I started a poem draft, edited for several hours, picked up an order at the hardware store, read some residency applications, mowed all the grass, read several chapters in a giant famous novel, watered transplants and seedlings, went for a bike ride, harvested greens, made risotto and a salade nicoise for dinner, and lost disastrously at Yahtzee. I did miss my yoga class, but that was only because my older son telephoned just before it was supposed to start. And anyway it's the first class I've missed in eons; I've been diligent about my twice-a-week schedule.

So I'm not sure why I feel like I got nothing done. I don't know what I expect of myself. This is not just a pandemic problem, but the pandemic is exacerbating it. Ye olde Protestant work torment, perhaps, but as you know I'm also terrible at making money, so.

And now that I've managed to both begin and end a paragraph with the word so, I'll move on to some other less raspy subject . . . how about Sigrid Undset's incredible novel, Kristin Lavransdatter, which plumbs the life of a woman from young childhood to her death at age 50, while evoking the world of early-1300s Norway in intense and believable detail. I've never read anything like it: beauty and dirt, violence and peace, human error and religious fervor and sexual passion and the simple pleasure of watching a child play in the mud. It's a stunning book.

Today I'm going to attempt to be more patient with my non-accomplishments. I'll do what I do, and what gets done will get done, and in the meantime the indifferent earth will keep rolling through space.