Sunday morning. One boy is in Paris; the other is spending the night at a friend's house. So Tom and I had the evening to ourselves, which is still an unusual state of affairs. We ate chicken sauteed with a big sweet onion, handfuls of fresh sage (from my garden), and the juice of a lemon; black rice, which tastes like a combination of arborio and wild rice; and oven-roasted asparagus (from my garden) with sliced tomatoes, garlic, balsamic vinegar, and teeny-tiny radishes (from my garden). Then we sat on the couch under a blanket and happily watched the Red Sox trounce the Rays and ate angel-food cake topped with pear-lime syrup.

Plus we have a new driveway! I'm sure you recall my winter groanings about ice, impassibility, ruts, holes, etcetera. So we girded our loins and asked a neighbor with machinery and a gravel pit to repair the damage. All afternoon he came back and forth with dumptruck loads of gravel, which he then bulldozed into the holes. The scent of diesel wafted among the lilacs, and the poodle was convinced that Evil had conquered her dominions. But at the end of the day, after seven or eight loads of gravel and hours of work, our neighbor scratched his head and said, looking up into the sky, that he supposed the bill would "come to, I don't know, round about 360 dollars."

In related news, my sister tells me that Dean and DeLuca in NYC has been selling fiddleheads at 20 dollars a pound.

Money is different up here.