It's a cool morning here, with a cloudy day forecast and then heavy rain on the way for tonight and tomorrow. The garden is beginning to weary--cucumber leaves yellowing, okra plants turning into knees and elbows--but still the produce keeps coming. Today I'll cook down another batch of sauce, and I'll still have enough tomatoes to give some away to Angela, in trade for the gorgeous leeks, onions, and beets she brought me from up north.

I think it will be a quiet day: more class planning, reading the Iliad, fiddling with my new poem, walking up to the library.

I'm feeling slightly melancholy . . . not in a bad way, just in an end-of-summer way; just in that old "Ode to Autumn," "season of mellow fruitfulness" way . . . Soon the garden will fade and I'll be lighting the wood stove in the evenings, and darkness will creep in from the east, earlier and earlier with each passing day, and my birthday will arrive, and I'll be 57 years old.

It's such a surprise, how things turned out in my life. But also no surprise at all.