I did some transplanting yesterday, a first step in planning for the garden's autumn look: pulling out most of the sprawling oversized broccoli plants and replacing them with fennel seedlings, moving some kale seedlings among the cabbages. And I spent a long time pruning and tying up the tomatoes, tying up peppers and eggplant, training the cucumber vine up a trellis . . . my attempt to keep the wild growth as compact as possible. Meanwhile, in the house, Paul had emptied boxes of his stored dorm-room stuff onto the living room floor and was sorting through them in a whirlwind of loud snap decisions. I tell you: this week will be chaos.

We've got rain on the way today, and I won't be able to escape into the garden. However, I'm going to have a lot of ripe peaches to distract me from the moving turmoil. My neighbor is picking up a box today, shipped directly from Georgia, and wants to split them with me, so I've got to do something with them pretty quickly. I foresee an afternoon of blanch/slice/pack/freeze and a fat peach pie for dessert. Yesterday she picked up a couple of boxes of wild blueberries for me from the farmers' market, and most of them went into the freezer too. Unexpected bounty: every year there's something!

Tomorrow I'll be back to work . . . juggling an academic journal with a poetry consultation, trying to get back into my exercise-class routine, dealing with house uproar, hosting a dinner guest in the evening.

Someday I'll write again.