Drizzle is clicking against the windowpanes, and the air is heavy with damp. Somewhere, a blue jay shrieks--Rak rak! Rak rak!--but otherwise the neighborhood is very quiet . . . windows still dark, shades still down.

This will be a busy week: full-throttle editing, or as full-throttle as I can manage with the boy in the house, and meanwhile he will be trying to clean up from one trip while planning for another, and the smell of hair-on-fire will be strong.

For the moment, though, things are peaceful enough--Tom in the shower, cat glowering about the weather, son asleep upstairs.

I've been reading Meg Kearney's new poetry collection, All Morning the Crows, and it's really, really good--such a brilliant way to incorporate bird lore into personal history. And I've been mowing grass and weeding and trying to figure out what to bring to my poetry group tonight, which is meeting in person for the first time in more than a year. I will not miss Zoom; I really hated the way it flattened discussions in this context, and I was always accidentally interrupting other people and then feeling bad about it.

But I have to say that I do like Zoom for exercise classes. Roll out of my bathrobe and onto the back room floor; do the hard things that my friendly teacher tells me to do, with the comfortable knowledge that nobody's watching me; then roll into the shower and on with my day. So much better than in-person.