In Stonington audiences come to poetry readings and laugh and sigh and cheer and pay attention. Later local people stand on stage and read the poems they love. After the event they buy a lot of books. Then they throw a party and offer the visiting poet a two-night vacation in an airy house overlooking the harbor. So, yes, this weekend may even beat the time I got paid in a gallon of maple syrup or the two dozen oysters I received as an honorarium.

Tom and I spent our vacation day on Isle au Haut with friends. We took an hour-and-a-half mail boat ride into Penobscot Bay. We hiked up granite outcroppings, through blueberry bushes, across cobbled beaches. We carried beautiful blue stones in our pockets. We ate bread and cheese and watched the schooners. We talked about Joe Strummer and the exasperations of home ownership and little black ducks that dive for fish. On the path we worried over a juvenal wren that was trying to learn how to fly.

And now I am home again, trying to remember how to manage the exasperations of home ownership. Tomorrow J leaves for his second year of college, and later in the week P starts his sophomore year of high school, and then the Harmony Fair opens, and autumn is creeping in, creeping in.