Days are worth avoiding now, preferably by sleeping though them, though that’s easier said than done. Mowed the lawn after seven last night and still ended up dripping with sweat. How people worked outside in the Deep South during the summer is a mystery to me.
I now have about twelve monarchs in chrysalis; I am taking a jar of them to the Monarch adoptive mothers in Asheville this morning. I have a new setup that I really like: the aquarium set on one of its ends, screen taped to the open side which is facing the window. Within, a jar of water with several stalks of milkweed in it. I’m thinking about letting them use this right through the chrysalis-making stage, so I have little blue-green pompoms affixed to the top glass. It reminds me now, with caterpillars in all stages busily chomping away at the milkweed within, of those old glass cases like Grandfan and Grandpop’s, in which the dead birds were mounted. How much more vital this is!
I start my new class tonight. That, my impending period, the heat, and anxiety about when they are going to begin cutting down the trees in the forest that surrounds me are raising my anxiety level to new heights. Not a happy camper right now.
Had our first dish of peas last night for supper. Need to get a lot of stuff together before I go to Asheville this morning so I guess I better start getting at that rather than writing. Birds are already singing, and the sky is getting light.
I wonder whether we will ever, as a nation, recognize the wisdom of what Wendell Berry is writing about in “The Gift of Good Land.” Driving down the road occasionally, when I see wild roses growing or other roadside flowers — in a place, in other words, that hasn’t been mowed or timbered or otherwise torn up by the modern machinery that runs the engine of America — I get a glimpse of how beautiful this place must have been before the industrial revolution started chewing it up and spitting it out. How nice it must have been to ride along rough roads on a wagon. Hot, yes, but slowly enough to see something of the world. We have sacrificed EVERYTHING to speed.
Today I will go by the latest sacrifice, over there by Mars Hill, where the earth moving equipment is utterly rearranging the landscape. How ugly it all is! How ugly it’s going to be for the next ten years, while they four-lane the road from Mars Hill through Spruce Pine. I’m not sure that I want to stick around to watch it. I have never before seriously thought of moving, but I am feeling less and less at home here, less and less free to leave my backyard. I feel under siege. I wish I had an old farm now, with about thirty acres and a house and an old barn right in the middle of it, where I could control what happens to more of the land that surrounds me.