James leaves for college in 10 days, and yesterday I watched Paul score the first soccer goal of his high school career. Tomatoes and corn are ripening. Grasshoppers are scratching and leaping in the patchy grass. Sunflowers lift their faces toward the sun; hummingbirds rumble at the feeder. Today I will bake bread and make sauerkraut, and vacuum the rug and wash the poodle, and mow grass and pick cucumbers, and read a novel about the Great Lexicographer.

Summer wanes.

I have not really been writing, though I have done flashes of significant and useful revising. The first western Pennsylvania poems are beginning to appear in journals, which reminds me of what I will need to be turning toward this fall, once my writing season begins again. Writing poems, canning tomatoes, splitting wood, hunting for honey mushrooms, shivering on the edges of soccer fields. Time leaps past me; time beckons me ahead.