Very early this morning, just before light, I heard an owl cry--so close to my window that it might have been perched on the roof above me. Three times it cried, and then it was silent, as streaks of day began sifting down among the maple branches like tiny birds do, with their brief drops and flutters.

Tom asked yesterday, in a comment, what my Tom ended up making me for birthday dinner. The answer is ravioli filled with picked crab and sorrel, topped with lemon butter. They were lovely. And we were even so fortunate as to have leftover crab, which last night I mixed with homemade mayonnaise and served with a composed salad of red and yellow beets, sliced potato, orzo and garlic, spinach and arugula, topped with cilantro. Tonight's menu: chili spiced with many, many tiny hot peppers harvested before the frost.

Today I plan to look at the new book I've acquired: Patch/Work Voices: The Culture and Lore of a Mining People, a compilation of the recollections of southwestern Pennsylvania miners and their families. Already I can see that the book will be both instructive and clumsily nostalgiac, as such things generally are, and that it will be at odds with the other book I'm reading, Compton-Burnett's A House and Its Heritage, which is stylish and brutal and not at all heartwarming. I hope the clash will be enlightening and not just confusing. Now that I am involved in two research projects simultaneously--my Chestnut Ridge poetry collection and my Poets' Sourcebook anthology--such clashes are bound to keep arising. Yet Compton-Burnett has nothing to do with either project. She's just looming there, like a Macbethian witch. Either she's making trouble or predicting it.