The air is humid and grey. The sky has settled onto the rooftops, and low tangles of cloud are drifting over the quiet bay. I have been dreaming of something I can't quite remember, something that involved tape measures and rulers and endless rooms. No doubt it was a house-buying dream, though I can't remember feeling anxious or ecstatic, nor can I remember anything about the shape of this place I was apparently measuring. I do remember that there was no roof, only high walls. Perhaps I was measuring a house ruin, or a series of secret gardens.

I have started reading fairy tales again--gone back to my fat Grimm omnibus, the only one of my fairy tale collections that isn't in storage. Outside the window a comic mockingbird is imitating a seagull. Tom is in bed, drinking coffee and reading a David Foster Wallace novel. Ruckus is hurling insults at the evil neighborhood squirrel.

Today we (Tom and I, not Ruckus and the squirrel) are going to the film festival in Waterville to watch a couple of episodes of The Decalogue, a beautiful Polish TV series, first broadcast in 1989, that is one of Tom's favorite things ever. And then we might go used-furniture shopping. If we're going to buy a house with a dining room, we'd better acquire a table and chairs. Of course we don't yet know for sure if we're going to be buying this house. This will be a weekend of negotiation and sewer-pipe angst.