Today is the second day of the boys' first full week of school. Tom has left for work. The Harmony Fair and Haystack weekends are behind me, and finally I'm beginning to feel as if my aloneness may develop a rhythm. All summer I have been writing only sporadically; reading constantly, of course, but with no chance to fall into the pattern of solitude that seems to be my trigger for real writing. Yesterday I wrote a scant half-paragraph of my Elizabeth Bowen essay, but it felt like concentration, not like grasping at shadows.

Even when I have days to myself, I'm up and down from my desk constantly. Anyone watching would think I was getting nothing done at all. Yet some thread stays unbroken when I'm hanging clothes on the line, or fetching the mail, or trimming goat hooves. I stay inside my own head, which I can't do when I have those cereal-eating, radio-listening, bike-riding lives pressed up against mine.

But there's an irony too; for without those lives, I would have nothing to write about.