The humidity has broken, temporarily, and I managed to get a full night's sleep under an actual blanket. Also I removed the rest of the fiction from the dining-room floor, tore out weary peavines and planted fall crops of chard and salad greens in their place, picked a big dish of baby string beans, mowed and trimmed the front-yard grass, finished Scott's The Jewel in the Crown and started Iris Murdoch's A Fairly Honourable Defeat, and went for a hike with Tom in the Fore River Sanctuary--a marshy preserve on the site of what, in the 19th century, used to be a barge canal from Portland's waterfront north to Sebago Lake.

For days I've been enacting some saggy object in a Dali painting, and it felt great to be peppy again. Today, though, I'm back to desk work. I've got multiple editing projects to finish this week, plus poem manuscripts to comment on, plus teaching to prep for. I never did do any work on my own poems yesterday; I was too excited about no longer being a deflated beach ball. And I never did any housework either, but oh well.

Now a cardinal is singing lustily in the trees, cool air is floating through the open windows, and Bugsy the tiny dog is huffing at my scornful cat. Patches of golden daylilies glow in the morning sun. In the backyard shade, tiny purple spiderwort flowers speckle the dark green. Bees mutter among my neighbor's bright shrubs.