Today I'll climb back into the editing saddle: I've got three manuscripts sitting on my desk, a fourth liable to show up at any moment, a fifth due to return for cleanup at the end of the month, plus two poetry manuscripts to read and comment on . . . not to mention that Paul will be back in Portland on Friday. So this short week will be busy, as I try to focus hard and get as much done as I can while the house is still quiet.

I was very glad to have a long lazy weekend bridging the conference and the editing stack. The rain was glorious, and yesterday's sunshine and 60-ish temperatures were a follow-up delight. Tom and I were itching to get outside, so we packed a picnic lunch and took the ferry to Peaks Island, where we spent the day wandering around the roads and beaches, along with a boatload of other day-trippers. Then, late in the afternoon, I mowed the rain-fat grass and Tom loaded tools into his work truck, and we ate grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner and thus mildly slid down the hill into the work week.

It will be hot today, so I'm pleased to have lawn mowing off my mind, though somehow I'll have to cram grocery shopping and vacuuming into the day's schedule. But mostly I'll need to concentrate on reconfiguring my life away from wallowing in poems and back into the routine floor-scrubbing tasks of copyediting--a shift that, while necessary, always feels sad. 

Well, I am fortunate to be at least a part-time wallower.

Adventure boy update: After a visit to Arches National Park, breakfast at a diner in Denver, and a long flat drive through Kansas, they are now waking up in a Quality Inn in Kansas City, ready to spend the morning at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, a place Paul has been dying to go ever since he was a little starstruck baseball-history-besotted Farm Leaguer.

And I think, after this, they'll be en route back to Chicago. The magnificent road trip is winding down, and, like their poet mother, they'll have to figure out how to reinsert themselves into the regular old days.