Indira Ganesan, August Brownies, 2012

The fourteenth of August.  Tomorrow is India’s Independence Day. It is  also Julia Child’s 100th birthday. Happy birthday to both.

My library books are due tomorrow, though I already renewed them once.  I took out five, will return two, and renew again.  I thought I had yoga, drove to the rec center, didn’t see any cars, so drove to the yacht club, and none there, either.  Tuesday!  No class on Tuesdays! So I went to the beach, dipped my feet in the deliciously warm waters and collected stones for a garden art project.

Came home, made a smoothie, and created a distribution list for haranguing folks about my novel to come.  Apologies, you might get a letter in your cyberbox. Too hot to read those library books though I started two.  So, made a snack, wandered outside,  and unintentionally weeded the garden a bit.

Yet once you begin to weed, mindfulness takes over.  Called it quits.

Researched brownie recipes, and ate a few chocolate chips instead. A nap couldn’t hurt, I reasoned.

Why does August make me sleepier than any other month?

Woke, popped in a load of laundry, and made these brownies.  Brain food for the imaginatively challenged, (me, not HFW, obviously) I wrote on Facebook.

How does that chemical alchemy occur, the exquisite scent that is produced when sugar, eggs, chocolate combine so perfectly that the kitchen is perfumed?

The strawberry is from the garden; as is the chocolate mint.

Indira Ganesan, Soon, 2012

It has been a summer of dog-earing, folding down corners of books and projects that will be finished later.  In my home, the rooms are scattered with magazine articles and stories I am coming back to, novels I’ve opened and marked, little dog-ears that promise later, soon, maybe in the winter.  I have a book of stories open at the table where I eat meals, and I’ve been on the story for days.  The story is very good, but I am compelled after I eat to clear the dishes, and go on to something else, even while thinking, why not just sit and finish?  It wasn’t always like this.  Books were read.  A friend once asked, looking at my books, have you really read all of these?  Of course, I replied, surprised, thinking, that was why they were shelved.  Who would own books they hadn’t read, I thought.  That was decades ago.  Now my shelves are full of the partially read, the near forgotten, the new ones.

Once I stayed in this town refusing to leave until  I finished my first novel.  I did, and began another, moved, then spent ten years moving and finishing the second book.  A few more moves, fourteen years pass, and a third gets completed.  Now I am back where I  first finished, fishing for a fourth.  Is it among all the dog-eared and bookmarked projects? The books, the magazines, the garden, the Olympics on tv? The laundry, the groceries, the car tune-up?

And what is that noise outside anyway and when will the tomatoes fruit?