One of my sons is downstairs blasting Guns 'n Roses and making chocolate-chip cookies; the other has turned the living room into an elaborate stage set for few hundred plastic knights, horses, alligators, squirrels, and pirates; I am sitting at my desk drinking beer; and altogether we are cheerful and contented. Tonight we will eat bacon and eggs for dinner and then watch the Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., version of Robin Hood. (I may possess the only 11-year-old child now in existence who thinks that Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., is a great actor.) Mid-movie, my husband will walk into the house after having spent a long dull Saturday driving to Boston and back; and the poodle will bark and then be embarrassed, and my sons will bounce off the couch and demand a full accounting of his day. And eventually we will all go to bed, except for the poodle, who will sneak onto the couch. And meanwhile, owls will kill field mice, and the stars will shine; but we won't know anything about those happenings because we will be dreaming strange dreams about canoes on wheels, and dead grandmothers returned to life, and old boyfriends whom we discover we have accidentally married, and cats that cannot be caught no matter how many stairs we climb.

So that is the story of life at 199 Wellington Road in Harmony, Maine, on this last day of February in the year of our Lord 2009 (as Samuel Pepys might have it). I hope that matters are equally dull and contented at your house. There's much to be said for plain, everyday happiness.