A cool, still morning. Last night, driving back from Freeport, where we'd gone to watch an open-air movie, I caught sight of the moon, half-cookie-shaped and tinted a strange and brilliant orange. We wondered then if that was the result of forest-fire smoke, and I think it must have been because today's forecast predicts another plume over Maine. 

This morning I'll go out for a walk, and then I'll be back at my desk. I'm hoping to finish up the editing project this week, and then I'll turn my thoughts to a couple of poetry manuscripts I'm reading for friends. On Wednesday I'll be zooming with Jeannie and Teresa; on Friday I'm going to have lunch with a poet friend from San Francisco. I hope all of this poet contact rubs off on me and I suddenly start writing poems myself. It's not like I'm not writing, though I'm definitely not in the zone. But maybe once I get this editing manuscript done, my chore brain will return to its wandering ways.

I did catch up with herb harvesting this weekend, and I also got the mowing and trimming done, so this week I hope to slowly work on weeding and flower deadheading, if the afternoons aren't too hot. Tonight I'll make bluefish with dill sauce with maybe Yorkshire pudding on the side. We've already got an overload of desserts--both nectarine crisp and a batch of mint ice cream. Summer is the season of quick, do something with that fruit before the fruit flies move in, and then, voila, there's too much food.

I'm back to reading The Leopard, back to wondering what I'll read next when I've finished it for the twentieth time. I'm feeling pleased about the Red Sox, who are suddenly behaving like a competitive team. Little Chuck, who had a great night's sleep, is chasing an empty seed packet through a maze of chair legs in the dining room. T is making his lunch, and I am hoping that no groundhogs are eating my vegetables, and this day should be okay, this day should be fine, I am alive here on this little plot of earth, My heartbeat yearns . . . Are you there? it asks. Who is listening? it asks. What song should I sing?