The temperature is 51 degrees this morning--maybe our chilliest of the season so far, and not very chilly in the big scheme of the year, but after such a warm summer it feels surprising. I'm glad to be wearing my red bathrobe, glad to be snug behind closed windows and nursing a cup of hot coffee against my cold hands.

Yesterday, before breakfast, I told T I was going to take a walk into Baxter Woods to check on the mushroom situation. He came along and we hunted fruitlessly for a while until suddenly I squealed because there they were, my first gorgeous maitakes of the season--tucked up against the roots of a big oak, just like their common name suggests . . . hen-of-the-woods, a perfect description of these fluffy beauties.

Here you see them arranged on a turkey platter in my kitchen--the middle one as big as a big cabbage, the smaller ones arranged around it. I had my work cut out for me: cleaning 10 pounds of maitakes is a slow business as they have to be broken into small pieces and painstakingly washed and trimmed before being sautéed. But after a couple of hours of labor I had three quart bags ready for the freezer, plus a bowl set aside for pizza. And then I had to process a bushel of kale!

After all that kitchen time, it was refreshing to step out after lunch and wander over to Porchfest, our neighborhood music gala, which features a few professional musicians but also lots of "we've never performed in public before" groups, which are always my favorite . . . the fourteen-year-old and his dad playing "Wipeout" together; the two nine-year-olds lugubriously enacting the White Stripes; the stocky middle-aged guy leaping around screaming into his mic, then lying in the middle of the street, visions of the Sex Pistols dancing in his head. As a combined effort, it's all strangely wholesome--an audience of strollers and kids on bikes and young couples in Bikini Kill shirts and middle-aged women with Kamala buttons and old hippies with regrettable beards, listening patiently, clapping politely, as if there's nothing inherently hilarious in a big dad lying on his back in the street and shrieking unintelligibly into a wireless mic, or in a fourth-grade guitarist decked out in his new school clothes and singing not quite loudly enough about smoking cigarettes and wrestling with the hounds of hell.

This morning, however, all of us will have to shed our personae and return to being schoolkids or accountants or poets. This week I've got that editing stack to chip away at, and classes to plan, and emails to answer, and laundry to pin up, and errands to run, and books to read, and poems to write, and floors to clean, and dishes to wash, and firewood to move, and a pile of tomatoes to deal with. I'd better get to it.