Yesterday was cold and spitting rain-snow. I finished my editing by noon and then gave in to weariness. Instead of walking or working in the garden or cleaning the refrigerator, I started a fire in the stove and then sat on the couch under a blanket and finished rereading Northanger Abbey. Eventually I crawled out and made chicory and rice soup (very comforting for tired people), toast, a salad of greens and pears, and brownies. But I never became lively.

If my sinuses were less clogged and I had fewer headaches--e.g., if the allergy medicine would arrive in the mail--I would be less tired. But all shipments are delayed, so I continue to snuffle and wince.

Still, it's a new day, and I do feel peppier, if still clogged, after all that sleepiness. I think there will be sunshine today, maybe daffodils and laundry on the line. We're going to dye eggs this evening, for the first time since the boys left Harmony. Tom is a very arty egg-dyer, so some of them are bound to be beautiful, or at least puzzling.

I'm going to copy out a few Blake poems, and start reading Eudora Welty's Losing Battles. I hope to ride my bike. I don't exactly know what we're having for dinner . . . maybe seafood, if I can order it from the fish market; otherwise, a cobbled-together vegetable something or other.

What is the point of keeping track of this minutiae? I've read a lot of diaries, and I've asked that question often . . . mostly about myself as voyeur. What kind of person finds a stranger's present-tense litany fascinating/mysterious/comforting/shocking? On this blog I assume the other role--the recorder--but I'm always aware (as most real diarists are not) that I have readers. I'm a meta-diarist, the dramatic reenactment of a diarist.

In A Month in Summer, my collection of diary poems set in 1868, I try to parse the interior/exterior worlds of a private writer by alternating between brief prose entries, chore titles, brief poems. I'm interested in the secrets that are never articulated or even admitted. I'm interested in the way in which a mind and body can exist in many spheres at one time. I'm interested in the frame of an invisible world.

Here's a sample:

Mon.—  Bake for brother 3 meat pies 5 loaves. I travel to Rockland tomorrow, spend 2 days with cousin V. Of course Dave grudges my absence, &c.

Kneading

Rags of sunlight cheer my heart.

I am going to try to write

A little.

I have nothing at stake but my life.