Things seem to have settled down, both weather- and emergency-wise, though I could still use some more sleep. I keep waking up at 3 and then falling into a doze 45 minutes before the alarm goes off at 5:30, which is an unsatisfying way to enter a day. But at least I'm no longer panicking about having to make a sudden midnight drive to Vermont.

Now that the yard has dried off after the storm, I hope to get outside to clean up flowerbeds, rake leaves, and saw up the last windfall branch. First, though, I've got to finish up my editing stack, prep for a meeting, deal with a pile of emails, etc. Last night I roasted a chicken, so at some point I'll gather together the various stock ingredients and simmer them for soup.

I've been reading Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise, written during the German occupation of France in World War II. Nemirovsky was Jewish and died in a concentration camp, and her children later found the novel's manuscript among her papers. I have never read a book quite like it: one written during a period of great panic and upheaval, on the subject of that panic and upheaval, but with an elegiac tone as if it were written 20 years after the fact. This tonal disconnect is startling and extremely moving.

But it's also hard to take in, so I am reading very slowly, in small bursts. It's interesting how reading patterns vary: sometimes I'm so voracious; sometimes I just nibble at the edges.