This morning, in the humid dark, two young raccoons bustled over the back fence and across the yard. The sight reminded me that yesterday I saw a mockingbird harass a red-tailed hawk (no doubt with the goal of distracting it from a nest), chasing it, diving at it, and all the while scolding it in blue jay patois.

Midsummer and the animals are busy, busy, all on their appointed shifts, dusk till dawn, dawn till dusk, eat and be eaten, destinies overlapping along the edges that circle daylight.

I was supposed to go out last night to a baseball game with friends, but a sudden sharp thunderstorm at game time changed all plans. Instead, I stayed home and watched the rain and made an unplanned macaroni salad from various this-and-thats. Though the rain was inconvenient for baseball, it was a delight in every other way, and now, in the a.m. gloaming, the cardinals are singing, the raccoon teens are cruising, the maples are dripping, and the warm air smells of wet soil, wet pavement, wet leaves.

The new editing project finally arrived, so I'll be back to steady work today. But in the gap I got a lot done on class planning and assorted paperwork, plus managed to shoehorn in household stuff like ordering firewood and scheduling the chimney sweep and buying more flea medicine for the cat . . . the kind of list my brain does not like to remember to check off.

I'm reading about baseball in the 1960s, I'm reading stacks of individual poems in search of teaching inspiration, I'm not yet reading the copy of Eliot's The Four Quartets that arrived in the mail, I'm whipping through NYT Sunday crossword puzzles, I'm fumbling my way into Vivaldi's "Spring," I'm not writing because my brain is exhausted from writing, I'm picking the first cucumbers. That is the story.