Tuesday

1. As of last night, there was a 30% probability that the zone of unsettled weather off the Florida peninsula would develop into a tropical storm. I’m not sure whether that’s still the case, but if the storm does grow, the National Weather Service would call it Tropical Storm Ana, and it would arrive just in time for the funeral.

My mother’s name? Anne.

2. Did I mention that I’m speaking at the funeral? As much as I’d wanted to write a tribute to my mother, the task ahead of me felt like carrying a ladder on my back. How does one compress a life into three pages? I went to the gym before dinner, ran and ran on the treadmill. I wrote it when I got home. I looked it over before I went to bed, lay down on the sofa with my arms folded, rigid. It wasn’t her. I took it out again this morning and worked on it some more.

3. This remix of Bjork’s “I See Who You Are,” especially past the 3:11 mark.

I See Who You Are (Riverus Version) - Björk

4. Mark got home just before 11 this morning. The day so scrubbed and bright we had to take the bikes out. This was the first day we took the bikes out in our new neighborhood, after they’d been collecting grime and dust in the basement of our building in Manhattan for years. They’re clean again, hard new tires. We went to Louse Point. We went to the Springs General Store, where the store cat, who’s 23, crawled out from under the porch and sat with us for a while.


5. Before that, though, I walked out to the pond out back. I looked down and the frog was two feet from my shoes, looking up at me in the sun. Slippery, alive, blue-green. Almost visceral. Usually he jumps when sees me coming, but this time I was the one who almost jumped. I sat down on the bench and looked at him. He looked at me. This went on for fifteen minutes. The underside of his throat was mottled, dark brown patches over pale banana: it palpitated. I said, My mother died. A few minutes later he made a few quiet frog sounds that sounded like snoring.