My poor sons have had the worst luck with public transportation this year. Son #1 was two days' late getting home from our Vermont family emergency because of a series of canceled flights. And now Son #2 is cooling his heels for seven hours in an upstate New York bus station because his connection from Toronto was late.

I love that phrase "cooling his heels."

I think we're supposed to get some rain here in Portland today, which means that my tomato plants will be producing even more tomatoes, which means I'd better start thinking about what I want to do with this bounty. First, however, I will make a peach pie. In my experience, when a son comes home after spending 6 weeks in the woods, he tends to be ravenous for fruit, vegetables, sushi, and large helpings of dessert. I do my best to oblige.

Tomorrow I'll be on the road again: playing at the Lakeshore House in Monson, 3-6 p.m. Today I'd planned to be spending the afternoon with my son, but his bus travails mean he won't get into town till late. So maybe I'll do some writing instead, alongside that tomato planning. I'm fairly well caught up on house and garden work, there will be a baseball double-header on the radio, and I've got a stack of fresh poems to study and consider, even if I don't get anything new down on the page. I've found myself rereading, again, Dorothy Sayers's Hangman's Holiday, which is much less slight than its title suggests. I have yet to write about Sayers, but I ought to one of these days. Her detective novels evolved significantly from pap to complexity--not in terms of the crime, criminals, or detection but in the characterizations of Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey, who may be one of my favorite happy couples in literature.