Portland had a light frost on Tuesday night, while I was in Monson, and another one last night. I guess that's it for my flowers, but I don't know when I'll get a chance to clean them out of the garden. I've got to work this morning, and then I'm meeting my friends Baron and Janet and Betsy for lunch, then getting a haircut, then going to Baron's reading this evening . . . and tomorrow will be work plus crazy errand-running-and-pulling-things-together so that we can leave for Mount Desert Island in the morning.

I really, really hope I'll be able to rest at the cottage because I am exhausted. This cold still hasn't released me from its grip, and I haven't been sleeping well, and I've had so many obligations, and the atmosphere in Maine has been stressful, to say the least. But I'm trudging onward. Class went well yesterday; the weather  was clear for driving; I lit a fire in the wood stove as soon as I got home and made an easy dinner of shrimp and macaroni. I'm doing the best I can.

Now I've started reading another new-to-me novel: Zadie Smith's On Beauty, which I plucked from a free-book pile at a Brooklyn breakfast joint. And I'm drinking my small cup of coffee, and I'm sitting in my couch corner, and heat is pouring sweetly from the furnace vents, and I have nothing to complain about. I'm meeting friends for lunch, and then I'm going a cottage by the sea. The messy interstices will work themselves out.