It's Sunday morning now, and the rain is pouring onto the sunflowers outside my window.

But this is where I was yesterday afternoon.

People were friendly at the shindig. Tom was enthusiastic about the fried oysters. And a famous person told me she loved my Milton book. That was a shock. The upshot was that I did not feel like a freak. I felt like an anxious person who turns out to have plenty of people to talk to at a party.

Afterwards, Tom and I changed our shoes and went for a short hike in the Linekin Woods, which brought us to another overlook of the bay . . .

. . . and we sat on cliffs that looked like striated granite embedded with stony salt and listened to somebody's loud radio in the house above us.

And then we stopped in Wiscasset and ate fish-and-chips and a crab roll and stared out at the traffic crossing the Sheepscot River bridge.

Yesterday was one of those days when I was so grateful to have a cheerful friend whose eye I could catch in the middle of a crowd, who could follow a confusing hikers' map, who could share his fries while eavesdropping on inane conversations at a clam shack, who could drive on the highway in the dark and walk around the yard with a flashlight looking for the stupid cat. It's a funny thing: to spend all afternoon at a big social event, and then find out that what makes you happiest is having ended up with the right person to go home with.