What goes without saying

Bent over to kiss my giant dog’s silky black ear and squinked my back. It hurts.

Lime appassionata. The kitchen smells of lime zest and I have jugs of squeezed lime juice in the fridge. I am slowly getting around to making Key Lime Pie without graham crackers. I have never seen a graham cracker out here and my friend Jan says crushed digestive biscuits will work.

Per yesterday’s post, an email from a friend reminding me what Kay Redfield Jameson, suffering with bipolar illness, wrote in An Unquiet Mind:

The debt I owe my psychiatrist is beyond description. I remember sitting in his office a hundred times during those grim months and each time thinking, What on earth can he say that will make me feel better or keep me alive? Well, there never was anything he could say, that’s the funny thing. It was all the stupid, desperately optimistic, condescending things he didn’t say that kept me alive; all the compassion and warmth I felt from him that could not have been said; all the intelligence, competence, and time he put into it; and his granite belief that mine was a life worth living. He was terribly direct, which was terribly important, and he was willing to admit the limits of his understanding and treatments and when he was wrong. Most difficult to put into words, but in many ways the essence of everything: He taught me that the road from suicide to life is cold and colder and colder still, but — with steely effort, the grace of God, and an inevitable break in the weather — that I could make it.

It may rain, so I must rally my lower back and go out to take washing off the lines. As I move around (gingerly) I practise snatches of dialogue from the latest fiction drafts. Patting the dog (gingerly). Trying not to think about the violence in Toulouse, the countrywide rioting here, the situation in Syria, the brutal death of young Trayvon Martin in Florida. In the back garden the bronze fennel is dying into gold, feathered stalks that hollow out and rustle in the wind.

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