I spent all afternoon making pies at my new summer bakery job. Then I had band practice, and now this morning I am driving two hours to Portland to visit with the director of a very successful children's and community writing project. I plan to learn many things.

Yesterday I found myself dipping into Mrs. Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans. What a funny, incisive book. No wonder the Americans were so annoyed.

To doubt that talent and mental power of every kind, exist in America would be absurd; why should it not? But in taste and learning they are woefully deficient; and it is this which renders them incapable of graduating a scale by which to measure themselves. Hence arises that overweening complacency and self-esteem, both national and individual, which at once renders them so obnoxious to ridicule, and so peculiarly restive under it.

I'm tired this morning, couldn't sleep well last night, worried about a desperately ill friend, not enough rain, being the wrong kind of person, tearing pie crusts, etc. A restless night turns the world into melodrama.

So glad to see your variety of reactions to Milly Jourdain's poems. What I like is resting quietly among these differences.