LIMINAL LIVING #88: 1 SEPTEMBER TO 7 SEPTEMBER 2025

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LIMINAL LIVING #88: 1 SEPTEMBER TO 7 SEPTEMBER 2025

September 7, 2025

Weekly recap of my ritual of existence in this liminal space called life. (See here for more info.)

Weather

I had the feeling it was a cool week, probably because the mornings were chilly and a few days were cloudy (or rainy), but the average high this week was a warmish 74.7°F, even if only for an hour in the late afternoon …. High temperatures ranged from 78.3°F to 64.9°F. The lows ranged from 48.6°F to 58.8°F, averaging 52°F for the week. And, we got rain!, almost an inch total, most of it on Saturday. The fire danger is still high and we are still in a moderate drought, edging toward severe.

Beginnings/Firsts

Not quite the first (that was last week) but this was the second recently eclosed (emerged) monarch butterfly I came across on the patio so far this season. I saw it hanging on concrete under the rain barrel, no visible chrysalis in sight, then later it was on the patio nearby pumping its wings, then an hour or two later it climbed up on a small plant less than a foot away, then another plant next to that one, and it was still there in the morning around 8:30 but gone by 9:45. Farewell, little one!

The time stamps on these are September 1, Monday: 4:35 p.m.; 5 p.m.; 5:35 p.m., 7:45 p.m. — and there it remained until around 9-9:30 a.m. the next morning. The last photo was taken at 10:55 a.m. on 2 Sept., Tues. of a monarch that might be this recently eclosed individual (a female).

Wild Things (Flora, Fauna, Fungi) in addition to others elsewhere in this post

(It’s funny how different the two common eastern bumblebees below look but iNaturalist folks swear they both are. The photo lighting and angles are quite different.)

Merlin heard these birds nearby this week.

Wandering

Walked in town on every day but Friday, when I walked in Hanover NH and around the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center a bit.

in-town

DHMC and Hanover

Curiosity & Discoveries

Very excited to come across this midsummer tiger swallowtail butterfly caterpillar on the tulip poplar tree!

Always invigorating to discover a black bear in the yard on the motion camera — and this one wasn’t far from where I was sitting in the sunroom at 8:20 p.m. Sunday night.

Creating

I created a splendid opportunity to walk a couple of miles back to the hair salon on Tuesday after I (and the stylist) forgot to charge me. (I could have paid over the phone but I took the opportunity to move that was offered to me!)

Repairing and Maintaining (everything but the house & yard)

Body/Mind: I worked out three times (3 hours) this week, reduced because I was busy on a few days during my target workout hours of 2-5 p.m. I walked more than 10,000 steps every day, more than 14,000 steps on four days, with a high step count on Tuesday of 17,553. We both got the updated Covid vaccines on Thursday. I got my hair cut early on Tuesday morning. I participated in Dharma Sunday via Zoom, with Dan Clurman leading us for two hours in the Feldenkrais Method (Awareness Through Movement) along with a related meditation. I love that stuff.

Gardening/Yard

Peaches are done. My husband dehydrated those that remained (mostly damaged). Here’s what’s left of those (we’ve been eating them).

I worked in the garden for about 3 hours this week, mostly watering, but also harvesting, pinching basil flowers, and snipping off yellowing tomato plant stems. On Friday, my husband moved the brush and clipping piles I made last week to the back of the property.

some garden pics this week

Nesting

Cleaning/Maintenance: I did clothes laundry on Monday and either Sat. or Sunday, I forgot to note it. I vacuumed the kitchen and hallway on Wed. The usual kitchen and bathrooms cleaning.

Financial/Admin: I spent some of Wed. and Friday on the phone dealing with what turned out to be a bank error, not just on our account but on many, that resulted in our property insurance bill not being paid, but fortunately I schedule most auto-payments 10 days ahead. I think we have it sorted now but will know more next week. On Thursday, I (re)subscribed for a year to Atlantic magazine online again after a break when they offered a good deal. I resisted the urge to subscribe again to Ancestry (at half-price) because it’s just too hard to use. (I can use it but I don’t enjoy using it.) On Tues., my hair stylist and I set up the next three encutment appointments, taking me through the end of the year.

Supplies: I placed an order with Nuts.com on Monday for macadamias, multi-coloured orzo, dried pears, and bitty bars. I bought an H&M shirt via eBay on Tuesday.

Food: The first four days dinner consisted mostly of sautéed local summer squash, local peppers, our garlic, and Vidalia onion thing, along with black beans (didn’t have green beans handy), mixed in with cacio e pepe, and then with either grilled chicken (him) or shrimp (her & him) added (or on Monday, his restaurant leftovers). On Friday I picked up Indian takeout while in Hanover, which we are still eating, yay, along with local cukes, local peppers, and our cherry tomatoes.

On Tuesday, I boiled and ate (with butter) the lima beans a friend (RL) grew this year. Yum! Here they are in their raw state after I podded them:

My husband accidentally made four loaves of rye bread on Saturday. Here they are before baking:

Sleeping & Dreaming

Sleep times ranged from 6 hours 10 minutes (early haircut that day) to 9 hours, with three nights coincidentally of exactly 7 hours and 47 minutes. My sleep time average was 7 hours 48 minutes, with a Galaxy Fit 3 score of 84.7 (dinged for not enough sleep one night, too much sleep the next, and I wish this fitness app would learn to take the longer view). I got a bit over 13 hours of REM sleep and 7 hours 20 mins of deep sleep.

