Other than being trapped in an editing project that is sucking away my soul and reigniting my carpal tunnel symptoms, I am in a cheerful mood today, and here is why.

1. The sun is almost shining and the laundry is almost dry and it is almost 70 degrees. This marks a considerable step up for Harmony weather-wise, for this has been the coldest, wettest, worst-gardening summer in all the 15 years I've lived in this town.

2. My new friend Matt, for reasons best known to himself, sends me emails that open with the greeting "Aloha, duchess," which, at six o'clock on a Wednesday morning, as I slouch in my bathrobe at my ancient scratched-up Formica table, drinking French roast from a mug printed with "Nice Rack" and watching ants invade my kitchen, feels like a particularly amusing form of address.

3. When the goat breaks down the barnyard fence, one of my sons puts her back in the barn and the other son gets out his drill and fixes the hole. Meanwhile, I drink tea and eat cheese and crackers.

4. Even though I am not writing (because of the aforementioned soul-sucking and carpal-tunnel-aggravating editorial project), I am primed to write, which is almost as good.

5. I am devouring Henry Green novels with joy and devotion, and I suspect that Milly Jourdain's less good poems (such as the one I posted yesterday) are better than I originally thought they were. My sons are reading, respectively, Raymond Chandler and a history of the Scottish chiefs, taking breaks now and then to ride their bikes around the yard and hit each other with couch pillows. It makes me happy to see our idiosyncratic books piled in precarious columns on the so-called coffee table.

6. Tom will be home for dinner tonight. All week he has been arriving home from work and then  immediately turning around to go to Waterville to watch film-festival movies, but tonight the four of us will sit around the Formica table together and eat rib-eye steak and new peas while conversing with each other in fake dialects, etc. Family life is so comic.