Raining again, and I'll be picking fiddleheads in the rain again; for blackflies dislike rain, but the thrush that lives by our stream does not. She sings and sings, or he does--a long, liquid, melancholy strain, that sounds like spring downpours or summer twilight. Fiddlehead season is nearly past; most of the shoots are uncurling into bracken ferns. Now the stream bank is thick with sturdy green and, among that green, tiny wildflowers: wood violets, wild oats, trout lilies.

And now for some chat that is not so Mary-Oliverish: Tom came home from Portland yesterday, having suddenly sold two prints to a magazine and been promised a photo essay inside . . . and it sounds like they may ask me to write text for it. This would be our first public collaboration, and we're both feeling a certain comic bewilderment about being treated like Artists. But this magazine pays, which is a treat; and fortunately the editors also told him they don't require journalism from me. Thank God. I couldn't possibly write anything that involved research and a cool eye.

Dinner last night: a beautiful trout that Paul caught during a school fishing program and jubilantly carried home for me on the school bus. And yes, I managed to gut it. And yes, we all wished he'd caught two.