Today is the day: hot weather in Maine for the first time this year!

Already the birds are making an intense racket. A few started carrying on well before daylight, as I discovered when I woke at 1 a.m. into a thin summer darkness. I lay tossing and grouching over some dumb issue that would not concern me at all during real waking hours, and a bird shrilled, another responded, as if they, too, were restlessly arguing with my stubborn brain.

So far I've had exactly the week I've needed--catching up with desk work, catching up with yard work--and I hope my bad sleep hasn't shoved a stick into the spokes. I've made good progress on a memoir I'm editing, started catching up on teaching prep. I fixed the trimmer and then used it to tidy up edges and corners, weeded the Hill Country, transplanted an unthriving rhubarb plant . . . There's still much more to do, inside and out, but I'm on a roll, and these open days have been a huge help.

Little things too . . . getting a tire fixed, remembering to buy Mets-Sox tickets for September, setting up my phone so I can talk to my kid when he's overseas, contacting the chimney sweep, contacting the tree guy about a problem maple . . . these picky little chores take so much time. And I have yet to tackle spring cleaning, yet to start hand-washing winter woolens, yet to vacuum up the spilled soil in my car . . . 

And now T is awake, rattling around upstairs, clumping downstairs, reaching for my hand as he walks past. And now the cat pops up beside me, proffering a quick meow and a nose rub before sliding off into his next sneaky cat project. And now I think of laundry baskets and the unmade bed, breakfast dishes and broom-sweeping; and now I think of the Bronte sisters, bent over the kitchen table, penning their elaborate, ecstatic, wild stories in tiny, cramped, horribly spelled script; pausing to peel potatoes, to snipe at one another, to pet the dog, to speak to their aunt. Home as the center of the imagination. Imagination as the center of freedom.