We went even further into the country last Friday night to the stock car races! it was lots of fun! We have friends who race and they were there to explain it all to us, which helped. The dirt track had been wetted down, thank god, or we'd have been a total mess. Folks who knew we were going laughed at us: from Manhattan to Modoc! they said. You'll have to wash your hair before you go to bed. As it was it was relatively clean for us spectators, at least. The cars were a wreck, or course, and there were a lot of car casualties. Some races that started with a dozen cars ended up with three or four!

We got home at midnight and we were so revved up we couldn't go to sleep until one-thirty. We spent the time talking about our old travels. All those cars skidding round and round so fast on that track woke something up inside us! Adventure!

Phoebe was flirting with the butterflies as they sat atop the fallen figs, feasting. Four red-spotted purples, at right angles to each other, forming a black, artificial flower, opening and closing their blue-tipped wings in a silent dance. Phoebe watched, then she extended her pretty white paw to touch, and one by one the butterflies flew away.

The sixtieth anniversary of Hirsoshima. All nuclear weapons and energy technology must be resisted! If only because the waste can't be disposd of safely for thousands and thousands of years. Not to mention the dangers of possession by nation states (including ours) and international revolutionaries.

Down here nearby the Savannah River Plant, summer is progressing apace. Earlier in the summer, we had a bobwhite and a whippoorwill singing morning and evening. We've had two great blue heron sightings: in both cases we saw him (her) flying out of the top of a tall tree, leading us to believe that he (she) nests in the trees and comes down to the creek to feed.

I have a little square turquoise ceramic ashtray I inherited from my mother. It sits on a table by the sliding glass door in our bedroom. I walked into the bedroom the other day to find a green anole resting on it, completely still, looking just like a majolica sculpture.

Out west, meantime, our Emma is learning to smile. She smiled at me several times when I was last there, when she was just a baby of five weeks old. Now that she's a grown-up eight weeks old, her parents tell me she's smiling a lot. She's also talking on the phone. She definitely said hi to me the other day. She's trying to get her hand to her mouth. She can see it out there, but she doesn't know how to make it come to her. Sometimes it arrives unexpectedly. Then she's happy. But then it goes away just as unexpectedly and she wants it back. Very frustrating.

Enjoy the heat. It will be gone soon enough.

I was in the delivery room for the birth of Emma! What a thrill!

She took her time getting here -- she was 10 days late -- but she's here, alert, alive, and a love!

We missed her so much once we had to come home that we adopted a kitten to shower with our unused affection. Phoebe is 7 months old, a white kitten with caramel markings, a ringed tail, and golden eyes. She's very affectionate with people, but she and Amos are taking a little time to get acquainted.

He was a little jealous at first, a little anxious about his position. He seems reassured that we still love him best.

It's such a metaphor. She lies back and waves her tail at him, but when he comes too close, she swats him. He keeps coming back for more, though he's learned to be a little wary. When he's ignoring her, she follows him around as if he were her big brother, the most interesting person in the world. When he wants to play, he runs away from her, expecting her to run after him. She stares. When she wants to play, she pounces at him. He jumps.

They have different signals. Sound familiar?

It's cooler today and cloudy. We've had a lot of rain, and it's been steamy. I wonder what it's like where you are?

Happy Fourth of July to all Patriots, of whatever stripe!

We have a pair of cardinals who eat the striped sunflower seed in the morning we throw out on the lawn in the evening.

A pair of titmice (titmouses?) have nested on top of one of the pillars outside the livingroom. When distrubed from the nest, they like to sit on the bent chair back of the white wrought iron loveseat we placed on the lawn overlooking the stream, where they can keep an eye on things. We hoped somebody would sit on that seat!

A pair of Carolina wrens have built a nest in one of the petunias we have on the balcony overlooking the lawn and stream. We watched them bring the leaves and twigs. The first day I threw it out. Then we decided to let them keep it. Unless they've abandoned it in the last day or two, seeing that I water the plants every morning.

The human baby's due on Sunday! Spring is busting out all over.

Not to mention the iris which is gloriously blooming now, purple at the edge of the woods, yellow down by the creek. We just watched a king snake slither slowly along the railroad ties where we think he has his winter home. We like him: he eats rodents and keeps other snakes away. Or so they say.

