In unheard-of news, young Charles has allowed me to sleep past 5 a.m. two days in a row . . . well, not really sleep, though he I did let me lie on my back in a semi-dozy state while he sat purring on my sternum, now and then leaning forward to press his cheek romantically against mine.

But all semi-tolerable positions come to an end, and at this moment Chuck is crunching up his breakfast chow and I am drinking black coffee in my couch corner, and gray flat dawnlight is carving seams into the neighbors' vinyl siding. A robin bursts into complaint, then hushes. Crickets squeak squeak squeak squeak, without cease, without variation.

Yesterday I tore out one of my tomato plants, which was yellowing, and pruned the rest so that the remaining green fruit might have a better chance of ripening on the vines. But probably this year will be like all the others, and I'll soon be decorating the dining and living rooms with bushel baskets of green tomatoes. I did make a batch of sauce yesterday, and a batch of pesto, all of which went into the freezer. I also baked a caramelized apple cake, which we never ended up tasting because we decided to go out for German food and overstuffed ourselves with sauerbraten and potatoes and spaetzle.

During the day I worked for a few hours on Substack formatting, and now I know how to basically manage the platform and have drafted some sample entries to share with Teresa and Jeannie. I read Kenneth Roberts's Arundel, and I listened to the Sox lose to the Yankees. I watered the garden and harvested hydrangeas for drying. I did laundry and dealt with a kitten litterbox mistake and won a game of cribbage and lost a game of Yahtzee. I whipped through a couple of New York Times Sunday crossword puzzles. I was constantly busy with something or other, but in a desultory, semi-vacation, semi-homesteader, semi-bellelettrist sort of way. There are worse ways to spend a Saturday.

Today will likely be more of the same. I want to take a trip to the fish market so I can restock our freezer. I might bake bread. I should prune the faded blooms on the dahlias, coneflowers, and marigolds. Maybe I should run the trimmer along the edges of the browning grass. I'd like to cut fresh bouquets for the mantle. Little chores, none of them crucial . . . and yet as Angela and Carlene suggested in their comments on yesterday's post, our small busyness is life's embrace.