Hold them without contempt you once loved. Knowing as you do everything about them but remember you never knew them, not really. Arms, those awkward upper appendages, so clever hands and fingers at the ends, those arms can not hide the feelings of the heart even if the lips service a lie. You can't make someone understand when there's no sense, trying to communicate with someone to whom, with whom, you feel the constant need to explain yourself. No regrets no guilt.

We weave an elaborate web of relationships and intrigues, breaks in the yarn only seen through close scrutiny, threadbare fabric patched only if it's necessary. We create a series of knots for decoration, for strength, for thickness, clever fingers at the ends of too truthful arms forming the structure, the bias, the warp and weft. Weave it loosely for give, for resistance, for additions, but not so loose as to lose form.


Saturday I awoke to clouds, marine layer, killdeer crying. We rode bicycles west into the late morning, into the wetlands preserve, checkermallows and wild grasses, the air cold and fresh with mist and bright with the sun illuminating the clouds. The medicinal smell of ironweed, that smell of summer, like sunflowers bloomed out and drooping under the weight of their future. Bright pink pea vetch and bright blue milkweed and cattails rippled in the breeze in the drainage ditch. We rode across the bridge and onto the bike trail.

Shift down crank that big chain ring around, drop down go galloping, give chase and make speed, the rush of wind our own creation and the blue and gold barn swallows sweep in the field beside us, like dolphins riding the waves of a ship. Speed just because, eyes watering, nose and throat and lungs burning, every muscle alive.

S passed me on the turn and I dropped behind him, drafting. He mentioned his mother was worried about him riding out the bike path alone and I laughed but he said no not because she was afraid other people would harm him but because he and bicycles have a long and disastrous history, including broken limbs and concussions involving trees and mailboxes and automobiles. But he promises he's a much safer rider these days. Not that I could stop him. We watched an eagle flying over our heads headed west to the lake and took the long way home.


Traditional style bellydance is not flashy cabaret but more folkloric stepwork, and the workshop I took on Saturday afternoon focused on floor patterns, musical rhythm, and finger cymbals. I learned so much. One of the things I love best about bellydancing is that it gives validity to age. Our Saturday instructor is in her sixties, still smashing in silver dahling and can dance graceful beautiful circles around girls a third her age. She told me once with the sweetest smile, there are grandmas who babysit and there are grandmas who bellydance. We studied beledi rhythm and masmoudi rhythm, how to dance and how to play the zills with the complicated and sometimes syncopated beats. It was as much a workout for my mind as for my hands and feet; a different style of dance than the sensuous rich layers of serpentine and shimmy.


JJ came for dinner and teased me about my inflatable kiddie pool. It's ten feet long and two feet deep and if I hold my breath and float on my back and close my eyes I can imagine I'm in a much bigger body of water bobbing along. It's also deep enough or I'm small enough to be completely submerged. Anyway it's better than the bathtub for splashing and it sure beats the heat.


Sunday after moving JJ into her cute little cabin in a neat old neighborhood and after she bought us lunch because she's a dear one not to mention damn sexy in that little red top she wore, S & I returned home. I have been working on crocheting scarves; I bought all kinds of wool, merino wool, mohair, lincoln, shetland, etc. and am first gathering then winding and then crocheting, which is done with one hook. I look at that little instrument and wonder at the creation and adaptation; it looks like someone lost one of their knitting needles and simply made do with the remaining stick by carving a notch to hook the line.

All I do is make knots; fancy elaborate and intricate slip knots, but just knots. I can unravel the whole thing by pulling on the loose end. It falls into a rhythm itself, my hands nimbly reaching and knotting, keeping the yarn a certain tension between the loop and the hook, and since it is both creative and mechanical I am able to let my mind wander. It follows the knots, I look at the places in memory forgotten, those untied ends. I find the tangles, the irreparable sections torn apart, shredded beyond recognition.

I don't feel regret for the damage of years gone by, it's not worth the trouble. Once in my life I thought I could mend anything, and maybe once in my life I could have mended anything up until that point, but now the best I can do is tie the pieces, tuck or snip the snags, and weave what I can into some semblance of pattern.