Little Chuck loves to sit on my hands as I type this note to you. After a night of sleeping, he is ready for pal time, and climbs aboard enthusiastically--purring, wiggling, rubbing his nose all over the keyboard, and manhandling my spelling. Admittedly he is as cute as a button while he's destroying my sentences. [Cute as a button is one of my favorite cliches. Buttons are definitely pretty cute.]

It's Friday, and I'll be working all weekend, so I'll likely let myself play today. Yesterday, amid my chores, I worked on a couple of poem drafts, read To the Lighthouse, and prayed for rain (to little avail). Today I absolutely have to clean the piles of books off my desk and arrange my study for a weekend of zooming, but I'll also go for a walk and I'll keep mucking around with my stuff . . . work on a set of poems that borrows lines from Whitman and Woolf, fetch a book from the library around the corner, wrestle with this silly kitten. I think the weather will be cooler, so maybe I can even spend some time in the garden, though the dryness is depressing.

Teresa had a dream that Ruckus came back from the underworld to remind Chuck of how to behave. Ruckus himself always behaved badly in real life, and would certainly have clobbered Chuck as soon he caught sight of him, so this is definitely a fictional scenario, not a mythical message. But isn't it funny that my friend, far away in Florida, dreamed about my cats? She's never even met Chuck.

Well, I must say goodbye and go gather up the recycling for the curb, and empty the messy litterbox, and wash the breakfast dishes, and throw a load of laundry into the machine, and otherwise enact my house persona. I am thinking of Mrs. Ramsey, in To the Lighthouse--her entire life wrapped up in service to others, believing fervently that this was the best possible life for a woman . . . and yet her interior world, her tidal reflections, her fierce privacy.