Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I had a nightmare last night, of the sort that slips into waking: I woke cattitude to warn him about something that happened in the dream. It took a couple of minutes, but we sorted out reality, he hugged me and said reassuring things—true and relevant reassuring things—and then julian_tiger got into bed and purred at us for a bit. I got back to sleep without much trouble, and as far as I know without further disturbing dreams. However, that experience seems to have cast a bit of shadow over the morning.

The good part of the day was a nice long walk in the hills of Inwood Hill Park. We hadn't been up there in a while. (We haven't been doing as much real walking the last year as we normally do, just to and from the subway together in the mornings and the like.) Not only did I want to walk with him, but we had hopes of black raspberries.

Our hopes were fulfilled: plenty of berries, despite some bushes having been cut back or even dug out in the last few years, and despite other people having been there before us. This time of year, the bushes sometimes say "this one isn't ripe yet, come back in an hour," and you don't, but someone else will. It helps that we know our way around, and where to look. In particular, there's one good patch that's just far enough from the path, with just enough thicket, including other kinds of plant and some dead brambles, that most people don't want to deal with it. Cattitude doesn't. I do. We share the berries, and sometimes he reaches in somewhere first, with his long arms, and sometimes I go diving in despite thorns, and sometimes it's just a matter of which of us spots a cluster of three or four berries.

I also did a little bit of trail maintenance, removing a large dead branch from one path. There's a small saw blade on my Swiss Army knife, which I don't use often, but every few years am glad I have. Some of the branches broke almost as soon as I started to saw through them, but there was one that I had to saw all the way through.

It was also a good day for butterflies, and we saw our first flicker of the season. We'd heard some, but not seen them earlier this year.

Then lunch, groceries, and home for me to read and him to nap. Late afternoon, we were out in the park again, and I felt somewhat unsteady, so we came back inside, he made me a cup of apricot-flavored tea, and then I've taken it easy for the rest of the evening.