All evening the northern New England weather service was sparking with tornado watches, tornado warnings, thunderstorm watches, thunderstorm warnings, but the sky stayed quiet in Portland, though the foggy air was as thick as marmalade.

I'd spent the afternoon winnowing, cleaning, and reorganizing the dining-room bookshelves (fiction, memoir, essays, biography), a massive undertaking made easier by afternoon baseball on the radio and by frequent confabulations with T, who joined in to deal with the art book/natural history/science collections. Every book came off the shelves, every one was weighed on the keep-don't keep scale; then all of the keepers were vacuumed, all of the shelves and the walls behind them were vacuumed, and everything was reshelved according to a new and more sensible plan. (In his Covid whirlwind, my son had insisted on separating fiction and literary nonfiction, which meant, say, that half of Joan Didion was on one side of the room, half on the other--an irritating decision that I rectified. He'd also organized biographies by author instead of subject, an equally annoying approach. I love him but he is a bad librarian.) It was dusty and sweaty work, and it took hours to finish, but we are feeling much happier now . . . except for the giant giveaway pile that is our next annoying project.

The puzzle, of course, is how did all of those books ever fit into that room? After stripping out hundreds, there's still not all that much extra space left on the shelves. I guess I'd really been cramming them in there.

Naturally, you must be wondering which author wins the prize for most number of volumes that Dawn owns. Though I have not actually counted each individual collection, I'm pretty sure that Iris Murdoch is the winner, with Anthony Trollope a close second. In the matched-sets division, prizes go to Charles Dickens and Samuel Pepys: Dickens for sheer numbers, Pepys for elegance. Meanwhile, T invented a fine organizational strategy in which pseudo-science (phrenology, crop circles) slowly transitions into real science (physics, natural history).

But enough of books. Now the sun is just beginning to peep through the mist. It will be a treat to have sunshine, after four days of rain. Today I'll get laundry out onto the line and, once things dry off, try to catch up on outside tasks. I'm still waiting for bits and pieces of editing to come back from authors, and I've got some prep to do for Wednesday's big all-day road trip to Rockland, where I'll be team-teaching a theater and poetry class. Mostly, though, the gardens are calling and I am eager to answer them.