It's the first of May. We've been here one year and three months today. I meant to write when the daffodils came out. I meant to write when the wisteria was in bloom and winding through the thickets of trees across whole village blocks and covering acres of woodland. I meant to write when white dogwood blossoms layered the forest. I meant to write when the ubiquitous azalea was at its peak. Now the snakes are out again basking in the sun, and here I am. That'll tell you something about me!

The robins are coming! The robins are coming!

Don't bother, they're here!

Arriving in flocks or in one flock, at least, they cluster under the crepe myrtle trees, pecking the dried berries, rattling the fallen leaves aside.

Not drunk on coffee berries the way they get in Floirida on that one day in spring when they descend on the garden and careen from bush to bush.

But hopping and flying about in the yellow bell, nodding busily at the retaining wall against which the crepe myrtles stand, feeding and fussing, fussing and feeding.

A female cardinal watches from the sidelines, her wax-colored, orange-beaked dignity. She wouldn't be caught dead like them, stooping to eat off the floor.

We've sold our beloved little cottage in Florida. There are a dozen reasons, but the most important one is Emma, our pretty soon to be granddaughter. I hope to spend a lot more time in California.

My brother borrowed his wife's van, and, accounting engineer that he is, made everything add up. A work of art. He arranged all our personal possessions to fit into the space available, drove with me 8 hours home, stayed the night, then turned around and drove 8 hours back.

My hero.

Now, for the first time in many years and for one of the few times in my life, I live all in one place.

The daffodils are up.

It won't be long now.

The ice storm was beautiful, cold and clear. Trees sheathed in ice, icicles dripping like a lace tablecloth off the picnic table, birds to our surprise darting about as if at play, flashing their colorful wings, everything still except for their chirping and the snapping of frozen limbs. We lost power. We huddled in front of the fire, listened to the battery-operated radio or to nothing at all but the crackling (fake) log, lit the night with honeysuckle candles.

Before it all melted away next day, I went swimming just to prove I could, ice still hanging from the deck chairs, me in the outdoor pool in midest -winter, thinking of all my dear snowed-in up your eyelashes also-lucky and beloved friends up North.

Today is the first anniversary of our move from there to here.

It's a girl! She has moved in the womb and there are pictures of her via the amazing technology of the sonogram! Probable name: Emma.

Meantime, back on the ranch, we had a visit from a stray dog the other day, a sad, old, crippled, skinny hunting dog whom I'd seen a day or two before wandering across the road above our house. Amos played with him for a little bit before he wandered off up the hill towards the main road. We let him go, hoping one of the children further down the road would take him in, feed him, love him, and keep him in his old age. But we let him go.

Which is to say that I'm guilty of a kind of callousness I'm about to ciriticize in others.

We're told that hunters sometimes abandon their old dogs when they can't hunt anymore. Sometimes they let them out at the side of the road, sometimes they tie them to trees and leave them to die.

If hunting deer (or living a too full and comfortable life) can produce this kind of callousness towards other creatures, imagine the callousness produced by killing other human beings. Defenses go up like dukes; guilt hardens the heart.

Guilt is one of the major character defects. When unjustified, it cripples us like that old dog. When justified, it makes us all deeper and deeper hunters.

Have I told you I'm going to be a grandmother at the end of May?

Well, I am!

Meantime, we go outside at the beginning of December without a jacket. I'm swimming nearly every day in my wet suit. It's lovely when the sun is shining, no matter if it's winter or summer. We walk up and down the leaf-strewn driveway, 10 times to make a mile. Amos races back and forth from one end of the pool or drive to the other to keep us company. Now the leaves are almost gone, we can see through to the other side.

We've put up wreaths along the railings as our first gesture towards Christmas, our first Christmas here. The grown-up, married, pregnant children are coming to see the house for the first time and meet Amos.

Happy, happy Holidays to all. I miss you, wherever you are.

We had a wonderful visit "home" to New York, saw lots and lots of friends packed into our five days just after the election. It was good to be back in a blue state, and to commiserate with a very blue city.

I feel as if I have dual citizenship now, in both countries.

But this note is just to wish you and yours Happy Thanksgiving (even if it's a day late) and Happy Holidays of whatever stripe you celebrate!

It's deer hunting season down here. We live next to 240 acres of land that are covered with loblolly pine and hardwood. Yesterday Amos brought home, one at a time, three deer legs with hoof, and, last, proudly, a seriously decomposing head.

