Finally I got outside yesterday afternoon: mowed grass, yanked out peavines, started in on the weeding. This morning I hope to get more weeding done, before the heat picks up. I'm still waiting for my new editing project to arrive, but I'm keeping busy. I've been working on poems (juggling three different revisions yesterday); I've been reading and walking and mushrooming and housecleaning and having phone meetings with various people linked to my various jobs; today I'll get my hair cut . . . It's been a scatty, unremunerative week, but such is the freelance life.

No rain again! That makes two days in a row. It's supposed to get hot this afternoon, and maybe I'll turn on the air machine later in the day, but for now the house is airy and cool. T is still abed: he has to go to a company-wide safety meeting today, instead of to the job site, so he's taking the opportunity to wallow. I'm listening to the hum of the fan, to the rattle of a cicada . . . a sweet midsummer soundtrack. The present tense is all around me--thin whistle of a cardinal hopping along the back fence; and now, upstairs, my beloved sighs and rattles his coffee cup against the saucer; first daylight blinks among the broad maple leaves; I need to remember to wash this dirty living-room window, and where is that airplane going, the one I hear rising above me? A walnut drops from its tree, clonk, against the rusty roof of the neighbor's flat-tired white jalopy, and the cicada starts up again, a long staccato hiss; the cat stomps upstairs to complain to T about something or other, my fingers fly over the keyboard, inventing as they go; and now another airplane--where to, where do they all go?--and yesterday I talked to one of my sons on the phone and that warm feeling of son happiness is still bubbling in me; it's good it lasts so long, every drop is like nectar, oh, my dear boys; and the flowers on the mantle are getting droopy, I need to change them today, I need to hang clothes outside on the line today, in my little yard, which is like a square of brocade, cut to fit among the houses and driveways and fences; I wonder what will happen, as I pin up the shirts and underwear? what dog will trot down the sidewalk? what mourning dove will coo from the wires? how will my eyes take it all in, this spinning world?