Yesterday I finished spading up the garden. I planted corn and sunflowers and beans. I transplanted tomatoes, peppers, and basil. I mowed grass and drove 20 miles and back to the grocery store. I did a load of laundry. I stir-fried pork and I drove a kid to a birthday party and I gossiped with some other eighth-grade mothers and I played cribbage with my husband. I read the stories of Vladimir Nabokov and listened to a baseball game. I went to bed and had night sweats and dreamed I was walking down the street with an eighteenth-century court intriguer in a place that looked like it might have been Chicago in November. I've left out all the various thoughts, memories, worries, speculations, idle curiosities, itchy obsessions, and recipe plans that flowed through my brain like a snow-melt brook. Other than sharing a Nabokov paragraph with you and doing a crossword puzzle and adding items to a grocery list, I did not write anything at all.

The temperature was in the 70s; the sky was blue and bright. For some reason the blackflies were not biting. Similarly we have had no ants in our house this spring, although we are once again battling the mice. The dandelions are glorious, and my grass is a riot of violets--deep purple, pale purple, tiny white, and, along the verge, a few tall yellow ones. Tom spent the day going to the dump and trying to ream out a clogged drain.

The poodle and I both have bad haircuts, but we are trying not to think about them. I should muck out the barn and finish mowing today. I should also play badminton and cut oregano and lovage for drying and convince a child to clean the bathroom.

This morning my pepper transplants look beautiful. When I planted the corn and the sunflowers, I mixed up the seeds with the hope that they would all come up together and the flowers would bloom among the corn. I am the kind of person who likes blooms among the vegetables. But often the idea is better in my head than in execution.

For dinner: roast chicken with fresh tarragon; mashed sorrel, potatoes, and green onions; asparagus and infant spinach salad; rhubarb pie.