This has been a long work week, and I am glad to see Saturday. After sleeping a little late, now I am admiring the pale whitish light of morning, a sky almost the color of the snow piles, the punctuation marks of birds.

Today is the day I plant arugula in the cold frame--first crop of the season, though the wintered-over spinach is still bright against the crusty soil. Otherwise, it will be a soft and shapeless day--maybe baseball this afternoon; maybe I'll work on those Donne poems. Tomorrow I'll need to do class prep for Monson, but not today, not today.

Next week will be nuts--a trip north to teach, foul weather on the horizon, various meetings and responsibilities, and then on Friday I'll fly to Chicago for a long weekend with my older son.

But I will not have to carry War and Peace on the plane because I have finished it . . . yet another reading of the big guy chalked up in the unremembered history of my life. I should have a special stick notched for each reading, but it's too late to start that tradition now. This is the fifth time? the sixth time? Who knows. All I can say is that Tolstoy has been part of my life since I was twelve years old, that I have struggled with it my entire life, and adored it, and I expect I'll read it again before I die.

Now I've started Morgan Talty's story collection Night of the Living Rez, and I should get back to Watchmen, which I put on hiatus during the W&P experience. I have Baron Wormser's new poetry collection, The History Hotel, but I may save it for the plane. There's so much to read; there's always so much to read.

My younger son has suggested a reading project for this summer--that we undertake Anna Karenina together--and of course I am delighted, of course I am thrilled. My children have grown up to be people who want to read Tolstoy with me! How did I get so lucky? Already he and I are texting back and forth about the Talty collection, which he has finished and I have just started. My father-in-law writes to me about books; my friend Angela writes to me about books; my mother and I discuss books. I undertake hard reading projects with my friend Teresa, and my nephew gives me graphic novels and demands that I talk to him about them. O this world of letters. It is like love.