This time next week, I will be beginning the first leg of my first very-long-time-away-from-home in a very a long time. On Tuesday we'll drive down to my parents' house in Massachusetts. On Wednesday we'll take the Amtrak to Washington, D.C., where I'll be reading with Nicole Cooley and teaching a workshop at the Writers' Center in Bethesda. After a whirlwind boy vacation among the statuary, we'll take the Amtrak back north on Monday, leave the boys with my parents (who will then fork off onto their own Gettysburg-Saratoga-New-Jersey-relatives odyssey), kill a couple of days alone in the Boston area without children, and end up on Thursday at the Concord Art Association, where Tom is featured in a photo show called "Seeing Is Believing" and will also be taking part in a gallery talk. On Friday the two of us will return to Harmony. I'll wash a great deal of laundry and briefly fret about the weeds in my garden. Then I'll leave on Saturday for Franconia, New Hampshire, where I'll be teaching at the Frost Place till Thursday.

Merely writing these sentences is making my eyes begin to cross. I am not the kind of person who leads this sort of peripatetic life. I am the kind of person who can't be bothered to drive two miles into town.