Back to Monday and back to busyness. This will be a week of meetings, of a new editing project, of hammering out my high school teaching schedule. Today I've got housework to do, sheets and towels to wash, groceries to buy, an early-morning walk with a friend, a big midday meeting with Teresa to go over evaluations and start planning for next year's conference.

Yesterday was busy too, though in a different way. First, T and I walked along Back Cove. Then, after I did the yard trimming, I started moving last fall's leaf compost up to the top section of the Hill Country, which is presently a thin square of weedy grass edged with a few plantings. Every year I do something big with my leaf-mulch treasure, and the weedy patch is this season's recipient. With the rough mulch as a base, it will become a new perennial bed. The work is heavy, sweaty, and slow--lots of shoveling and pitchforking and wheelbarrow trundling--and I won't get the job done quickly. But I'm glad to have it underway.

In the afternoon, I cleaned myself up, and T and I went into town for lunch, a visit to the museum, and a trip to the fish market, where we bought two cooked lobsters, a baguette, and a slab of bluefish. T was in the mood for lobster-roll night, so I mixed up some mayonnaise and made a tomato salad, and we each picked and dressed our own sandwiches. And then we ate outside in the gloaming--a classic summertime feast under the evening sky.

No poem writing, hardly any book reading. It was a day off from work, I guess. [Okay, I admit I did look at art.]