I had kind of a bad day yesterday. I don't know why, but this last trip up north dropped me very suddenly back into my old grief state. I talked to P about it; he suspects the culprit is time of year, which is possible. This is a strange, remote, sadly beautiful season in my homeland, and today is also P's 25th birthday, which triggers elegy in its own right. He says he's been feeling it himself, in New York: the stab of loss.

As I drove past my Harmony house on Tuesday afternoon I could see that the new owner had been cutting trees. I keep wondering if that's what's made me so sad, but I don't think it really is. Many of those trees would have had to go if we'd still been there: too massive, too old, too close to the house. More, it was something about the sky, the rain . . . the fourth-dimensional leaps of time . . . I don't know. None of this makes sense. But sense isn't the point.

Anyway, I tried to go easy on myself yesterday. I took a long walk through the neighborhood, treading through the gusty sunshine, swirls of leaves pattering and whispering as they fell. I wandered through Baxter Woods, up into Evergreen Cemetery, concentrating on being alive in that moment, and I was, and I do feel better today. I don't want to regress into grief. It was not good for me, for my writing, for T, for the boys, for anything. I had to pass through it, but I don't want to reignite it.

Today I'll work outside in my tiny patch of land. I'll rake leaves. I'll bag up roots and twigs. I'll roll up hoses for the winter. I'll break away from the old sickness. It's what has to be done, what will be done.