Saturday dawn. I wake and doze and wake and doze to gentle rainfall. With the bedroom windows open, the patter is close and comforting. Half-conscious, I pretend I'm in a tent, on a screened sleeping porch, in the loft of a thin-roofed barn.

***

Now, an hour later, I sit wrapped in my red bathrobe in the unlit living room. A car swishes past. Raindrops tap and clatter and peck and chirp, a staid and steady concert in the windless air. Upstairs Tom and the cat curl and stretch among the clean sheets. Outside the gardens glow . . . lemony iris posed against white drifts of bridal veil spirea . . . a garlic chorus jazz-handing among red-onion spikes . . . 

***

Yesterday I shipped off my editing assignment and then spent most of the rest of the day outside, weeding, mowing, watering transplants, hacking grass and dandelions out of the gravel walkway. Sonja the poet-landscape designer arrived to treat the ash tree. I never thought I'd be happy about a pesticide, but that is the only way to save our beautiful specimen tree from the ravages of the emerald ash borer. All around the city ash trees are disappearing. But not this one. This one will grow old.

***

I will head to New York on Monday morning, and I am examining the odd and delightful sensation of being caught up on every chore before leaving home for most of a week. Paying work, housework, garden work. Clean sheets, clean bathrooms, clean floors, mowed grass, weeded gardens, edited files. Surely I've forgotten to do something vital?

The rain will fall all day long, and maybe I will putter among poem drafts, maybe do some grocery shopping, maybe bake something, maybe figure out our Chicago itinerary, maybe go for a walk in the rain, maybe read a little Shelley, maybe listen to baseball . . . maybe is such a restful word.

***

In gray rain-light the quiet rooms are almost strangers.