The High One turned to flame in his hands, and then into a memory

Patricia A. McKillip has died. I read her so early, I can't remember the first time. Her influence on my writing and on some of my thought is incalculable. We met twice at different conventions. I shared readings with her husband. She wrote the sea like I could breathe it. I was re-reading one of my favorites of her mid-career novels idly last week, hoping that whatever she wrote next would be something I liked. At the moment the stones are still falling out of the sky.

Cherry-glazed black lines over your eyes

For the first time in almost exactly a month, I got outside in the afternoon to photograph the flowering things of my neighborhood, with cameo appearances by the lilac beyond our back deck and Autolycus watching me make dinner.

( When a thorn showed up and pierced my heart. )

Dinner was a somewhat disrupted affair, but spatch located Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here (1943) on TCM. I have seen this film twice and it remains, even at small-screen size, a functionally inexpressible experience whose existence I appreciate equally beyond words.

I would like something nice to happen in the world; all the news lately seems to run in the opposite direction. It's getting tiring.