It's 10 degrees in Portland this morning, and the furnace is sighing and groaning in a January state of mind. Yet the sunlight speaks of spring. I am sitting here on the couch thinking of making more coffee and of eating breakfast, but mostly enjoying doing neither of those things. Yesterday we ran a few hardware-store errands, watched a little basketball, walked out after dark for dinner and beer. And now we have an unstructured Sunday ahead of us.

This sunlight is making me long for the garden, but there's no chance of that. Fortunately I have some store-bought daffodils for comfort, and the yellow looks lovely against the grey walls. Here, in the following sloppy photo, you can see the old stone jar and the top of my granddad's Victrola (don't worry; the stripe on the left is just sunshine), which was in the western Pennsylvania farmhouse he bought in 1969, when I was five years old: the place I have written of so often--where all the furnishings were redolent of 1910, and everything was faded and dusty and cheap and inconvenient and ugly, and fated to become more so over the years . . . and yet I loved it so much, even more than my Harmony land.

I think I will have to write about it again. I feel it looming over my housework essay, though I thought, with my Millbank piece, I might have managed to say what needed to be said about the place and its stuff.

Still, it comes back to me, year after year, decade after decade. The place is woven into my synapses and does not forsake me.