A faint drizzle, roof drip pecking oil pipe, the slow clink of water on iron. 5 a.m. is dark these days, but the air is still thick with summer. The first birds are beginning to wake: invisible chittering in my neighbor's black walnut tree, fat raindrops sliding one by one from the maple leaves, chonk, onto the shed's steel roof, and the cicadas, up, down, on every side, creaking in quadrophonic symphony.

This has been a slogging work week, and I had a hard time getting out of bed this morning. But now that I'm here, I'm glad to be up. I like the darkness, the open windows, this intensity of sound. 

I found a bit of time yesterday afternoon to work on a revision, and this afternoon I'll go visit a friend at her new place. Editing is like living underwater, everything else a deep breath.

I've been reading Lori Ostlund's novel After the Parade, much of which is set in small-town Minnesota; and I've been thinking about smallness, the intensity of preconceived expectation, how people in Harmony thought they knew exactly what I was likely to do, if they thought about me at all. How they were probably correct.

Is it better to be dismissed as perpetually foolish, or to be entirely unknown and unconsidered?