This post is much too moody for daylight hours, so I’ve hidden it in minutes leaving up to the bewitching hour of midnight. A half-moon dangled between the pine boughs, and some star or planet was right beside it, keeping it company on a calm sky of the deepest ocean blue. A song then, for a day and evening that has been bewitching, bothersome, and bafflingly bewildering – a song that has been posted here before in Ella Fitzgerald’s brilliant rendering of it from sunnier days that seem to have taken place ages ago…
It was a bothersome day because of the bugs – even with a heavy spritzing of insect repellent, and a preliminary yard fogging, they would not leave me alone as I attempted to clear up our side yard. Upwards of ten years have passed since I last tackled that section of our property, and that’s much too long to let anything go. The vines have soared fifty feet into the pine and oak trees – the bane of bittersweet and Virginia creeper – both taken a hold of the entire area. Sprouts of little shrubs have become trees, and pulling them up by the roots took its toll on my neck last week, and my back today – another bothersome aspect of the day. I know enough not to pull too hard, I really do, and still I find myself thinking I can do one more, that my back is the same supple thing it was in my 20’s, and it’s simply not.
The bothersome grows into the bewildering, as the news reports of an assassination attempt on a possible dictator come onto the television, as if the news couldn’t get any more depressing and worrisome. That one evil, corrupt, indicted felon can so destroy a country with half the country’s blessing is still a bewildering mystery to me.
And so I do my best to discover the bewitching that begins and ends the song, but I am at a loss. This summer only continues where last summer left off – no resolution, no happy ending, only more loose ends, more questions, more worries and sadness and wonder.
Now I will move into a midnight meditation, to shake off the mucky emotions of the day and hopefully find a place of peace for a calm stretch of slumber.
