Soup du jour.

Sleepless is the word these days. No babes to care for in the night, just myself and ten pillows, twisted sheets and a choir of crickets. No complaints really, I simply would like a good night's rest. Since arriving home from the East coast, rest has gone out the window. I spend the darkest part of each night hovering over projects at my work table, cruising the world wide and rereading.

Jeanette Winterson, you write so beautifully. The following paragraph copied in scrawling cursive and then into type from 'Sexing the Cherry'--the idea of it, a flicker of memory--came back around yesterday as I watched a man walk further and further away from my position in the coffee queue.

Here in an excerpt that called out to me. The first time I read this paragraph I was sitting in a park in Bassersdorf, Switzerland. Magic hour.

On more than one occasion I have been ready to abandon my whole life for love. To alter everything that makes sense to me and to move into a different world where the only known will be the beloved. Such a sacrifice must be the result of love... or is it that the life itself was already worn out? I had finished with that life, perhaps, and could not admit it, being stubborn or afraid, or perhaps did not know it, habit being a great binder. I think it is often so that those most in need of change choose to fall in love and then throw up their hands and blame it all on fate. But it is not fate, at least, not if fate is something outside of us; it is a choice made in secret after nights of longing. 


I am a charioteer in this game called Love and although I am only twenty two, my am growing tired of longing after a phantom.


* Above excerpt taken from Queens of Machu Picchu, an old post of mine. I was 22 in 2008, pining after a stranger and writing like a maniac in all corners of the world I was crawling then. Anecdotes don't pour out from mind to mains as easily as they used to, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Keeping things to myself more? I suppose. Young Madge.

Damn! Some things never change.

Sleepless and single, not all bad in actuality. I began sewing again last night after so many ages of looking at lifeless muslin rabbit limbs. And I enjoyed myself whilst!

Life after holidays is wonderful. Leo is beside me lounging in his inflatable pool, soaking up the heat rays. Curls for days, sparkly eyes on a boy who grew again in the space apart from the other. Amazing, that quick growth. His face changed, new words lodged in the memory banks: chaud, pool, cold, chat, compote (apple sauce) and his personal fave, de l'eau de l'eau de l'eau--repeated three times minimum. This kid would flip a lid in Aunty Marj's pool! I hate that my ma has never seen this golden babbling creature, has never hauled his slippery naked body around and around in the water. They would LOVE each other, I have no doubt. His is silly now! Still can't say my name for the life of him, but I know how he feels.

We cruised straight to the splash parc at the top of the afternoon today, the heat pressing. When I got to work he was naked in the pool, stirring a special plastic shape stock around his body with a giant wooden spoon. Soup du jour? Leo Pou (as his mother calls him, short for poussin--chick in anglais). As always, I forgot all the gear that is required for a swim day. Leo was the only naked child at the place, running wild, curls flying, eyes wide with other children wonder.

Only child.

Mail from Tante Lisa over lunch hour at Leo's; Montreal 2011.

I love my job.