A weekend of rain, and now sunshine and shattered peonies; iris collapsing into the lank grass, schoolbus belching diesel, and my older son dramatically exhausted from staying up till 3 a.m. trying to finish writing a short story about a telemarketer.

Last Monday of the school year: chemistry finals all week, parent-student baseball, apathetic primary elections, and eighth-grade graduation; interspersed with a clover-clogged lawnmower, bolted lettuce, and cucumber plants that won't grow because the slugs keep eating them.

Blackberry flowers on a bramble I didn't know we possessed; raspberries loaded with buds; badminton net sagging into the wet dandelions, and chickens cheerfully coated with mud.

Wordsworth's Prelude, Keats's biography, an A. S. Byatt re-read, and an embryonic essay about throwing up on an airplane while sitting behind David Byrne. Continued intense poetry-collection melancholy interspersed with forgetfulness. Not enough hay in the barn.

Wishing I were in Brooklyn, relieved not to be in Brooklyn. Wondering if the wind will dry the grass.