After yesterday's soaking rain, the fallen leaves smell like strong tea, and sunlight glitters through a scrim of gold--from the ash trees, from the neighbor's feathery black walnut--and sparkles up from the carpet of wet orange-yellow-red-brown rippling over grass and garden.

It feels strange to be a couple alone without a kid in the house. I do hope Paul is having a wonderful time up north on the lake, and is staying semi-warm and -dry, but his adventure is a little holiday for us as well. Yesterday morning Tom worked on photos in his study, and I worked on a poem draft in my little bedroom corner, and then I cleaned the basement, which sorely needed it. So now we have a place to stack firewood, and my inside clotheslines are ready for use, and many, many spiderwebs have been removed. Then, in the afternoon, we went on an outing to Home Depot to buy sand and gravel for our walkway project. Later we took a neighborhood walk, and then played cards and ate potato pancakes and listened to the Dodgers game and watched a terrible movie from the 80s called Lost in America. It was a highly non-adventurous day, but cozy . . . just the two of us ambling through our little projects together.

The walkway will be today's undertaking--mostly Tom's, but I will be on call to help lug the giant paving stones into place. When he doesn't need me, I'll be planting bulbs: garlic in the terrace garden, lots of crocuses and daffodils in the backyard. This week I'll probably also buy a bag or two of tulip bulbs, to scatter through the front beds.

I might get to housework, but if I don't, I can finish it during the week. My editing burden has lightened, now that I've turned in the first big batch of manuscript; and with no boy asleep around the corner, I can vacuum and clank buckets whenever I feel like it.

Two and half days alone in the house. What a novelty that will be.

* * *

Two hours later update: Phone call from Paul. Canoe broke. Headed home.

Long, deep sigh.