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THE ALL OF THIS

Over the weekend, during a non-rainy anomaly my hands were itching for stonework so I tore down a portion of the old stone wall of the upper garden and rebuilt it but it's still not quite right so I planned to redo it on Wednesday but it rained all day. Today was beautiful but I was at the office. Stones have all the fun. Also cleared and burned a lot of scrap, felt good, made plans to fell the oak above, planted some radishes, mended a chair, shaped the weeping cherry a bit away from the eave. Amidst all this I was alone in the bamboo wind and the glassine trills of the hawks in love, many birds came to audition; all were accepted gratefully into my growing spring chorus; I even saw some frogs, and turned up a couple of sleepy red salamanders from under their stone-wall coverlet, fresh from the long dream of winter, squinting and rubbing their eyes in the sudden light and looking about, remembering, doing a salamandery "Oh yeah, I remember this place; but who are you?" Such company!! Rarely a moment to myself, but I didn't mind. The self is such an abstraction, compared to the all of this.