Last night's noisy windy rainy sleety storm has blown through, and this morning everything outside is drenched and dripping and dank. A clutch of pigeons flits across the lowering slate sky; the ground is heavy with fallen leaves; the trees are suddenly thinner, ghosts of themselves. The air smells of winter.

It will be a quiet day, I think: breakfast this morning with friends, and then a sewing project, garden-design planning with Tom, reading Middlemarch, going for a walk, drinking tea, folding shirts.

I've begun copying out the Inferno, so there's that too.

And like a man reneging his decision,
            having second thoughts and shifting ground,
            withdrawing from the course he has embarked on,
On that dark hillside there and then I weakened. 

--Canto II, translated by Seamus Heaney