Saturday morning, first light. After yesterday's balmy 70s, the temperature has returned to what one should expect from April in Maine: highs in the 40s, maybe the 50s, and liable to be windy and/or damp.

I'm sitting here talking to you when I ought to be packing food into coolers, but so be it. Yesterday I grocery-shopped, prepped three meals, finished a batch of editing, did a lot of laundry, raked flowerbeds. What I cooked: a pan of lasagna (including fresh sauce and freshly roasted spinach), marinated chicken thighs (with lots of garden herbs and garlic), a pan of cream cheese brownies, a pan of rosemary shortbread; and then the actual dinner I served to the kids: pan-fried swordfish steaks (topped with yogurt-chive sauce), freshly made polenta, roasted vegetables . . . the day was a marathon. 

But tonight I'll be grateful I did it, when I'm idling beside sweet Goose Cove and not futzing with the exigencies of a toy vacation kitchen.

The question remains: what book shall I bring along to read? I'm leaning toward Walt Whitman's America, David S. Reynold's excellent biography/cultural immersion into nineteenth-century New York. With a houseful of young people (okay, only two young people, but the cottage is small), I'm not likely to have the quiet hours of last November, when T and I were dawdling there alone. So maybe a book that immerses me into the busyness of Civil War-era Brooklyn will be just the thing. Anyway, what I mostly want to do with my spare minutes is write: I've got a stack of draft blurts in my notebook and I am itching to dig into them.

Talk to you tomorrow--