Monday morning, cool with the promise of heat. Birds are singing in the lilacs but otherwise the street is quiet, except for the growl of the neighbors' air conditioners.

Our three-day date weekend ended with drinks and appetizers at the restaurant around the corner, then a communal doze on the couch in front of a Carole Lombard film. It's funny how refreshed we've both felt: not that we did much out of the ordinary, or much that we wouldn't also have done with someone else around. But I suppose the refreshment arose from simply concentrating on enjoying each other.

This morning we'll split off into our work days . . . Tom back to trimming out the windows of a big mansion south of town, me finishing up the talk I'll give on the last day of the conference. I still don't have a room of my own, but for this week I'll have a house of my own. I'll write and read, and catch up on housework, and pant through my exercise class, and then in the late afternoon Tom will come home, and we'll hang out together and I'll cook lamb chops for dinner. I know this sounds like nothing special, but I haven't had a solitary work space for a very, very, very long time. When I look back at this year and a half, I have a hard time understanding how I got anything accomplished.

Meanwhile, the boys have been texting me updates from Minnesota and South Dakota. "About to go past the DeSmet exit," Paul wrote. Laura Ingalls country is what he meant. I asked him to describe the landscape. "Flat," he told me. "Soybeans as far as the eye can see."