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from St. Mary's Day, 15 August

ii) Prime, 6 am. Arise, the Sun is Come.

Our finest summer cheeses are made with nettles. We drain the cheeses from the brine, then lay them upon fresh nettles and cover them with new nettles as well. Then we let them ripen. It requires turning the cheeses and changing the nettles every day for two months. I can hear one of the lay sisters, the one built like a barrel, I think, thrunch and flailing with her apron trying to chase two fat crows off the cheeses. I see the mustard is ready to be picked. After the repast, I'll take one of the orphans out with me and we'll give it to the infirmarian to dry and thresh it.

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When it's my turn to cook the plums for winter, I take a pan the size of a kilderkin and partly fill it with water. I skime my eyes around the kitchen to make sure I am alone and then I touch each of my nipples with my forefinger because plums and damsons are sacred under Venus, and my mother is not a Christian. I have at least a fardel of plums to cook. Into the water I keach out six gills of honey, a noggin of rose water, and set the plums in the bottom of the pan one by one. I hang them over a soft fire and as they seethe, I strew rose petals upon them, and let them boil down and sometime stir them as they thicken. The crink who is helping me is a dwindle and dumble too. I have to force open the loofs of both her hands and put her wrists together so when I strome my fingers through the plums as they cool to find the pits, I can put them carefully into the urk's filthy hands. If the pits are planted next spring, the urk and I and most of the sisters of the Paraclete will be gone by the time they are fruit-bearing trees. I give the crink a pipkin of warm fruit because she looks half-starved, and she eats like a slotterhodge, and I repent being agged with her. I was more likely agged because the dimmet is coming and I can't finish before dark.

~~~ Next week, the 21st , is the day the Dove came back to the Ark with the olive branch in her mouth. We call it Gleaning Sunday because we let the poor walk through our fields and take what the harvesters have left behind. I ladle the plums into crocks while the undercellaress seals them with wax. Hopefully, the damsons of Venus will keep until Easter.

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iii) Terce, 9 am. Illuminate my heart, O God, and guide my hand.

Duck and drake/Good quills make. Dearlings, attend to me. An illuminator should manage her own quills, as she who cuts the hay should whet her own scythe. One gets one's pens from the five outer flight feathers, the pinions. Swan, goose, duck, crow, and raven make the best instruments, though you may use pheasant, pelican, peacock, and eagle as well. Some of you have swan, some goose feathers. Feathers from the left wing fit the right hand best and the right the left. First, we must heat the quill in the hot ashes of a fire. Less than a minute. Gently peel off the delicate skin by scraping the trunk of the quill with the back of your knife bladd. Now, rub the quill smoothly with the piece of soft silvery scales of lamprey found on your desks. Rub hard. The oil in the fish skin softens it. Next, spit on the barrel, rub briskly with the fish skin and put it in this ewer to soak all night in water. In the morning, we will harden the quills in a pan of hot sand. The cutting of the quills is easy enough, though you must work carefully. That's for tomorrow.

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Here, in Sister's drawing, is Bathsheba bathing on the roof under the sycamine trees. The tiles of her bath are Etruscan red, her gown the color of a dryad rose. Silk slips from her shoulders, the draperies falling into a pool at her feet, and shadows shush, shush, their warning unheeded. She tests the scented water with one white foot, and with the help of her handmaids, steps into it, her flame-colored hair floating on the surface like golden foam. That day, David was writing a psalm. The devil flew into the room as a glorious bird, its beak made of diamonds, its legs of rubies, and every feather blazing gold. David, wide-eyed, reaches for its beauty, and the bird has flown out the window and onto a branch above the roof in the sycamine tree. David looks down and sees Bathsheba bathing and was overtaken. You know how it ends. Don't you think it strange that their son, King Solomon, could understand the language of birds?

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v) Nones, 3 pm. Meditation at midovernoon in our cells.

I loved our attic rooms, the way light
sculpted your face, marked your hair
blue-black, danced on your hands
as you explained declension, case,

or grammar in words of fire, in syntax
that sparkled and fizzed. The god-man
on the cross stopped guiding me when
you stepped from the window ledge

with sunlight held like golden roses
in your arms, the pages sprentling
nakedly as if there were a breeze.
You nantled my lip with a single finger

for wistness, your mouth nearing mine.
I breathed your murmuring towziness,
and a skyme of routhe leapt in my heart.
Salt on my lips-was it from weeping

of from a wave breaking over our heads?
We loved and loved in the gabled room
at the top of the house overlooking
the Seine. My uncle below at supper

supposed us to be studying, only it
was not the patristics we read
intently but the holy book of the body.
We were not longer teacher and pupil.

Origen, Jerome and Paul turned their backs
on us. There were only lessons in love.

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