Yesterday was an intense travel day, compressed between 3:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. and involving no coffee or real food. But I made it home, fell asleep, woke up, made dinner, fell asleep again, and here I am, still groggy but at least I've got coffee now. There are a million things to do today: desk work, housework, grocery shopping, and the mess that is my yard. You may recall that I left home in the middle of a cyclone? Well, on the bright side, all of the branches that came down were relatively small. On the pain-in-the-ass side, many, many branches came down, and the gale whipped them everywhere. My garden is knitted with tree parts, the dahlias are flat: the place looks as if we were hit by a hurricane, which I guess we essentially were.

But my trip to Chicago was completely lovely. I think I haven't told you about Jane Eyre yet. It was enthralling. The Joffrey performs in a gilded, doo-dadded, muraled hall built in the 1890s and kept in tip-top shape. The acoustics are wonderful. We sat in a box, which made us feel fancy even though the tickets were cheaper there than other places.

And the ballet itself was stunning: not just the dancing, but also the sets (mostly scrims with Yorkshire-ish abstractions) and the lighting design. The choreographer did an amazing job at storytelling, and also maintained that strange Brontean mix of melodrama, anachronistic female agency, and sex-versus-God tension. The cast was enormous, and included a strange but effective troupe of male dancers who served as representatives of Jane's internal demons--an extremely elegant way to deal with the wordiness of the novel. The result was both spare and lavish, enormous and minimal. I am a person who usually hates movies based on my favorite novels, and I loved this ballet.

And what else happened in Chicago? Exhausted teachers on trains, carrying picket signs and holding the hands of their children. A small girl singing songs on the bus. An aging mariachi band, in full black and silver regalia, packing up their van after a show. My darling young people, walking together alongside a windy lake.