Peas not in yet, but a lovely, lovely day out in the cold wind digging up garden beds with a spade, hauling manure with a wheelbarrow, and prying up giant rocks with my bare hands.

This sounds like irony but isn't. It really was lovely. Early-spring gardening is full of hope. No biting insects yet, just new flowers and excitable birds and chunks of heavy wet soil and a clean grey sky. I keep thinking that I'll soon be getting too old to thrive on all this labor, but it hasn't happened yet.

And then Tom came home with mussels for dinner, and the boys departed for 7 hours, and we spent a happy evening together, and afterwards I didn't even have insomnia.