Yesterday I finished an editing project, then hung out with various iterations of poets till bedtime. Now today, after I muscle through a few desk chores, I am on cottage time: shopping for the island, packing for the island. The shopping is the far bigger task: our trips to the cottage are essentially four days of dinner parties, cooked in a tiny, minimally equipped kitchen, plus breakfast, lunch, and hiking food. So planning is complex, and we travel heavy.

In addition to food, I have another burning question: how many books should I bring along? My children have invented a joke equation in which days-on-vacation have an explosively exponential relationship to books-in-Dawn's-luggage. This time I'm working with the added twist of trapped-inside-on-rainy-days, so the resulting number could be staggering. Certainly I will pack Henry James (now in a nice new non-disintegrating paperback), probably also Jane Hamilton's novel The Book of Ruth, which I just plucked off a friend's giveaway pile and seems like an undemanding read that might balance the tortuous pathways of James. I will probably bring along my Coleridge volume so that I can copy out "Lime-Tree Bower" word for word. I have Terrance Hayes's newest collection. I might bring along something for writing prompts: maybe the new facsimile edition of a 19th-century guide, called (if I remember correctly) Madame La Marchand's Magic, which Teresa and Jeannie sent me from Florida and which includes a long and fascinating section titled "The Ladies' Love Oracle." But what if I run out of novels? I can't run out of novels. . . .

You see that things are already getting out of hand. Fortunately, however, I can wear the same three old slopping-around-the-house outfits the whole time I'm there. Clothes are no worry at all.

Tom tells me that the forecast has brightened: we might have one day without rain. That's cheering news, not that I need cheering about the cottage. Even in the pouring rain, it is the sweetest place I know. No matter how foul the weather or how sad my mood, Goose Cove shimmers outside the back door.

Still, it's a given that our moods will be sad because last time we were there we got the news that our friend Ray had died, and nothing has been right in the world since.