The sky is indecisive. Perhaps it will snow here today. Perhaps not. It's quiet in this house, in the way houses can be quiet even in the midst of sound. A radio is muttering in Paul's room, and somewhere downstairs James is excitedly confabulating with his father about how best to word the application for his driver's test.

It will be a housework kind of day, a going-to-the-dump kind of day. Also, I am girding my loins and shipping out my prose manuscript to a second publisher. I still have not heard back from the first, but six months later I'm beginning to wonder if I ever will. The gloom of indecision is weighing heavily; and let's call it double gloom, really, because my poetry manuscript languishes in a parallel limbo.

But enough of this repining. Today I will scrub the bathtub, and water my beautiful rosemary plant, and laugh at the woodpecker who has taken to banging his head on the telephone pole, and reread Lampedusa's glorious brief memoir of his childhood in Sicily, and drink lemon-ginger tea, and wish I were in Sicily wandering around the mysterious dusty rooms of an eighteenth-century palace, and begin planning the menu for Tom's Monday-evening birthday feast.

I'll leave you with this stanza from Sylvia Plath's "Night Dances"--a small stanza, and very simple, yet now that I've read it, I don't feel like I'll ever need to read anything else . . . or at least not for an hour or two:

The comets

Have such a space to cross,