Tom is going to spend the day at the photo coop, mounting and framing prints for a show, and I'll be home un-decorating . . . stripping the lights from the little cypress tree, tucking the nativity set back into its ancient pretzel box, clearing the cards from the mantle. It's always sad to put away the little tchotchkes, but always refreshing to ease away from holiday clutter and back into spaciousness.

I want to tell you about a book I've been reading--Brian Doyle's novel Chicago--which I gave to my father-in-law for Christmas last year (on the strength of once teaching an essay by Doyle that I really liked), and which my father-in-law handed back to me this Christmas, saying, "You must read this." Among other things, he said, I would meet the best dog character in literature, and I think he may be right. Edward is a dog like no other: I cannot possibly sum up his humor, wisdom, and helpfulness during moments of sadness and light. Suffice it to say that he is deeply familiar with the speeches of Lincoln, regularly attends White Sox games, and holds office hours every Thursday morning. But beyond the magic of Edward, the novel is so surprising and moving. The plot is simple: young man moves to Chicago at the beginning of the book and moves to Boston at the end. In between is a picaresque journey among alleys and along the lakefront, through skyscrapers and into Comiskey Park, under elevated tracks and into blues bars and convents and playgrounds and gyro shops. Often the speaker is dribbling a basketball. Sometimes he reads Whitman to Edward. But the sum total is a miracle of tenderness--comical, naive, patient, open-hearted--all rayed from the microcosm of one apartment building on one street in one neighborhood in one section in one city along one lake in a half-mythical version of 1970s America. It's a beautiful and eloquent book, easy as water on the eyes, and I might go back and read it again as soon as I finish it.

Otherwise, what will I be doing today? Undoubtedly eating some of the leftover Sicilian-style pizza I made for dinner last night--number-three-in-a-row of memorable meals: it came out really well, and I served it with a fennel salad and the rest of the jam-filled cookies, and we ate it on the couch while watching a James Bond movie, and the cat squished himself between us on the blanket, and a good time was had by all.

And probably I'll do some laundry, clean the bathrooms, dust, generally tidy up the place, before our work lives restart their engines tomorrow. It's been a good holiday week: a fine combination of party and peace. Now the throes of winter are upon us, and that can be a good season too . . . the steady occupations of work and thought, fire-lit evenings, snow and cold and the bare-armed trees, crunch of boots, smiles at dusk, the dense scent of minestrone and new bread, crisp sheets and flickering darkness and sleet tapping the bedroom windows.

You may, over the course of these fourteen years, have noticed that I love weather and seasons . . .  dark and light, wind and quiet, snow and sward . . . though, of course, as a gardener I have some trouble adoring a drought. For me, winter is a season of physical rest: the garden is asleep, so time opens for writing and reading and ambling and pondering exactly where a black stone should rest on the mantle. I look forward to the hectic race of the growing season, but I'm also grateful for the winter recess. I brush gently again the walls of the rooms, fold the blankets, polish a table, mutter a song. Nothing else needs me.