6:30 a.m., Saturday. Snow drifts through the half-darkness. Always, there is light in this city--streetlights, buoys, docks, cars--and when we arrived I feared this constant twilight would keep me awake. But no: I have slept like a teenager every night I have been here.

Now I am sitting on a gray couch beside a window, looking down at the cars hissing through the skim of snow. In the front bedroom Tom yawns and sighs. In the back bedroom Paul pulls the blanket over his head and sinks into another bout of dreams. In the distance a train hoots.

If we had a working stove, I could almost say we were living regular lives. Yesterday I vacuumed and dusted and unpacked boxes and did three loads of laundry. Then I walked a mile to Micucci Grocery and bought red wine and ravioli and a jar of sauce . . . the first jar of sauce I have ever purchased. It was painful to buy someone else's sauce, even though it was store-made and I've eaten it on Micucci's pizza slabs plenty of times.

Tonight I''ll experiment with cooking ravioli and sauce in the microwave. I've never bought sauce, and I've never lived with a microwave. So many new things.

Two crows have swung through the snowy dawn to land on the telephone wire outside my window. Three crows. Four crows. Now they are preening and scratching and hunkering down fatly on their roost. They're small in size; maybe they're a brood of juvenals, but their voices are deep. A pack of young folks hanging around, hoping for fun, or inspiration, or snacks.