This morning, well before dawn, James drove out of Chicago. He'll stop overnight in Pennsylvania, and arrive here tomorrow evening. We are all excited. So many months apart and worried, and finally we'll be together.

In honor of his arrival, I'm reaming out the Zoom room today, aka the pandemic classroom: our tiny back room, home of the TV, and my conference webcam, and Tom's record collection, and the foldout futon, a room with which some of you became very familiar over the course of the conference. Now, for a few weeks, it will be James's bedroom, and little Alcott House will burst happily at the seams.

Paul is going to wash windows; I'm going to scrub the bathroom floor: that's the kind of day this will be.

Yesterday, I spent much of the day in the garden. I harvested garlic and shallots, and hung them up to cure in the shed. In their place I sowed late-season greens: lettuce, arugula, chard. I thinned the overcrowded kale bed, and moved kale transplants into flowerbeds and among the okra. We may end up with too much kale to eat, but the plants will be pretty well into November. I am a proponent of edible landscaping: not only because I love a kitchen garden but also because it removes the stress of "have to eat it all" when I end up with a bumper crop. No, I don't have to eat everything. I can just look at it, like I'd look at a flower. So now I've got curly, red-veined kale dotted among okra and sunflowers and zinnias and cosmos.

As a restful break, I've been reading Trollope's Barchester Towers, but I've also been reading Stephen Graham Jones's Mongrels, a creepy book about werewolves and transients--not at all what I would usually turn to, but Paul was assigned it in a class focusing on Native writers, and he told me I should. I am always very interested in books by Native writers, and always very repelled by horror novels about werewolves, so all I will say is that this is not one of the books I'll be reading when I'm alone all day in the Katahdin woods. It is a book to be read safely at home.