Back from lunch and I’m ping-ponging between work and the book, my poems I’ve been drumming all day, even wrote on in the vineyard, leaning against and old, discarded barrel creekside.  Looking up and out the window to the vineyard at a day which could more than easily be a postcard.  But I have to work, be focused and professional in such a beautiful place.  How is that possible, how is that fair, how is that something that I’m not supposed to entertain possibilities to?  See me spun, still spinning in this swivel chair, looking out at the edge of the Cabernet block, wanting to skip away from this desk and out to the deck, and onto the field, into the vines, take more pictures.  I’m greedy with images now, since getting more serous and persistent with photog’.

Thought of a character Wednesday in class, with the English 100 group– winemaker, 39 y/o, suddenly quits drinking.  Not ’cause she has to, just to see what happens as a result.  That, and she wants to think more clearly, she wants out of the wine industry.  She hates the industry for robbing her of her passion for wine, the vineyards, process.  They made it too ‘industry’ for her.  She wants out.  So before one tasting with the corporate people, called in to do so on her day off, she stands in front of them at the head of the long boardroom table and says, “I can’t do this.” She leaves, for travel, traveling around the world and taking pictures, keeping a photojournal, online.  Yes, a blog.  But she also scribbles in a little notebook her late-grandmother bought her just before she died, three years prior.  She, Juli, knows this is when she has to do it.  She buys herself a new camera, walks around some of the vineyards she used to source from, then books her first flight.

She feels alive for the first time since entering the industry.