There's a bit of mild rain out there this morning . . . a few chill drops speckling the steps and the sidewalks. Through the windowpane I glimpse a strip of pea shoots thrusting upward, tulip leaves curling, grass greening, trees buds fattening.

Yesterday I arranged drip hose in the still-empty beds, marking out where my summer crops will stand. I replaced the dryer-vent hood. I hammered in posts and repaired trellis. Tomorrow, maybe, I'll sow carrots and beets and chard.

Tom spent his day off designing our fire pit, which will essentially be a concrete table with a wood grill embedded in it. The plan looks delightful--such an improvement to our currently barren back yard, and a big asset for summertime life at crowded Alcott House. Even if quarantine measures ease, I doubt Paul's Canadian canoe-camp job will run or that he'll easily find another job or internship that will give him housing options. We're a household of three for the conceivable future, and we'll be glad to have a place to sit outside in the hot evenings.

Today I suppose I should do housework, at least until the drizzle quits. I finished reading Welty's Losing Battles and now I'm turning again to Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, which is ruthless and un-cuddly and peculiar and always entertains me. Once I can get outside again, I'll run a few wheelbarrow loads of bark chips out to the front garden to mark footpaths among the beds. It does ease my mind to attend to the simple hopes and dreams of flowers and vegetables. And I love the peripheral world . . . gulls floating overhead, the screeches of children immersed in an inscrutable game, a pair of crows trash-talking in the treetops. In Harmony, in the spring, I felt as if I were working in a broad bowl edged with spruce and sky. Here, everything is jagged, but the sky remains, and the somber maples, as massive as gods, stake their claim to soil and cloud.

As our so-called president incites stupidity and violence; as he lies to us, and bleeds money from our suffering, and flaunts his indifference to our lives: in the midst of this chaos, I am sitting quietly on the grey couch next to my beloved. He is drawing a blueprint and I am writing this letter to you. The furnace clicks on. The cat complains. The kettle boils.

This sweetness. It is so precious and so frail.