Fog squats on the city, shrouding us in her skirts. Every surface in the house is clammy. Paperbacks curl. Palms stick to banisters. Salt swells and clumps in its dish. Fans whirr, burnishing the stolid air with a skim of breeze. We have no air conditioner. The Alcott House is old-fashioned summer.

This morning I'll mess around with a new poem draft--a sonnet I'm slowly shaping--and do a bit of work in the garden before my Zoom meetings start up again. Yesterday I walked up to the cemetery twice to look at the owlet: a giant baby perched high in a white pine, that Paul and I have taken to calling Owlbert. I spent an hour with my conference staff, who are the best people and are going to make this experience easy and fun and complex and poignant and serious and comical and surprising and rich, despite distance and wonky Internet connections. I made black beans and rice and sat in the evening sunshine and drank two glasses of rose and felt lucky.