For some reason I slept like a drowned person last night, and now I've woken up groggy and mush-minded and generally unfit for conversation.

The sun is shining, and a sparrow is chirring. Through the window, I am watching two starlings have the bad idea of building their nest inside the neighboring house's exhaust vent.

Outside on the street corner, someone has set up tables and chairs and piles of little cups . . . yard sale items, perhaps? An event I'll need to avoid?

In the bedroom the mantel clock ticks ticks ticks ticks. Here in the main room, copies of the New Yorker and of Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater lie on the kitchen table, alongside a candle and a coffee cup. There's a stack of records on the stereo cabinet--Yo La Tengo, William Onyeabor, the Holy Modal Rounders, the Louvin Brothers. On the coffee table there's another New Yorker, a half-finished New York Times crossword puzzle, a copy of Dwell, a historical atlas of Maine, a DVD case for an Alex Cox movie titled Walker, two remote controls, a pencil, and Tom's glasses. On the table beside the window: a small lamp, an empty fruit bowl, a dish of cherry tomatoes, and a white cat.

On the floor, Tom's shoes, a copper pan filled with cat toys, a stack of last Sunday's New York Times, a red floor lamp, a black and gray rug. On the walls, a portrait of one of my great-great-great grandmothers, three of Tom's photographs (the gas station in Harmony, a pixelated beach, a woman driving a car), a bookcase filled with CDs (too many to list) and decorated with four small candles and one old camera and and a device for looking at stereo photos, a blue clock, two stereo speakers. On the low shelves: a philodendron, an orange and white tin cup filled with pencils, two library books (Skylark, Human Voices), a cribbage game, a copy of Aperture, three marble tiles, a silver reading lamp. On the high shelves: two sea shells, a baseball-sized sphere of concrete, a salad bowl, three candles, two DVDs from the library (Kubrick's The Killing, Kaurismaki's Ariel), a small TV, a tangle of wifi and router stuff and an HD box and a DVD player, a small computer printer, ten or fifteen art-photography books (Disfarmer, Arbus, Gowin, Shore, etc.), and a shelf of records (too many to list).

Now the white cat jumps off the table, and the day begins.