Weekly march

Into the breach. Out for the chicken viewing, which is down to two birds these days. Freckles died last week, after appearing to improve. She laid an egg, then lay down and died. Her demise has caused a shuffling of the trio's pecking order, but the biggest bird doesn't seem to have done any harm to the smaller one. Chickens don't last forever, but she is missed.
It's getting dark early, threatening to rain.
Been reading the collected stories of Katherine Mansfield, who as I've mentioned before, completed 88 stories before she died of TB at age 34, in 1922. Her family, the Beauchamps, had been in Australia and New Zealand for three generations when Katherine was born in Wellington, NZ, in 1888. Despite a kind of old-timey feel to many of the stories, she had a fine acuity for landscape and human behavior coming along. It would have been interesting to see her later work, had she lived and written more. She moved to England and was friends with Elizabeth Bowen, with whom she shares a kind of strange flavor of writing. I was reading a travel piece in the New York times online which was about Alice Munro, a Canadian writer who lived in Vancouver, BC, in the 1950's. She has some of her non-traditional characters reading Katherine Mansfield in one short story, which made me think perhaps Munro herself had done so as well. Munro's short stories have some of the kind of off kilterness to them that Mansfield and Bowen do in their work, idiosyncratic voices, female characters who are often on the outside of regular social activity.
Tonight I tossed some cauliflowerets with potato chunks, olive oil, freshly dried oregano, salt and pepper, and baked it; quite delicious!