The air is clouded, heavy. My bare feet stick to the humid kitchen floor. A sparrow clicks and taps at the feeder, and a small wind lifts the shadow-sprung spruce branches. Once again, my house is full of sleeping boys.

I have been reading Byron's "Darkness":

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air. . . .

Summer is sliding to its appointed end. My thoughts, unformed, begin to hazard a word or two, a phrase, a sentence. So strange how my writing pattern follows the year's. Garrulous summer overflows with chatter. But fall and winter are for invention and loneliness.