The temperature is in the 40s this morning, and a huddled-up crow, looking windblown and disgruntled, is perched on the tip of the "Founding of Portland" obelisk across the street from my bedroom window. We are beginning the down-slope to autumn.

I have had the sensation of small bursts of words behind my skull . . . nothing at all like a poem, but a gathering-together of tools, an accumulation. I am beginning to imagine I could be a writer again. Still, mostly what I am is a landscaper. Yesterday I finished spreading the new soil in the garden beds and began digging up flagstones from the side-yard wasteland. Once, long ago, somebody had an idea about a patio. But the flags sank into the earth, and then someone dribbled gravel over them, and then everyone forgot them. So now I am prying them up and loading them into the wheelbarrow and trundling them out to the front yard to create paths and step stones inside the beds. As soon I finish that arrangement, I can lay drip hose for irrigation, and then, finally, I'll be able to think about fall planting.

Needless to say, all of my garden muscles are shouting, "Hello! We thought you had forgotten us!" My hands hurt and my shoulders ache and the backs of my legs are weary. I've got a bruise under a fingernail where I bashed it with a rock, and bruises on my thighs where I bashed them with the wheelbarrow. Still, it is lovely to rediscover my sturdy old body. We've been friends for a long time.

One thing that's so different about gardening in town instead of the country is that I'm constantly on view. All of my gardening in Harmony was a strictly private matter. But on the Street of the Transcendentalists, everyone gets to watch the show. There I am, in the front yard of a tiny residential street, houses packed close together, and I'm recklessly yanking around rocks and soil and hauling away piles of weeds. So everybody notices, and half of them drop by to say hello. [Thus far my favorite conversation has been with the second-grader across the street, who appeared suddenly to hang out and tell me about her cat, Jack. You'll be interested to hear that he has staring contests with the dog on the other block.]