I came home from my morning walk yesterday with two big fresh puffballs--an excellent cemetery forage after a day of summer rain--and so for dinner we had enchiladas alongside a salad of fried mushrooms, roasted potatoes, green beans, and golden cherry tomatoes. It was a good day for mushrooms, and a good day for getting things done: I finished my editing project and shipped it to back to the journal staff; I fiddled with my poem draft until it felt more or less complete; and I read the last few pages of the Odyssey. 

This weekend Tom and I will be working on the new garden bed: laying out the pattern, then filling it with leaf compost and the two cubic yards of soil currently sitting in the driveway . . . hours of shoveling and wheelbarrowing and dumping and spreading. For recess, we're going to change clothes and drive downtown and go chair shopping for my study, though I don't have much hope that we'll find anything nice that we can afford.

For the moment, though, I'm sitting quietly in my couch corner--wrapped in my red bathrobe, hair crazy-curled with humidity, cup and saucer of black coffee steaming on the table. Outside, the crows are making a racket. Upstairs, Tom is sound asleep. The cat, stalking through the room, emits a friendly yowl. I'm thinking vaguely of books, vaguely of laundry. The spaciousness of my days still feels strange, but less terrifying than it felt last weekend.

I have spent the past six days trying very hard to retool my life, and on the whole I've done a decent job with that. I remade my work space, I concentrated on my physical well-being, I read and wrote and thought for myself, I made progress in my paying job, I dealt with adversity and disappointment, I tended my garden, I hugged Tom morning and night.

What large, dark hands are those at the window

Lifted, grasping the golden light

Which weaves its way through the creeper leaves

       To my heart's delight?

--from "Cruelty and Love," by D. H. Lawrence