At 6 a.m. it's a balmy 68 degrees in the little city by the sea, so I've turned off the air machine and opened the windows, and now shafts of sun and the Sunday-morning chatter of crows are filtering through the screens. The heat will pick up soon, and I'll have to shut everything down again, but for the moment summer has returned to sweetness.

Now I'm drinking coffee, listening to towels churn in the washer, trying to hoick myself off this couch and into my tedious watering duties. Yesterday morning I cut out wheelbarrow loads of past-their-prime perennials . . . dry sweet peas, bee balm, spurge, salvia. I thinned and transplanted cabbages, and dead-headed calendula and zinnias and dahlias and cosmos. Meanwhile, T worked on his shed project: digging out the detritus that had accumulated around the sills, scraping out a trench and nailing down a hardware-cloth barrier to keep animals from slipping underneath (no more skunks, please). Hot work on a hot day.

Today I think he'll be pondering footers for the woodshed addition, and maybe he'll start framing that section, or maybe he's got some other plan. My jobs will mostly be grocery shopping and housework. I did work on a poem draft yesterday, and I've got another blurt or two to start transcribing and revising. The work keeps pouring out. I feel more like a conduit than a poet.