On the whole, I am feeling better about the house situation this morning. I talked to lots of friends and family members. I walked in the woods. I started packing up a few things in my son's room. I thought about making a new little garden somewhere else. I think my melancholy will ease when we actually acquire another place to live. For the moment, I don't have any solid image of what a new home might look like. I will feel better when I have a room to picture.

I also spent an hour on the phone with my younger son, who, like his mother, can be nostalgiac and overemotional. And I think he and I are more or less in the same place: shifting from sadness, to acceptance, to anticipation, to sadness again. Right now, though, he is also immersed in the enormous transition from high school to college . . . in particular, the way in which the social life one creates may become both an emotional and an intellectual adventure. He and his roommate are intensely discussing their love for Faulkner's novels and the film Killer of Sheep. "I'm learning about new ways to think about the way rap artists layer their music!" he tells me. "My friend who wants to be a chemistry major also loves Keats!" All of this makes me so happy.

Today the Harmony Fair begins, and I will work what I presume will be my last stint at the exhibition hall. Tom and I are planning to go to the demolition derby tomorrow, just for old time's sake. Maybe you'd like to look at some of his derby pictures and his Harmony art, to see what we are leaving.