It sounds like icy rain.  A kind of sharp patter which hits the terrace in different places, making me think of hail.  The windows are blurred with it, one section of the sliding glass door thick with droplets, and the other one, on the right, is clearer.  That is because the one on the left has the screen behind it.  I do not want to move to see if it is in fact ice that is hitting the glass.  It is May, and I need to write a novel, and I need to plant dahlias.

The wind is picking up.  It is a wind that starts and stops, and if Galway Kinnell were still alive, he could write a poem about it.  Galway Kinnell is dead, isn’t he?  Too many people have passed away–Jenny Diski the latest, who I only knew because she wrote about what it was like living with Doris Lessing as a child.  Has Doris Lessing passed?  Yes, she has.  Is it because Google is at my fingertips that my memory is so thin?  That I need not use my memory as much because I can always look it up?

It is that kind of day.  The kind I wonder why I am not really as good a writer as I want to, and no amount of soothing will do.  It is the cold, sharp, rock we carry in our hearts, the notion of not measuring up, when measuring up is fruitless and meaningless, and all-consuming.  Yes, yes, there are the gratitude lists, and look at where I am: safe from the rain and cold, with dinner in the fridge.  I have a fridge.  So where does this elusiveness come from?  Is it because classes are finished, grades are in, and I don’t have anything as good as Ferrante or Tolstoy to read?  A chunky novel I can’t wait to go to bed and start reading?

Meanwhile Air Fare Watchdog Alert tells me that there are $39 round trip tickets available if I only look, from here to there and back again.  I look, and I don’t see it.  Restlessness, this is what my mother calls.  When I get restless, with nothing much to occupy me for the moment.  It will change tomorrow, maybe even after dinner.  I’ll heat something up, watch Midsomer Murders which, by the way, is endless with episodes.  Nowhere near as good as Wallander, but Patti Smith has watched it.  Now, really, is that important?  It is just the rain, the cold, and early May.

But later:

Turned out that the Midsomer rerun I was watching, but new to me, took half-place in Denmark.  And the stars from The Killing and Borgen were on it with Nordic Sang-froid while teaming up with the Midsomer cast.  And from a long-lensed  view, The Killing star looked a lot like Patti Smith.

I enjoyed the episode, and midway through, laughed out loud.  Midsomer is hugely popular in Denmark, because, as the Danish broadcaster DK’s acquisitions director once put it to The Guardian, it’s a cozy English village mystery series, “And if you fall asleep it’s fine, because that’s what it’s for and you’ll never remember who did it anyway.”

Outside, the rain has paused, and the frogs are peeping again.