It's been stressful over here lately, and I don't deal with stress all that well. Sometimes in the middle of the day I just need to escape. If I can put a pause on my own self, I usually can get away. There's a large rock just on the hill above our house. It has a good view and is far enough away to keep people from interrupting. Hopefully it also has limited distractions because I can get horribly distracted. My mind just gets so loud inside of it. Sadly, I always find these spots of peace in the wrong seasons. I don't imagine I'd do very good going out when there's snow on the ground.

Usually I spend half of an hour up there on my 'thinking rock'. Fifteen minutes of that time, I work on writing. I already section off a period of time to work on my novel writing; so this is actually the poetry type writing. Anything really that comes into my mind. I don't go seek endlessly for a perfect word or the perfect idea. I write the thoughts down as they come. After all, I only have fifteen minutes. The other poem I posted in the last blog was the first poem I wrote on the thinking rock. Here is another I wrote yesterday:

It will be cold in the morning.
There'll be a frost in the morning.
The flowers will die in the morning.
I'll have to say goodbye to the year.
You say there's two and a half months still left,
But it'll have ended in the morning
When the plants and the flowers fade.
The sun will rise up in the morning
And warm the earth and me with its heat,
But it willy only seem mocking to me.
Mocking me. Mocking life at its end.
As the earth warms. As the cold hides in the corners.
Corners of my garden.
Standing above where flowers have drooped and fallen.
My garden will be a graveyard in the morning
After the cold has crept and crawled through the night.
I'll wander through the ruin.
A glance here, a glance there, to see if it is the end.
The end of the year for flowers, for plants, for me.
The colors will be stolen in the morning.
All colors but the colors of leaves.
Summer's magic is over as another year goes dormant.
Another garden, another life, another me.
It'll be cold in the morning,
But I won't mind the cold.
There'll be a frost in the morning;
The reaper returning again.
The flowers will die in the morning.
I'll sing the funeral song.
I'll have to say goodbye in the morning.

Well, it did freeze this morning. Going into a garden after a frost is one of the saddest sights. It's the one morning that makes me dislike Autumn. We tried to prolong the life of some plants with blankets. I even put a sprinkler on my flower patch (cosmos, bachelor buttons, gazanias, rudbekia, etc.) to keep them alive a little longer. Unfortunately, they turned off our irrigation water for the year early this morning before the protective layer of ice melted. So, I went out to see a beautiful but very sad sight. Everything was covered in ice, reminding me of the glass art people do, and now they are mostly all frosted. It's sad business. I would have picked a gigantic bouquet of cosmos for my bedroom if I knew.