We spent last night at the ballpark, a favorite summer-night date. It's one of the good things about where we live: that we can amble there and back from our own house. The walk home through the dusky streets and neighborhoods is as pleasant as the game.

Today, editing and yoga and house-and-garden stuff, and then tomorrow we head north, back to the homeland for a visit, and then next week I'll be camping and writing with high schoolers for a couple of days. So you may not hear from me regularly until midweek.

That poem I've been working on/dreaming about is shaping into something I like. And I've been thinking hard about Austen's Emma as well. Emma is not my preferred heroine: she's too bossy and self-congratulatory, though of course that's her author's point. But the side characters and setting may be among my favorites in all of literature. The descriptions of Highbury street life; the renderings of Miss Bates's chatter; dopy sweet Mr. Woodhouse . . . it's a clinic in comedy, but also in negative capability--a writer's ability to stand outside herself and become entirely what she sees.