I'm prone to swing at mirrors

I did not get a picture of the deer I encountered this evening while walking within a ten-minute radius of my parents' house. It was roan-red, unantlered, browsing behind the hedge of a suburban lawn. I was surprised to see it; it moved quietly away through the screen of trees at the side of the house. We have had coyotes and foxes and uncountable rabbits in this area for years now, but I don't ever remember street-roaming deer.

I got a very bad picture of the little astronaut who trotted audaciously up the stairs to the sun porch once his sister had jimmied the closed but signally not locked door because I was engaged primarily in preventing him from further exploration, but he can be glimpsed looking back to his handler for instructions. She made a bolt for the forbidden territory herself while I was in the process of returning him. Both cats were successfully gathered and replaced so that my mother can keep breathing in her own home. I had naturally been on the phone with spatch when the incursion occurred.

How the sky ignores me, forever unimpressed

The sapling in the side yard which was believed to be a redbud turns out to be an elm. Its thin serrated leaves are yellowing in the drought, so I have been not quite literally throwing buckets of water on it. I feel protective of it in its own right and because it reminds me of the elm tree on my former street which I adopted and named and which I hope someone else is watering this summer. I have spent this month feeling curiously and progressively dispossessed, in exile. I saw an article about the first female captain of USS Constitution and it reminded me that I can no longer walk to the Charlestown Navy Yard in three-quarters of an hour. I have a reservoir behind me, but not a river. I don't smell salt with the right breeze in the mornings or hear gulls. I have a cat who has arranged himself in the curve of the basket chair so that he is taking up the part of my lap desk that is supposed to hold a mouse and instead naturally supports a cat and the thrum of his purr against my wrist is of great comfort, but it is the end of the month and I am not looking at moving out of this limbo in the next few days, which is not for want of trying. Every few days it feels like the Globe runs another article to the tune of the housing crisis in Boston. No kidding. I was raised to believe that I carried my home with me, but it is beginning to feel a bit like the bounds of a nutshell. Hestia is crouched in the hearth, her black tail curled protectively over the stones; I have to believe that as long as she is there, the fire has not yet gone out.