Yesterday was pleasant and slow . . . mostly hanging around the house, but with an outing to the grocery store and then to a Japanese restaurant for a ramen-and-broth lunch. It's so nice to have a son around the house, to be aware of him as a presence, just another householder bumping around doing his own stuff, nobody entertaining anyone else but constantly overlapping in a casual friendly way. Another good thing is that a couple of his closest college friends have moved to Portland since graduation, so now he has a social life beyond his parents when he comes back to Maine. That loneliness was hard to witness when we first moved, especially as it intensified over the pandemic. It lifts my heart to watch him stride outside to greet a waiting friend.

Today he starts his wilderness first responder class, so I'll be back to my usual solitude. I've got a few things to do, emails and class prep and such, and I also want to work on answering a series of questions a friend wrote up about one of my newer poems. I missed my weekly Thursday-night writing group last night, so I'd like to give myself a prompt or two as solace. And next Friday's conference presentation is looming; I should probably run my eyes over those plans.

I'm still not 100 percent healthy, but every day is better. Whatever this illness is, it's clingy, though not debilitating. I want to go for a walk, I want to scratch around in garden soil, but the weather has been cold and windy and not so alluring for a semi-convalescent. I have been getting outside, but I haven't been luxuriating. I'm eager for the soft air.