Momma and I stayed up until almost 2 am talking. Since I was set to travel back to DC today, I shouldn't have stayed up so late. But it reminds me of the passage in the Odyssey that Dr. Ryan talked about over thirty years ago -- the part about how wonderful it is to stay up through the night telling stories -- especially as life is short -- the idea that telling each other stories is perhaps the most nobel thing in life, the thing that makes life real.

I'm not tired this morning. But I have delayed my departure. Perhaps we'll leave in a couple hours, or perhaps stay yet another day in this heat, as a precaution.

Rain is what we wish we had. Here at my parents' house, a drought has held firm for about a month, and now the region lays under a hot air mass since Monday. I was supposed to return home, but have stayed on to make sure my parents are all right until the heat wave passes.

Meanwhile I have been trying to think about apples -- without much effect. I have (I know I'm really a writer now) been thinking about almost everything else. I have several books about apples in the box I brought with me. These books were weighty like apples, like a barrel of apples. But they have largely gone unread. Instead I have picked up and read in bits almost everything in print lying around me, including a spy thriller republished in Readers' Digest books.

So one could suppose that I've been having a dry spell of my own, hot with distractions. However, that would not quite be so. To the contrary it's been a productive last few days of writing. It is merely that I wrote about everything except my assignment.

If my experience with painting offers any parallel, I suspect that while I have avoided the word "apples," I may have written my apple assignment already. I have noticed how in painting, one repaints "the same picture" over and over (quite apart from the differences in subject matter).

So possibly I have written the apple piece, and it lies hidden under the guise of modern art, of invention, of self-reliance or education -- or one of the other topics that I treated in other places in the last few days.

I had asked myself recently if it were possible to turn any topic metaphorically into any other. I figured that stacking books on different subjects beside each other and letting their interior worlds spill over into each other might be a way to get this started. Perhaps I have already proven my thesis. Maybe my apple story is already there, hiding in the guise of something else.