Another cool morning, and T is already out taking pictures in first light. Meanwhile, I am idling . . . sipping hot coffee and mulling over my various weekend tasks--mostly garden projects, but also I want to freeze green beans and kale and maybe make a batch of refrigerator dills, and I should shift stuff around in the basement so I can begin moving the seasoned firewood from the shed into the house, and I should empty the compost bins, and I should should should etc. The list is always endless.

I'm also starting to piece together my fall and winter reading projects. Teresa and I are going to read Wordsworth and Coleridge's original Lyrical Ballads together; my son and his partner and I are going to read Lear together. I'm excited, anticipatory. I love reading complicated books with other people. It's so encouraging and exciting to struggle into them together.

I always feel as if the end of summer is the beginning of thought-season. As the garden wanes and my homesteading responsibilities shift, I turn again to the big stories on the shelves. Winter brings me closer to my books . . . though of course that statement can be seen as specious, given that I read non-stop, day in and day out, week upon week, year upon year. I cook dinner with a book splayed on the counter. I cannot be without one. They live with me everywhere. I am greedy.

But the winter projects are deliberate in a way my daily inhale is not. They make me feel less crazy, more purposeful. I become a student of sorts: granted, a scatty, un-learned, academically ridiculous student, but nonetheless one who is wrestling. And I have fellow students, and we can whisper together and emote and roll our eyes, but we have to get our homework done on time.