A steady rain is rattling down, one of those long slow all-day rains that gardens love. So no outside work today, maybe not even a walk. Instead, it will be a tuck-into-my-shell morning, mostly spent at my desk editing a snarl of legal footnotes. And then after lunch I'll doll myself up in a new dress and head downtown to the MCELA convention, where I'll be giving a presentation on revision, and hanging around the Monson Arts table hawking my programs, and otherwise behaving like a poet who is not curled under a turtle shell.

I've started reading a book I found on the street, David McCullough's The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, a study of nineteenth-century travels to the City of Light. I've never been to Paris myself (outside of the airport), but I've certainly read lots of Henry James, so I'm finding the book more interesting than I expected . . . poignant, too--the way in which Americans, in all our raw brashness, can be suddenly toppled by awe. Who knows if we will ever be that wide-eyed nation again?