I woke up with all the windows wide open and the air temperature outside my comforter hovering at 50 degrees. How did summer disappear so suddenly? I guess I'd best remember to shut the windows before I go to bed.

Tom and I started off our day yesterday by shopping for paint. Then he began prepping the upstairs walls, and I turned my attention to the back yard, which is a desert of neglect overhung by three enormous gorgeous maples. The yard beneath those massive trees is a big square of dirt interspersed with a few ugly prickly weeds, its fence lines cluttered with rotten tarps, old hammocks and chairs, empty cans of Silly String, and miscellaneous windblown trash, all mixed in with last year's leaves and a couple of semi-stacked cords of firewood. My only goals were to separate the leaves, brush, stones, and garbage into piles and to restack the firewood more intelligently. No beautifying will be possible till next spring, but at least I can try to make the space more usable as a staging area. And I'm happy to say that after an afternoon's labor we now have a tidy woodpile and a discreet and useful compost-bin/leaf-mulch arrangement behind the shed. All the disgusting trash is stored away inside the shed for next Saturday's dump trip, and this afternoon I can start moving another lopsided stack of firewood from the middle of the driveway (Why is it there, you ask? I have no idea) and rake out whatever nasty junk is hiding behind it. There will be plenty.

In the interstices I'll be catching up on doll-house housework, editing a book about the spiritual influences of 19th-century American writers, and eventually fetching Son Number 2 from the airport. So I will leave you with this hilarious passage from Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, in which Thomas Cromwell jokingly tells Anne Boleyn what would have been in store for her had she married a northern lord. Reading this description feels like reading a 16th-century article from the National Enquirer.

"My lady," he turns to Anne, "you would not like to be in Harry Percy's country. For you know he would do as those northern lords do, and keep you in a freezing turret up a winding stair, and only let you come down for your dinner. And just as you are seated, and they are bringing in a pudding made of oatmeal mixed with the blood of cattle they have got in a raid, my lord comes thundering in, swinging a sack--oh, sweetheart, you say, a present for me? and he says, aye, madam, if it please you, and opens the sack and into your lap rolls the severed head of a Scot."