It rained all night and now, in the pre-dawn gloom, the white hostas loom like predators, and the deep wet green of trees and grass swell and threaten. Across the street, our neighborhood possum, a pale bustling chunk, scoots through the waning daffodils. Through the rain-soaked window screens the empty street looks like a Renoir setting, all running colors and flat light.

Supposedly the rain is ending now, and then the sun and heat will set in . . . or at least as much heat as we've seen this season. Yesterday didn't quite reach 70 but it still felt like our first summer day--warm and humid, with the top-heavy glare of July--and Tom and I walked to the farmer's market and bought pork chops and some celery seedlings, then stopped at a yard sale advertising itself as "Awful; Everything Is Broken" and bought four books (Milosz, Munro, and two Alice Waters cookbooks) and a stack of old postcards. Afterward Tom spent the rest of the day working on photographs, and I ran the trimmer and did some weeding and cleaned bathrooms and planted celery and talked to my kid and sat in the yard drinking ice tea and reading most of the Munro stories.

Today I might wash windows. I'll certainly finishing reading the Munro stories. I'm considering making a pie.

It’s hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from,
when so often they’re put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty. 

--Czeslaw Milosz, "Ars Poetica?"