Yesterday I finished an editing project, hung out a big load of laundry, baked a batch of pumpkin bread, and got quite a bit done in the garden: weeded four beds and began on a fifth, trimmed grass, dug dandelions out of the gravel, even did some edging. It was satisfying to make so much progress; also satisfying to draft two decent poem-blurts at my writing group in the evening and then to sleep solidly all night long.

Those sorts of days are tonic. The work of my hands aligns with the work of my head; everything feeds into everything else. The poems exist because I dug dandelions out of the gravel, because I folded Tom's stiff, air-scented shirts, because the kitchen was fragrant with ginger and cinnamon. I don't know how to manufacture that synchronicity. More often than not, time is just chore slapped against chore, days as floating flotsam, obligations tangled together in awkward friction or unrolling in bland tedium. But when everything talks to everything else . . . when the work is the conversation: that is the sunshine.