Yesterday, as I was working in the garden, my neighbor appeared and asked if I'd like to go plant shopping with her. Naturally I was overjoyed at the invitation, and the two of us spent a delightful hour prowling through the offerings at O'Donal's Nursery. My neighbor is a serious flower gardener, with beautiful perennials and well-designed beds, whereas I am a kitchen gardener who likes flowers but has almost no experience with landscape design. But beyond the gardening, I was happy to to hang out and start to get to know her better.

Then, later in the day, Tom, Paul, and I walked over to a local crawfish boil, where we sat in the slightly chilly sunshine listening to a band play Stevie Wonder covers as we tried to figure out how to get crawfish meat out of the shell.

I still haven't gotten over the fact that, in a city, you can easily engage in such activities while still getting all of your house- and yardwork done. In Harmony we would kill an entire day running basic errands in Bangor. There was no such thing as taking a lunch break to go listen to music and eat shellfish.

Today, rain rain rain . . . I hope. And back to my desk job. And probably lugging the boy around to gather the gear he needs for his summer trek.

In between driving back and forth to Vermont and managing home stuff, I've been rereading Larry McMurtry's Duane's Depressed, and having mixed feelings about it. I used to like it more than I do now, though I still like it quite a bit. But this time through, I'm getting distracted by what feels like excess repetition. Maybe that's important, given that the subject is depression and depression is heavy and repetitive. Yet as a plot strategy it's imperfect.