And here we are at Monday again. I've got a busy week ahead: furnace cleaning (aka kitten wrangling), vet appointment (ditto), four zoom meetings (yikes), and whatever else is scrawled on the calendar that I'm not recalling at the moment.

None of that is paying work, but soon editing projects will start reappearing. I'm on the countdown to my Monson classes. And yesterday I was asked to write a big critical retrospective of Baron Wormser's work--an almost overwhelming assignment. Of course I can't turn it down, and I wouldn't dream of doing so. Nonetheless, nerves kept me awake last night. Writing essays, especially review essays, always exhausts me, and writing essays about my teacher's work is particularly grueling. Even though I've written about Baron's books several times already, I'm still anxious about getting things wrong. Yet it's an honor to be asked, and I know I'm probably the right person to do the job . . . Anyway, whatever the case, I said yes, and now I have to figure out what the task will require of me.

We got more than an inch of rain over the weekend, thank goodness. The grass is still brown and burnt, the shrubs still tatty and shabby, but the air is cloaked in the scent of wet leaves and earth, and there is a sense of ease in the garden after months of tightness and stress. On my walk I'll keep an eye out for mushrooms--it was a terrible summer for chanterelles but maybe the autumn maitakes will have a chance.

I've been reading Atwood's Cat's Eye, such a painful book about childhood, and thinking about how it echoes and diverges from Elizabeth Bowen's The Little Girls. I wonder if Atwood read that novel before she wrote her own.

Childhood is such a wilderness.