It's drizzly outside, and much warmer than it has typically been in the early mornings--already in the low 60s instead of our usual mid-40s or low 50s. I expect the plants are very, very happy.

Yesterday I finished another full round of weeding, and now every bed is in good shape. I've caught up on pruning and deadheading, and for the moment the place looks as good as it can look, given the ugliness of the house siding and the various gaps and snaggles in the yard infrastructure.

I finished Proulx's Barkskins yesterday. For such a massive book (700 pages or so), it was a surprisingly quick read, and quite interesting as well--a giant novel about the lumber industry may not sound scintillating, but it actually was, though the ending dropped into environmental preachiness . . . morally admirable, of course, but novelistically annoying.

This afternoon I'll have my monthly zoom confab with Teresa and Jeannie. This morning I'm not sure what I'll be doing with myself: going for a walk in the rain; maybe washing the upstairs windows; ideally, writing a poem, but who knows? Right now I am in an intense reading state; I am awash in other people's words . . . poems, novels, meditations. If that's what my heart desires, why should I argue?

Still, it's been an odd week so far . . . spacious, lonesome . . . books and books and garden and garden . . . I'm curious to see what happens next.