We're reacquainting ourselves with running water and electricity and comfortable beds. Tom spent yesterday working on his countertop project. I weeded and mowed and pruned. The boys did laundry and tinkered with Paul's computer and visited with a Harmony friend.

Today is James's last day in Maine: tomorrow he heads back to Chicago, and our sweet two-week visit will be over. So I think I'll make him an early birthday cake and we'll have a little party. It will be a hot day, not an excellent choice for icing a cake, but that's what refrigerators are for.

I'm sad he's leaving, of course, but we're all adults now, and this is the longest time he's spent with us since he graduated from college. Everything feels poignant: the visit, the vacation, the going.

Now I'm preparing to return to my editing stack. James is leaving. Tom will go back to his construction job. Paul will keep trying to figure out what the hell he can do with his life.

But at Baxter I had one full day to myself, and I did not write any new drafts. What I did was read, and take notes, and look at an older draft, and then read some more. I brought Trollope's Barchester Towers; Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway; Ulrich's history Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750; the poems of Muso Soseki, translated by Merwin; the poems of Blake; and Peterson's bird guide. I copied out a number of the Soseki poems. I lay in a hammock and looked at the sky. I sat in a stream. I walked on a trail. I think this was all good work.