The wind will pick up today, and the rain will keep falling, and altogether it will be a day that will make me glad to have a house to come home to, after I've slogged through my appointments and errands.

I slept strangely last night: solidly, then wakeful; solidly, then wakeful; and punctuated by vivid dreams about furniture packed with dirt instead of cushions. So I'm feeling kind of groggy and lurching this morning, not quite steady in myself.

But I had a pleasant evening--a teeny-tiny Zoom poetry group, only three of us instead of the usual eight or nine--and it was really nice to wallow in our three poems instead of cranking efficiently through a sheaf. Afterward Tom and I ate a chicken and bean soup that made me very happy. Not only did it taste and look good, but it worked beautifully as a dish to start cooking before poetry group and quickly finish cooking afterward. An excellent busy-night, rainy-night meal.

The draft I brought to share last night is titled "Ode to Four Words I Plucked at Random from a Book of Poems." The four words are grass, patience, longer, and seedhead. You could borrow them to write a poem, and then we could compare drafts and be amazed at how different we are.

I know this letter to you is scatty and has terrible transitions. But that's how my slow brain is working this morning. If you'd spent your dream-hours vainly trying to plump up couches filled with dirt, you would be scatty too.