Five o'clock in the morning. Portland, Maine. Early May. A ragged dawn is peering over the black roofs and chimneys. An invisible robin sings. A passing freight train judders and squeals and groans.

On the mantle, a green pot filled with quince branches. On the coffee table, an empty cup and saucer. A vase of tulips. A pencil. A half-done crossword puzzle. A fat paperback copy of Kristin Lavransdatter.

Manuscripts and laundry and meals and garden. Another day looms. It's impossible to know what to write in this diary-letter, what will matter to you. Do you care about sorrel leaves, pale and tender and ready for harvest? Or the squirrel that littered crushed nutshells on my front steps? Or the sight of a clean blue-striped kitchen towel whipping in the wind? Or a white cat asleep under a stand of crimson peony shoots? Or a 14th-century Norwegian heroine? Or the strange history of the Seattle Mariners? Or my son comically enacting the home life of L. L. Bean catalog models? Or the scent of minestrone?

I mistyped diary-letter as dairy-letter. The error reminds me that, as child, I loved the word cream. My father would talk about the family cemetery plot at Cream Ridge, New Jersey, and I would not picture corpses and ancestors but white fog lingering over a rocky hilltop, blond cows cropping new grass, milk bubbling into a tin pail . . .

In a dairy-letter, I could write about Wordsworth's home, Dove Cottage, in the English Lake District, with its cool, damp, stone-clad, low-ceiled dairy, a place for water to drip and cream to rise. I could write about the velvety flank of a Jersey heifer. I could write about Wallace Stevens.

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. 

[from Wallace Stevens, "The Emperor of Ice-Cream"]

I am not, in general, prone to adjusting my life to match the poems of Wallace Stevens. Still, I will promise to dawdle in such dress as I am used to wear. The boys can bring flowers or not, as they choose. But they can't have last month's newspapers. I burnt them all up in the stove.