Still here

I find it hard to believe this summer is winding down. We've been in a wilderness place, but it's getting less dense and a bit of sunlight is cutting through the darkness. We're grateful for each ray.

It's amazing how a mind can fixate on the strangest thing when you're tired. I must have spent twenty minutes staring at the brickwork on our house yesterday. Some were coated with black bubbles, others had circles of red surrounded by the dark char, and then there were the ones that looked sun-baked and glazed. I remembered how bricks were made in Colonial times, stacked in alternating rows with a big oak fire to bake them. The bricks on the ends of the rows took on the sooty darkness of the fire, creating the bricks used in the blackened patterned style used in the Flemish bond pattern. Useless knowledge, I know, but it came back to me as I studied our carelessly fired bricks with no pattern, no style.

I like order, precision, and a plan. I don't know how others finish writing a book without an outline of some sort. If I tried that, the work, if I finished at all, would look like the bricks on our house. Not something I want my name to adorn.