I dreamed last night that I watched my older son transform from the young man he is back to the little boy he was--small, sturdy, with duck-fluff hair, so busy and excited--and then he rushed away from me into his world. I woke up nearly in tears; it was so poignant and painful to watch my beloved son reprise his life and then vanish into it.

So I'm sitting here now, with my coffee and my quiet, trying to soothe myself: he is okay, I am okay, we are still attached to one another. But, still, the essence of some massive loss lingers in my chest.

Anyway, onward into daylight.

Yesterday T and I went to the public library's annual book sale, a delightful cram amid tables and boxes. While we were poring among the volumes, a pair of girls wandered by, probably early high school-aged. "Oh!" said one. "Little Women! I love Little Women!" and she caressed the cover. And then the other, in the same voice of love and awe, said, "Oh! Jane Austen!" How beautiful to listen to girls and their books travel on across the generations.

I spent the rest of the day messing around in the kitchen and the garden: baking baguettes; tearing out the sunflowers; cleaning dirt off the cured garlic and carrying it into the house; harvesting fennel; mowing grass; and then making my own version of chicken cacciatore--homegrown tomatoes, peppers, and herbs braised with foraged hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, an onion, red wine, and boneless chicken thighs, served over squares of fresh polenta, alongside a fennel and marigold slaw. A top-ten meal, for sure . . . and, as I cooked. listening to the Red Sox eke out their last few moments of the season because "baseball will break your heart; it is designed to break your heart."

Now it is Sunday, and I have a stack of library-sale books to paw through: William Trevor's Selected Stories, Peter Taylor's Complete Stories, Philip Roth's Everyman, a beautiful early 60s edition of John Le Carre's Call for the Dead, and a bizarre compendium called Curiosities of Literature, by Isaac Disraeli (the prime minister's father), complete with ornate Victorian cover and ridiculously tiny print.

Meanwhile, Tom acquired Colin Rowe's The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays, a show catalog from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art titled Snapshots: The Photography of Everyday Life, 1888 to the Present, Philip Conkling's From Cape Cod to the Bay of Fundy: An Environmental Atlas of the Gulf of Maine, Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms, Andre Malraux's The Psychology of Art II, and Hammond's Nature Atlas of America, which he got for me, because he knows I love the ridiculously opinionated style of midcentury popular natural history-- to wit:

Wolverine: A Disagreeable Countryman--A despicably mean character is the outstanding trait of this northern savage. . . .

American Badger: Prospector of the Western Plains--If on a bright western morning we see on the grassy plain a line of tracks meandering from hole to hole, each one flanked by a little mound of fresh earth, we have before us the nocturnal labor of a badger. . . .

This list of our varied acquisitions fills me with love for him. Isn't this exactly the mystery I long for in a husband?--a man drawn to strange and compelling books, some that I don't understand, some that I will never read, some that we'll pore over together. Ah, the romance.