My first day back at work was a productive one. I've now nearly finished the short-story collection I'm editing, and today it will become one more job to cross off the to-do list. That will leave me with just a handful of short editing jobs in hand as I enter the downslide into conference planning, which is exactly what I need.

After a cool and rainy Monday, we are back to high spring. Yesterday evening was all soft breeze and raucous birdsong, and T and I lounged outside in the back garden eating fishcakes and salad, drinking rose, talking desultorily of this and that, as night slowly slipped into the sky. What a good idea it was to buy a plain, inexpensive outdoor dining table! Our back garden has taken on new luster. We idle over our meal; we watch a pair of Carolina wrens flit from fence to roof to fence; we listen to the liquid oratorio of the robins. Green surrounds us, intense as a wet painting; and yet, you country people enduring black-fly season: no biting insects. This we can hardly get over: we keep marveling at the fact that we're sitting outside in the evening without being devoured.

This morning I'll go for a bike ride before breakfast. I'll hang laundry on the line; I'll look at the poem I'm puzzling through; I'll finish editing the story manuscript, and then I'll revise some teaching-conference plans. After lunch I'll sit outside and talk to Teresa over the phone about seventeenth-century poetry. I'll spring-clean another kitchen cupboard, and I'll weed a garden bed, and I'll salt-rub a steak for grilling. I'll pick herbs and radishes from the garden. I'll hug T when he walks in through the door. We'll play cribbage; we'll listen to baseball; we'll talk about possible cover photos for my new collection. We'll cook our dinner outside and we'll eat our dinner outside and we'll reluctantly trudge back into the house to wash our dishes and we'll fall asleep to the whir of the fan. Summertime.