78 degrees at 5 a.m., but the air feels sweet, despite the thickness. I've got the machine turned off and the windows open, and now katydid squeak is seeping into my quiet room. It's Monday, the last week of July, in this little northern city by the sea, and a cardinal is singing in my neighbor's hedge, and a small breeze is lifting the sunflower leaves.

All hot weekend long T toiled at the shed, scraping a trench into the root-packed soil, leveling block for a foundation, and now we have the footprint of the new woodshed, and a stack of new materials in the back yard, and a stack of crappy junk in the backyard, and it looks like construction, and I am excited. So is the cat, who could hardly tear himself away from the job. He spent hours flopped in the shade, watching Tom labor. That cat is a born administrator.

My plan today is to finish up my big editing project and then start a new small one. I did quite a bit of housework while T was digging, but I've still got the floors to clean: I have learned from long experience not to wash floors while a carpenter is on the job. There's a cord of wood to stack in the basement, and poems to fiddle with on my desk, and T. S. Eliot to read for my conversation with Teresa. I've started to explore Best American Short Stories 2010, which I found on the street, along with the a lovely old edition of the poetry of Wilfred Owen.

I'll endure my exercise class and make ice tea and wash clothes and run the trimmer and cook local salmon for dinner, and hold my head and pray for rain, as Bob Dylan puts it so succinctly. Every recent storm has skipped us. Maybe today we'll get lucky, finally.