This time next week, both boys will be back at school. The house will be quiet. Autumn light will be filtering through the fading maples, and the wild geese will begin to gather themselves into their sharp celestial formations. For now, though, we are still four people sharing one bathroom, a perpetually emptying fruit bowl, and a coffee pot in constant use. I am trying to work in the interstices, but the interstices are few.

I wrote a long letter to you yesterday, but today I have no such fervor. This morning I am wondering when my corn will be ripe and how many more days the raspberry crop will last and if the grass will ever stop growing. I am trying to reread Peter Mathiessen's Shadow Country, a narrative of sweat and mosquitoes and murder and tropic heat and fear and painful beauty, but my sons keep calling up the stairs: "Come look at this!" "Do you want more coffee?" "Want me to set up your phone?" "Guess what happened in the Red Sox game!" "I hate what's going on in Ferguson!" "Can Sam come over?" Do not think I am complaining. I have sons who seek out my company: what could be more flattering? But there is no solitude in this tiny house, and there will not be any, until there is too much.