A friend called from Deer Isle yesterday and cried, "It's fair weather!" He meant the Blue Hill Fair, but for me Labor Day weekend is always the Harmony Fair. Podunk little community obligation that it is, I loved being part of it, the way the entire town focuses on nothing else for three days, the way the kids run wild and the parents bump up against each other in strange venues--vegetable judging, demolition derby--and everyone is dusty and stringy-haired and overtired and surviving on a diet composed solely of French fries.

But no fair for me this year. Last year Tom, Paul, and I drove to the homeland for the occasion and judged in the exhibit hall and spent a few days in Wellington and wallowed in elegy and French fries. But this year, we're home--T and I in the little northern city, P in NYC--and I daresay we will not eat one single fry the whole weekend.

Instead, I will mow grass and freeze kale, both of which I meant to do yesterday, but I got caught up in phone meetings and the day bustled past me. Still, I did manage to make the first tomato sauce of the season--a rich and spicy mix: half poured over bucatini for dinner, half tucked into the freezer. And Teresa and I wrestled our way through a Donne session, and I hacked at a poem blurt that seems to want to be a formal sonnet, and I mopped the floors and cleaned a bathroom and refreshed all of the flowers in the vases, and I went to bed in crisp line-dried sheets . . .

Which is to say, I carved out a day that made me feel like myself. I am a sensualist, in the most PG-rated way. In dreams I stride down the aisles of train cars in fabulous swishy silk dresses a la Myrna Loy. In real life I linger over a spoonful of homemade chocolate pudding topped with freshly whipped cream. I bury my face in a stiff clean bath towel smelling of sky. I stare at vases of bright flowers, at spotless kitchen counters, at bowls of tomatoes, at wood fires, at cardinals on fences. I listen to the same song over and over and over. I can't get enough: always, I can't get enough. The greed of the skin, the greed of the ear. I have no idea if this is a sin or a blessing.