Today will be a rainy day, and I am happy to see it.

Yesterday's spatter turned into sunshine--another gorgeous day for walking and yard work and lolling with a fat book and a glass of tea. I mowed, cleaned up the front flower beds, and transplanted sunflowers and cosmos. In the boxes in the lane I thinned and transplanted beets, escarole, and carrots. In the afternoon I worked on a poem, listened to baseball, read and read and read, and in the evening my neighbor and I walked out for dinner and chatter.

So a rainy day is just fine. The tiny transplants will be delighted, and I am happy to retreat to house things today. I need to sit down with the poems of Richard Crashaw--next on the list in my seventeenth-century-poets reading project with Teresa. I'll spring-clean the kitchen while listening to afternoon baseball. I'll keep working on my poem draft. I'll get out my mat and do some yoga and core exercises. I'll concoct T a welcome-home dinner, and then this evening I'll fetch him home from the bus station.

This has been exactly the weekend I needed: busy and productive; also restful and unstructured. Lots of exercise--walking, bike riding, gardening--spelled by lots of loafing with books and cold drinks; even some wallowing in bed. Now I stare through the windows into the rainy garden and I see cultivated soil, bright young plants, clipped grass, everything compact and tidy and welcoming. When we bought this house, with its hideous bleak yard, I imagined a kitchen garden, a cottage garden, a shady grove. Seven years later, they have come to pass, thanks to the work of my hands. I feel a lot of pride about this--the pride of making something from nothing. The pride of creating a pleasure garden. Much remains to be done. But as with poetry, a garden is never final.

And I wrote this weekend too . . . I pulled together a poem draft that is an open door to something else, a shape asking for more . . . and that is so interesting too. I see a form in what I've made, and what this form tells me is that it needs to intersect with another form. Maybe, this morning, I will begin to discover what that other form will be, what language it will require.

Importantly, there were many things I did not do this weekend: edit anyone else's manuscript, do any teaching prep. Originally, stupidly, I'd intended to make today an editing day. But then I saw the light. No. Take your three-day weekend, Dawn. Take it. During my travels to Chicago I edited and taught. During my travels to Mount Desert Island I edited and taught. Ugh. Why is it so hard to protect my time? I need to get better at that.

Meanwhile, my kid is in Asia, looking at this guy--