Sunday morning, cold and bright: Jane Austen and French roast coffee and a scratching dog: two overweight mourning doves groaning at the feeder: me, coiled at the kitchen table playing with colon placement (and that would be the punctuation mark, not the body part); boys, all of them abed: an eternity of housework and baking ahead of me, but there could be worse eternities, such as math SATs and slippery tightrope walking and speeding down Route 95 with a student driver:

(What do you think of these colons anyway? Virginia Woolf has a habit of implementing nontraditional colons. Take a look at Mrs. Dalloway and see. And then there's Iris Murdoch and her comma splices. I find them rather difficult to swallow, but I'm working on it.)