Last Saturday, the cat was gracious enough to let me sleep till almost 7. But the honeymoon is over: this morning he started bouncing me at 4:30. I hid under the blankets for another half-hour but finally gave in at 5 and got up. Bed wasn't being that enjoyable anyhow. I'd had a night full of dreams about grocery shopping among empty shelves while talking on the phone to a friend who'd decided to hate me. So relaxing. Hot coffee and a quiet couch are way better than that.

My constant headache is still constant, but my sinus congestion feels some better. Tom will be home for two whole days. This afternoon, if the ground isn't too sodden, I plan to start edging flower beds and weeding out the maple saplings that are starting to sprout in the soft soil. For dinner we'll have either leftover-beef tacos with the genuine Chicago-made corn tortillas I've been hoarding in the freezer or noodle bowls with marinated tofu, blackened cabbage, and pot-au-feu broth. I'll let the boy decide.

Last night I finished rereading Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale. Martha Ballard, the diarist that Ulrich studied, has many charms for me. Though I am not a caregiver in the way she was, I so admire her pertinacity: an aging woman falling off her horse, for the hundredth time, as she muddles down a wet lane in the middle of the night, on her way to help a neighbor in labor. How many times did she cross the unruly Kennebec in a canoe and immediately tumble into the mud? Her physical clumsiness and her skilled grace are endearing. And she loved her garden. In May 1809:

Clear part of the day. Showers afternoon. I have dug ground west of the hous. Planted squash, Cucumbers, musk and water mellons East side house. Began and finish a Large wash after 3 O Clock. Feel fatagued. Son Jonathan ploughing our field. My husband workt with him.

Two hundred years later, in Portland, Maine, a day's voyage down the watery lanes from Martha's vanished farm, I dig ground and sow seeds and finish a large wash, as a son and a husband wrestle with their own thorny chores. The contiguity pleases me.

Martha's chaotic spelling is also a charm of the diary. Her own sister was illiterate, but somehow Martha not only learned to read and write but also used those skills to enshrine a private life . . . a very rare action for a woman of her class, in her time and place. Her erratic spelling feels like part of that bravery: a way of stabbing over and over again at language, determined to make it do her bidding. And sometimes it is also very funny. In March 1809:

Son Jonathan sent for his Father & I to dine with him. We had moos meet stakes.

The diary has been a fine choice for pandemic reading . . . close enough to evoke a shared life; distant enough to allow a detachment that is not available to me in our present crisis. But now that I've finished it, I'm turning back to familiar fiction: yet another rereading of E. M. Forster's A Room with a View. Published in 1908, a hundred years after Martha ate moose meat with her family, it will certainly clash in my thoughts with Mrs. Ballard's frontier diary. But I like its farcical prewar English-in-Italy hoohah, especially the misunderstandings: the impossibility of actually saying what one means. No matter when or where we live, we still seem to struggle with our words.