for the black bat, night, has flown

    '... labor, something which, like marriage and children,
    I long ago vowed to avoid for the rest of my natural life ...'

    I'm sure with you on the first, John, though your feeling
    about the other two saddens me. Without them, my life,
    at any rate, would have been both heartless & pointless.

    It would also have been gardenless. Alongwith all
    the other irreplaceables for which I owe her, one of
    the least often acknowledged has been my wife's happiness
    in making a garden for each of the houses we've shared.

    Our present cottage one - & presumably our last -
    is much the smallest. Half shaded by two big trees &
    with bursts of colour between the stepping stones in
    all the varying, not over-tamed green, I think it also
    the most beautiful. It's what I have to look out at in
    the early morning, waiting for the espresso to percolate.
    Only now that we've been writing a little about such things,
    do I realise just how deeply deprived I should feel if
    it weren't there.

    (Incidentally, anyone read the poem recently? I used
    to think of it as an extremely dreary Victorian parlour
    ballad. Then I heard Olivier recite the whole shebang.
    Wow.)

    Scottie B.

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Received on Tue May 27 02:53:44 2003