Late yesterday afternoon the boy and I met a diaspora friend for a walk around Back Cove, and then drove home through a snarl of traffic to discover an ambulance and blue-lighted police cars clogging the road in front of our house. My first panic was: I burned the house down! My second was: Tom's had an accident! Neither of those things turned out to be the case. Instead, before our eyes, one of my neighbors was being taken away in handcuffs.

Needless to say, this was unsettling, and sad, and we fretted about it for much of the evening. Of course I have no idea what he was charged with, though I can speculate. The complications of the human character are many and few.

Later, after the visible drama had ended, we ate beef stew with foraged puffball, garden peppers and carrots, and herbs; parslied potatoes; a big platter of home-grown tomato slices topped with basil and fried okra; quick cucumber and shallot pickles; and a lime cream tart. We had pleasant conversation, Tom washed dishes, Paul and I played Yahtzee, the whole scene was absurdly nice, and I couldn't stop thinking about my neighbor being hauled off to jail, and how un-nice things were fifty feet away from my front door.