Day and night

There are poppies in bunches at Pick 'n Pay. Our Limpopo avocados have not ripened yet (R20 - $2 - for eight. In Brooklyn they are $1.50 each). In the greenbelt when I walked the dogs between rain showers this afternoon, a duck sat on the racing brown stream and was swept around a bend. A tree crashed in the pine woods across the way. The rain sweeps over the roof again. It is dark outside at 6pm. I watch Grand Hotel and marvel at how good Joan Crawford is, and how bad Greta Garbo.

Yet she got the best lines.

"The music has stopped."

I had to smile. I felt that way when the Frenchman left. How such a quiet man can leave such silence behind him.

He writes and says: The terrace and roof farm look great [no one has seen the farm for weeks, as neither Amy nor Dinah could manage the heavy hatch]. He says: Blueberries as big as cherries.

My worlds pull apart.

He will take pictures of pots and I will send instructions. Pull this. Leave that. I wonder if the Cape gooseberries survived. They were pinpricks when we left. The cat's grass must be sawgrass by now. How about tomatoes?

Outside, in the wet, frogs click in the reeds.