead of the sheet. And then somehow curled up on the mat under the blanket for long enough afterward, so comfortable and nearly warm, that after washing my hair, I didn't walk to work. Aha, but that was okay, I discovered when I got there, because my Walkman was on my desk. Can't possibly walk without a book.

26 September 2001: Neighbors

Of the 15 houses on our block, four have flags. We are not among them: we've never owned a flag and haven't gone out to buy one. I have perceived the flag as the symbol of only some people's America, and I would be pleased if everyone's unity now returned the flag to everyone.

There is a business at the top of the street whose flag is upside down, perhaps flipped up in the wind, lying on its slanted roof. I saw it this morning on my way to the bus and pointed it out to an employee--"The flag on your roof is upside down." I didn't go on to say it should hang freely and not be displayed prostrate like a rag. He saw it, and I figured it would be rectified. This afternoon when I got off the bus again, it hadn't been moved. This time I spoke to my buddy, an older man who's usually outside and with whom I chat on my walk home. I told him the flag was upside down--stripes up, union lower left--and he looked at it with me. He didn't seem to see the problem. I didn't know until this weekend that the union should always be upper left but had assumed the union rotated from top left with stripes horizontal to top right with stripes vertical, and it still looks wrong to me to flip a flag front-to-back when rotating it. But stripes down should be common sense, no? Anyway, he said he'd get it straightened out.

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Several weeks ago, RDC and I sat on our porch swing with Blake in his cage on the railing, eating our supper, reading our books, and enjoying the evening. Our neighborhood babushka, somewhat of a busybody but sweet and harmless in a lonely old woman kind of way, strolled by. She chatted with us for a spell, admiring Blake, asking after our fruit, and suddenly slapping her shoulder with a shriek. Skimming her shoulder with my fingertips (at her request), I felt a stinger. She was crying now, looking older than I had ever thought her, and we hustled her into the kitchen and I poulticed the sting with a palmful of sodden baking soda (a remedy I had never heard of, but that's what she asked for so that's what I did), covering it with one of the big bandaids I had left from the running-in-sandals fall in June and taping it down with medical tape. As soon as the initial pain passed, her spunk returned and her age no longer seemed so scary. While I attended her with her dress off her shoulder, RDC was on the porch. Because of the stinger, I thought it was a honeybee (and therefore not so very much to cry about, though I hope I didn't act so), but her slap had dismembered the stunned yellowjacket RDC found. Ah. Now she could cry all she liked. "Don't kill it!" she said. "Let me." Soda'd and taped and calm, she shucked her shoe into her hand and smashed the thing to bits. Probably a mercy, since it would have died anyway, but still satisfying.

After she euthanized the hornet, she clasped her hands, looked skyward, and uttered a short but fervent prayer for healing and in thanks for her good neighbors.

The birds took a few days to realize we were feeding them again but by Tuesday the message had got out and they'd emptied the feeder twice during the day. Gluttons. After I filled their feeder, I left a sack of tomatoes, plum and beefsteak, on Babushka's porch (placed where she wouldn't tread and slip on them).

Another neighbor rototilled one half of her front yard on Sunday. I don't want to use a rototiller: they kill worms. But I don't know how else to penetrate the hardpacked earth and thatched dead grass. I meant to tell her what a picture she made in the sunlight, pretty and slender and neat white Keds and a charming straw hat as she wielded the machine. It didn't take her too long, either.

The next-door family have found their dream house not too far away and are moving. Perhaps just in time: she's six weeks pregnant with their second child. But they're nice, except for their ten-times-louder-than-the-sun window-unit air conditioner, and if we've shared no more than mail-and-plant vacation duty, we did share that camaraderie.

I like my neighborhood.