It's chilly this morning in the little northern city by the sea . . . 49 degrees, and I am wrapped in my bathrobe attempting to recall the sultry days of August, when windows gaped all night long and any clothing felt like too much clothing. Our bodies are so bad at remembering the past. Perhaps it's a way to balance out our brains, which spend so much time wallowing in what-happened-what-might-happen. Right now my body is claiming that it always huddles in a red fleece bathrobe, always wears socks first thing in the morning, always toys with whether or not it's too early in the season to flick on the heat.

Yesterday afternoon I picked the last of my peppers and eggplants and yanked out the plants. With 40-degree nights ahead, I knew it was time to give up on them. What a terrible year they had; these hot-season crops really hated the constant rain. The eggplants are as long as my thumb, and most of the peppers are similarly stunted . . . though I do have two handsome full-sized poblanos.

Now the garden is mostly kale, chard, arugula, and herbs, plus an up-and-coming crop of fennel and some dogged broccoli. The marigolds and zinnias still flower bravely, and in the house the last of the tomatoes are ripening. Summer isn't gone, but it's going.

T got home last night, tired and cheerful, and now I hear him chunking drawers open and shut, sighing into his work clothes, prepping himself to fall back into the world of the construction site. And I am sighing into my coffee cup, prepping myself to fall back into the world of copyediting, my inbox stacked with other people's files, other people's deadlines. What I want to do is dip into my own notebook, which is filled with a week's worth of new draft-blurts--from Monson, from the salon, from the Rilke sessions. But I doubt I'll have that chance today.

Oh, well. I will walk this morning. I will linger hopefully under oak trees in search of autumn mushroom gold. I will read E. M. Forster over breakfast and mutter at John Donne over lunch. I will stand in the shabby leaf-strewn grass and pin up laundry on the lines. Here at the Alcott House, here on my miniature homestead, my pocket-handkerchief demesne, I will sit on the front stoop, mid-morning, with a cup of hot tea in my cold hands and a cat under my knees. The earth will spin. The gulls will scream. Small will become vast, I will be dizzy with it.