We were supposed to travel this weekend, but Hanna was unwell so rather than push ourselves and land her with three weeks of pneumonia like last fall — that was fun! — we revised things and stayed in place. On Saturday morning we took our coffee and pastries (thank you Ula Cafe!) and went out to Forest Hills Cemetery to sit and read in the October sun.

Ula is doing this amazing orange clove seasonal latte which sounds like it should be dreadful but instead tastes like a liquid form of those chocolate oranges one gets at the Christmas holidays.

The heron, Canadian geese, and mallards, were totally unfazed by our presence — though after I snapped this picture a couple of super happy canines came by and drove them all protesting out to the island in the middle of the lake.

I’ve been reading Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist: Essays this weekend, which has reinforced my perception that it’s been too long since I sat down and essayed. Creative nonfiction, the art of the personal-political essay, was my first love in college and Gay’s prose is so sweet it’s at times painful to read. In a good way.

You might be seeing more longform writing here in the future — though how far in the future I cannot say. I need to consider, still, what I want to write and how I want to write it. These things take time. 

In the meanwhile, I also have Maplecroft and Bitter Greens and The Late Scholar on my bookshelf. Fiction calls!