Thursday, April 29th

WHEN I HAVE my breakfast now (in bed) I am watching the screen of leaves slowly thicken between me and the ruffled edge of the sea as it breaks on the rocks to the east. The maples are in flower and I can still see through their yellow-green; soon it will be all green and then good-bye to the ocean as it breaks, until November. But soon I can open the door to the porch off my bedroom and look straight into treetops and sometimes catch a warbler on his way through, and almost always a song sparrow on the very tip of a branch.

I had two experiences in New York that I want to record. After that heavenly train journey down the Hudson, and once I had registered at the club, I walked down Lexington Avenue to Bloomingdales’ to try to find some summer shorts and jackets … as usual, in total despair because I wear a size 18 or 20. I was shunted from floor to floor, on each seeing exactly what I needed, “But, oh no, madam, we only have sizes 8 to 16. Try floor 3 …” Finally I managed to find a pair of very expensive jeans to garden in and a couple of shirts on the unchic, sad floor for half-sizes! Meanwhile, two thirds of the women going up and down the escalators were obviously not size 16! Why do we lie down and allow fashion to dictate our lives and to humiliate us? I think the Fat Panthers (emulating the Gray Panthers) had better launch a crusade—large posters showing gaunt, thin women looking tense and one hundred years old beside round, rosy, happy women might be a first attack.