I slept past 7 a.m. this morning, and now I am groggy and dream-ridden . . . a globe showing that it's snowing everywhere in the world, a train ride through an industrial landscape, trying to play the violin while standing on the windy Russian steppe, writing an elegy for a friend who is not dead . . . somehow these vignettes all flickered through my dreams his morning, and I don't know how they were linked together, though at the time I felt as if I might finally be figuring something out.

In retrospect they sort of sound like an Akhmatova poem.

Yesterday I worked in the garden, mostly cutting and pulling out fading flowers. I am more ruthless than I used to be about getting rid of plants that are still in bloom but clearly fading. I try to take a certain botanical-garden approach to the front yard--draw the eye toward beauty--and I'm finding I don't miss the flopping faded coneflowers or the drying dianthus, even though neither was exactly dead. I also went on a bike ride and a very long walk, and I think maybe I'm recovering some of the vigor that went on hiatus during our long heat spell.

So, body and mind. Both seem to be convalescing, which leads me to believe that they've both been ill . . . not "I've got a disease" ill, but definitely under the weather somehow . . . and isn't under the weather an evocative idiom?