Sunday was another wet day--off-and-on drizzles and downpour, no possibility of yard work, though I did find a few dryish minutes to pick blueberries and tomatoes. Instead, I spent much of the morning at my desk, finishing up commentary on my friend's ms, and then transferred my thoughts first to grocery shopping and then to the kitchen: making vanilla ice cream, making quick green-tomato pickles with a handful of windfalls, marinating chicken with lemon and fresh sage, listening to baseball, watering houseplants. I finished rereading Our Mutual Friend and started rereading A. S. Byatt's Babel Tower. I made a fresh corn, cucumber, and tomato salad; oven-braised the chicken with minced garlic and a Serrano pepper; put half of the blueberry harvest into the freezer and sugared the other half for scattering over the ice cream. It was a puttering-around day, a slow Sunday-dinner-prep day, a day for an apron, a summer dress, and a fat novel.

And today I am back on the job. This morning I'll begin a new big editing project; in the afternoon I'll clean the house; in the interstices I'll wash sheets and towels and maybe get them onto the line if the weather give me the nod. I'll go for an early-morning walk in search of mushrooms, though on the whole it's been a terrible foraging summer. Outside a cardinal sings his Jericho, Jericho tune. Upstairs T clings half-heartedly to sleep.