45 minutes
with Delia the dog
neighborhood + 7 Oaks
78 degrees
Took a walk in the afternoon with Delia the dog through the neighborhood, almost to the river trail, then to 7 Oaks. Felt like summer. RJP told me the other day that the buoys are up at the lake. Next week — maybe on Tuesday? — I’ll test out the water!
10 Things I Noticed
- a black capped chickadee
- the neighbor on the next block who almost always sits on his front steps smoking was sitting on his front steps smoking
- someone at cooper field was dribbling a soccer ball then shooting it into a net set up in the batting area — not sure how old he was, but his bike looked like it was for someone around 12
- someone “mocking” in a blue hammock in the grassy area between edmund and the river road. When I walked by, I could hear soft music — not sure what it was
- angled solar panels on the roof of a tall and big house — maybe a duplex?
- a recently dug up dirt patch in one corner of an otherwise pristine yard — I wondered how upset the woman/gardener who lives there is about this blemish
- crossing the street, taking a few steps through someone’s grass to reach the sideway — wow, such thick, soft grass. What did they have to do to have such lush grass?
- Delia decided to poop on the edge of another yard in the thickest part of the grass. From a distance, this grass looked like it might be soft too. Nope. Spiky, stiff, sharp
- lots of little wrens or sparrows — not sure I can tell the difference
- no birdsong coming from the sink hole at 7 Oaks — all the birds were in neighborhood trees
Mary Ruefle and Yellow Sadness
Yellow sadness is the surprise sadness. It is the sadness of
naps and eggs, swan’s down, sachet powder and moist tow-
elettes. It is the citrus of sadness, and all things round and
whole and dying like the sun possess this sadness, which
is the sadness of the first place; it is the sadness of explo-
sion and expansion, a blast furnace in Duluth that rises
over the night skyline to fall reflected in the waters of
Lake Superior, it is a superior joy and a superior sadness,
that of revolving doors and turnstiles, it is the confusing
sadness of the never-ending and the evanescent, it is the
sadness of the jester in every pack of cards, the sadness of
a poet pointing to a flower and saying what is that when
what that it is a violet; yellow sadness is the ceiling fresco
painted by Andrea Mantegna in the Castello di San Gio-
gio in Mantove, Italy, in the fifteenth century, wherein we
look up to see we’re being looked down upon, looked
down upon in laughter and mirth, it is the sadness of that.
The citrus of sadness. I like that. I can also see yellow as the sadness of naps or of expansion and explosion. In “Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde writes about yellow:
During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. Then taking it carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and forth, over and over, until the color had spread throughout the whole pound bag of margarine, thoroughly coloring it. I find the erotc such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experiences.
“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” / Audre Lorde
I remember reading this essay in grad school and liking it this image of the spreading joy that colors everything. Energy, intensity, strength. A warm yellow.
As I walked I looked for yellow — a very bright yellow shirt on a biker, dandelions dotting the grass at 7 oaks. I thought about the sun as leaving smears of yellow and yellow as piercing the eye. I also thought about the strange level at the Guthrie Theater where everything looks yellow. And now, writing this, I’m remembering how I discovered some research about Van Gogh and yellow. He only say yellow, or something like that. An image of mustard came into my head — ballpark mustard, not grainy or spicy mustard. Not sure why not spicy mustard — I like its color and taste much more than “regular” mustard.