Ugh. I had such a hard time waking up at 4:30 this morning. I could have slept for at least two more hours. Now, even with half a cup of coffee inside me, I'm squinty and sluggish. I don't remember having any dreams at all: it was one of those hit-with-a-brick sleeps that really ought to happen on Saturday night, not Monday morning.

Anyway: Yawn. How are you? We went to the drive-in last night and it was very fun--The Wizard of Oz was a fine choice for a sitting in a car in a scraggly field at sundown. Personally, I would root for Singin' in the Rain as the next option, or maybe Young Frankenstein. But nobody asked me.

Somehow yesterday turned out to be a day for not finishing chores. I cleaned bathrooms but not floors. Tom skim-coated only half of his fire pit. Paul procrastinated on homework. I'm not exactly sure what we were doing instead. Lollygagging, I guess. We did go for a long walk together, and I happened to stumble into some discarded ostrich fern plants lying on the curb. So I brought them home and dug them into the back garden. They are fiddlehead ferns, so they were a significant cadge. I hope I can keep them alive.

The pile of work on my desk is now exponentially fatter, as the residency applications I'm supposed to read arrived last night to swell it out. I must edit today; I must get that manuscript blurb done this week; I must finish the housework; I must wake up from my lingering stupor . . .

But the weather will be sweet. And I'm looking at an old bottle cradling three tiny-blossomed, long-stemmed, fragrant narcissi. And Kristin Lavransdatter is a stunning set of novels. (I'm 900 pages in and  can barely put the book down.)

Here's a little poem, from my diary manuscript, A Month in Summer:

Pulling Beets

 Dawn Potter

Week follows week.

I hardly know which way I am heading,
Upstream or down. 

How near lies the border-land of the unseen.