Well, I went out to write last night, and felt like a social imposter, but did somehow manage to produce two dense scribbled pre-poem blurts that Betsy insists are real work, though I am not feeling at all confident in my ability to sort useful from tripe. Still, I filled pages, and that is more than I've done for weeks. Really my only steady writing has been these notes to you, and some of them have been barely longer than a sentence or two.

Today: Lug trash to curb. Hang laundry. Endure exercise class. Call my mother. Then immerse myself in Frost and Marvell and try to carve out activities for my conference sessions. Then edit an academic essay. Then do a little gardening. Then figure out something for dinner.

I'm trying to catch up on obligations. My friend Donna and I are reading Brian Doyle's novel Chicago together, and I am woefully behind. While I was in Vermont I finished Tessa Hadley's excellent new novel Free Love and then reread A. S. Byatt's Possession because it's a comfort book and I needed one. Now I've got Diana Goetsch's new memoir, This Body I Wore, sitting on the coffee table waiting for me. Diana taught at the conference a few years ago, and I'm excited about her book, but I'm slow and pokey about everything right now.

Yet after two days of rain, we will have sun and warmth, and I will open the windows, and my garden will explode with happiness and weeds. It's Friday, and I am home, and  I have the ingredients to make chocolate pudding, and there's nothing wrong with any of those things except for possibly the weeds.