I woke up to rain, light but persistent, and it will keep raining all day and into the evening. So this will mostly be an in-house day, though I do have to trudge up to the library to fetch the book I reserved: a novel by Tessa Hadley, whose fiction I just discovered in the New Yorker. But inside is okay, as I spent a lot of yesterday outside. Mid-day I took a long walk into the cemetery, where I found a big puffball and watched a young red-tailed hawk complain in a pine tree. It was a very fledgling kind of outing: I also saw three big bluejay children harassing their parents . . . so many crabby avian youngsters out there, irked because Ma and Pa have stopped feeding them. Then later I weeded the strawberry bed and picked beans and shishitos and when Tom got home we went for another little walk; for some reason I was restless and in need of movement.

Despite that restlessness, I did manage to convince myself to start scratching out a poem draft. It's nothing much yet, but I'll mess around with it some more today, after I finish my editing stint. 

Overall, I think my frame of mind is improving. I'm starting to relax into being alone, into having space to work, into choosing what I want to do when. I'm experimenting with upping my morning exercise classes  to 5 days a week, instead of 3, now that I have so much more flexible time. Since Paul's been gone, I haven't spent time with anyone other than Tom: I've been entirely alone during the days, barely even using the car, only talking to strangers. This is not a long-term plan for happiness, but it's seemed appropriate for my first week. A sort of retraining in how to introduce myself to myself.