Heliotroops (that is, my fellow co-editors of Heliotrope, a journal of poetry) came to Edgefield last weekend for a retreat. We put together Issue #5 of the magazine, due out before year-end; we gave a sold-out reading at the Genealogical Library on the town square, sponsored by the weekly newspaper, the Edgefield Advertiser (thank you, Edgefield Advertiser); we met with the Augusta Poetry Group; we swam, we talked and talked, we relaxed, we drove around. It was a wonderful weekend for me and, I think, for everyone concerned. Great to hear those New York accents in my house again after all these months; even greater to have those New York conversations!

Two days before the arrival of the Heliotroops, a bobcat, originally thought to be a cougar, killed a pet pit bull who was tied up in the yard of a home about seven miles from here, near North Augusta. The bobcat has not been caught.

On the same day, a deer somehow wandered downtown and, spooked by Main Street traffic, leapt through the window of Tidwell's Jewelry Store!

Never a dull moment around here, I'm telling you.

And yesterday, as I looked up from the pool, the sky was so blue, I swear to you, it was purple. As if a lilac bush had bled its color into the firmament. (Purple prose being appropriate to the moment -- and to the recently departed and much missed Heliotroop!)

Saturday night at The Big Mo. Double feature of the new Manhurian Candidate and Fahrenheit 9/11. Full moon. Hot dogs, popcorn and Coke at the concession stand. A plea to support the concessions by the voice over owner/ticket taker because that's the only way he and his family can keep the Big Mo going. A movie screen full of dead drive-ins. We turned the truck around, set up our directors' chairs in the flatbed, ran the battery all the way down listening to 94.3 FM, where the movie sound was being broadcast. The owner/ticket taker/rescue mechanic jump started the truck for us in the dark, while the movie played. We got home, us old fogies, at 2 AM.

Did you make out? asked our friend Betty.

Shoot, we said, snapping our fingers. We knew we left something out.

The resident great blue took off from the creek where it had been resting or eating, I watched it rise through the trees, wheel around to the north, and fly over the house on its way to somewhere else to spend the day. The wonderful thing is it will be back, it likes it here.

Plus I saw the heron gliding high in the sky over the road as I walked to pick up the paper this morning. Silence added to the romance of watching him out of sight. I can't get over how alive everything is down here. Including me.

A spider web hung between the trees in the woods. I could see it in a shaft of light that fell between the branches. It looked as if it were floating there, weightless, unattached, and gone like a dream as a cloud passed overhead and the direction of the light shifted.

Meantime, the latest snake is either a coral snake (beautiful, vivid bands of color, and poisonous) or a scarlet kingsnake (beautiful, vivid bands, and harmless). By the time we came back with the hoe, it was gone. We are choosing to believe it's harmless.

The snakeman says this one is deadlier than the last one.

If you get bitten, they say to bring the snake with you to the hospital.

Wildlife update. It was a cottonmouth! Three days later, the yard man killed it with a hoe. Its severed head opened its mouth, as white as cotton inside, to prove it. Faster and deadlier than a rattler. The book says water snakes are often needlessly killed because they so closely resemble the cottonmouth. Both hide in fallen leaves and among rocks, where they are practically invisible. We are consulting experts on how to control them. Some say sulphur keeps them away. The smell of hell.

This landscape is almost sexual, so deep is the emotional pull it exerts. Driving along the late evening roads, peeking through roadside trees to curving meadows, the sun a bright disc thrown against the sky, sometimes a lonely tree in full leaf silhouetted against the growing dark, I feel my womb contract as if I were trying to birth the world or take it as a lover.

Then I went swimming. As if in the Pacific Ocean. If the earth were glass, this is what the sun would look like, shining below the horizon. Yet even with the pool light illuminating the water, I imagined other creatures in there with me, quick black dangerous. Lie still, I thought. They are attracted to motion.

They are attracted to blood.

Snakes give off the smell of sulphur when they die. Or when they are angry. That's why sulphur can keep them away.

Walls of separation divide us. Matter divides us. It is our fundamental condition, the condition of creation. It is the human mission to lower the barriers, destroy the walls, get as close to one another as we humanly can. To feel that we are all swimming, that we are all water, that we are all attracted to one another. Not in anger but in love. But we are furious at our separation, we are lonely in our isolation, and we take it out on one another, not recognizing our need, not recognizing our situation, which is spiritual, which is one, which is why we must be kind and just to one another.

But peaches are the smell of heaven, believe me.