Reading / Words & Ideas / Listening / Watching

Reading

BOOKS

I finished two books, sort of, this week. One was half a book but a whole novella, Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965) by Georges Perec (I still have the other half of the book, another novella, A Man Asleep, to read.) The other was The Weekend (2022) by Charlotte Wood.

Things is “about” a couple in their early 20s, Jérôme and Sylvie, who are part-time market researchers living in Paris. They would have liked to have done something else but “they possessed, alas, but a single passion, the passion for a higher standard of living.” Though they live like students and are fairly poor, shopping at flea markets instead of at the auctions they browse assiduously, they want to be persons of standing and to that end they pore over certain magazines and talk about their tastes and yearnings with their circle of friends, most in the advertising industry, and go to the cinema [which, granted, was amazing in the ’60s] a lot. Even when they are enjoying themselves, the moment could easily crumble with “the slightest false note, a mere moment’s hesitation, a sign that was perhaps too vulgar;” then everything goes back to seeming like “a thing they had bought, a pitiful and flimsy thing.” Against the backdrop of the ongoing war in Algeria, which occasionally feels very threatening to them and which when it ends leaves them feeling world-weary and uneasy, what they want most is “superabundance.” Eventually a collapse of their friend group coupled with a growing realisation that they aren’t getting any younger and need to establish financial stability lead them to living for eight months in Sfax, Tunisia, where Sylvie gets a teaching job and where, it turns out, there is little to want to buy — and without wanting, what is the essence of their existence?

The Weekend was nothing like Things and yet there are certain similarities, particularly in terms of noticing the signs of growing older, wishing they weren’t (or simply denying that they are) growing older, and at least for one of the women, seeking stability/money. Three women in their early 70s, who have been friends for over 50 years, gather at the house of another close friend who has recently died, charged by the deceased woman’s partner with clearing it out over the Christmas holidays. (This is set in Australia, so it’s hot and they swim in the ocean.) Successful writer Wendy brings her suffering dog, Finn, against the orders of Jude, a once-famous restaurateur, who, while counting the days until her longtime married lover comes to stay for a week, immediately and brusquely takes charge of the food, the cleaning, and the other women to the extent that she can, though Adele, a once famous and now fading actress, whose partner Liz is leaving her (and leaving her broke), resists Jude’s pushing and finds ways to not work too hard. Jude and Adele both have a certain horror of aging, particularly of the body as it ages, and try in different ways to ignore all signs of weakness and deterioration in themselves and others, while Wendy turns a bit of a blind eye to her aged dog’s suffering. I like the frankness, the imperfections, the anxieties, the pain, the insights, the compassion these women (and the dog) exhibit and the subtle ways they support and challenge each other. [It’s interesting to me, contrasting the two books, that in both of them many things are named, in detail, to the nth degree, so many big and little things; but in The Weekend, whose very foundation is the women gathering to go through their friend’s things (which they are welcome to keep in exchange for the clear-out), their friend’s things are felt by them as oppressive, dreary, undesirable, basically trash; none of the women really wants them.]

Next up are A Man Asleep (Perec, 1967) and Bad Wolf (2012/2013) by Nele Neuhaus, in the Bodenstein & Kirchhoff crime series, set in Germany.

I found several new words/terms in Perec’s novella, including quincunx, as in “the quincunx dots marking the plane trees.”

OTHER

Not everyone will find this essay — Third-order vanity: A new term for the social media age, by Haley Nahman at Maybe Baby — as insightful or interesting as I do. I think her theory and her explication of it are incisive: “[F]irst-order vanity, despite its comparative simplicity, is not the same as confidence, but rather an imitation of it. To admire oneself in the mirror is to still be looking for answers.”

Also:

Also this helpful tip for taking photos of people; I’ve been trying it out on plants, too.

And I want to try this recipe:

Watching

Still season 4 of “Death in Paradise.”

Connections & Community

Local Support: My husband volunteered at the local car museum this week for 10+ hours. We ate outside on the patio at the local café/bakery on Friday morning. Shopped at the farmstand on Monday (corn) and Wednesday (?). I shopped at the regional co-op on Thursday and got Indian takeout at a local place in Hanover on Friday before meeting my friend at the hospital.

Relationships: Salon met on Friday with just three of us and I could stay only a little more than an hour, but it was still fun! A friend (RL) and I got together on Monday at her house for 1.5 hours to catch-up. Also on Monday a friend (AS) brought us a bottle of honey made by his bees and he and my husband went out driving (and coffee-getting) in their little sportscars for a couple of hours.

I got my hair cut on Tuesday morning and caught up with my stylist/friend (GV). Our friend (ND) turned 89 on Tuesday and we spent an hour at her house chatting; on Saturday we were there for another half-hour and she gave us some homemade gingerbread cake. I talked with my sister by phone for a half-hour on Thursday, and we ran into some neighbours (CR&GR) while walking after dinner that night. I went with a friend (MBW) to her annual oncology appt. after her scans and labs on Friday for an hour or so. Sunday we checked friends’ (ED&SD) container plants and dehumidifier while they were away. A friend (KKT) emailed a couple of times this week and I emailed her. Another friend (RVN) also emailed this week. I emailed a friend (MC) a longish note about our permaculture group on Thursday and she replied on Friday. We RSVP’d to our nephew’s wedding/rehearsal dinner in Oct.