Another hot day on the horizon, and the air machine is chugging away, making a small dent in the torrid heat. With one tiny A/C and two artfully positioned box fans I can keep the house about 10 degrees cooler than the outside world, and considerably less humid. The house climate's not perfect, but it's not bad, and I slept decently all night, even occasionally under a blanket.

I finished up my editing project yesterday and my next assignment has yet to arrive. So, till then, I'm unemployed, meaning that today will be a housework day, an errand-running day, a reading and writing day. There's plenty to keep me busy: bathrooms, floors, windows; sheets and towels and sweaters; notebooks packed with poem-blurts; the sad and lonely end of Anna Karenina.

My sister seems to be making a spectacular recovery after her emergency eye surgery, despite a dire prognosis, so that is a huge relief. My children are cavorting in foreign lands. Everything I wrote at the salon felt like it was channeling Lewis Carroll, but oh well. Some days are like that.

Not a drop of rain yesterday, but the soaked earth is reverse rain: as the sun heats, it draws out the deep and murky scent of water, which lingers in the air as more than humidity . . . a tropicalia, here in the little northern city by the sea.

But, yes, there was sunshine, and thick heat too, a real summer day; and I'm very glad that Tom installed the air machine last night. Otherwise, our sleep would have been no sleep at all, upstairs in the little sweatbox.

Today will be another such. For the moment the machine is off, windows are open to cool morning air and birdsong, and my bare shoulders are perfectly happy. Since returning from the Frost Place, where I tossed and turned every night, I have been sleeping with the intensity of an old cat. I can't tell if I feel refreshed or just sodden with sleep, and I'm sure the weather is adding to the confusion. Intense rain, followed by intense heat: my body has forgotten the sensation of briskness.

Today I hope to finish the editing project on my desk. I want to go out to my writing salon tonight. I might wash some windows. As you see, I am so non-brisk that I can't even plan in chronological order.

My notebook is packed with drafts from Frost Place lessons, but I've barely touched them. It's not that they're bad; it's more like my brain is short-circuiting and I can't figure out what to do next.

The doldrums: that's what Coleridge calls this state, when he writes about the windless seas in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I might be there. I'm keeping a sharp eye out for albatrosses.

On Tuesday I did watch a hawk snatch a bluejay out of a maple tree. It was quite alarming. Not an albatross moment, but surely some kind of omen.

The fog is thick again this morning, but supposedly, supposedly, the sun will shine today. Intuitively this feels very unlikely, given our long acquaintance with dankness and the actual current existence of dankness, but I will be glad to be mistaken.

The endless rain has affected many things, including T's ability to install the air conditioner . . . so if the weather does in fact become hot and sunny, this house will be miserably stuffy. But verifying the existence of sunlight might be enough of a solace.

T and I will both be back in the saddle today. He'll be heading out to a new construction site, and I'll be doing the final cleanup on a novel, getting the files ready for proof stage. In the interstices I'll go to the grocery store, maybe cut some grass, conceivably hang clothes on the line, endure my exercise regimen. July stretches before me like a hay field, lovely but businesslike: mow, rake, bale; mow, rake, bale. I'm ready to get to work.

 . . . and of course I woke to rain, and rain will likely fall off and on all day, and that is the way things are here in the little northern city by the sea.

I did manage to break out of my severe laziness and finish (mostly) spring-cleaning the kitchen, and I did fiddle with a new poem draft, and I read a lot of Anna Karenina and found chanterelles on a walk and talked several times with my sister, who, fingers crossed, is finally doing better after her surgical horror. Nonetheless, rain and leftover Frost Place weariness continue to exert their magical powers, and doing anything feels difficult.

However, tomorrow must be a work day, so I need to get myself primed for that. I've got an editing project to finish and another prepared to drop on me, and at the moment I have zero desk stamina. Maybe that will change, if perchance we get some sunshine. This rain is an atmospheric sleeping pill.

Rain and rain and more rain, then going to sleep and waking up to rain that keeps on raining. I think southern Maine had 45 minutes of sunshine in June, and July is heading down the same wet road.

On the bright side, however, it is a fine promoter of laziness, exactly when laziness fits the bill. Tom's employer gave him extra paid time off over this holiday, and I am still recovering from the Frost Place, so we have been in a state of mind for idleness. As the rain pattered down, we spent much of yesterday under the couch blanket--reading, dozing, doing crossword puzzles, listening to baseball. The fridge is full of leftovers, so meals were undemanding, and the rain was a soundtrack to our inertia. And then, in the evening, we watched a dreadful Elvis musical. The day was 100 percent indolence, and after all that non-work I slept like a baby.

But I can only live the potato life for so long. I'm getting fidgety, so this morning: exercise regimen, and then I'll return to kitchen spring cleaning, or vacuum upstairs, or go for a fast walk in the rain . . . something to satisfy my urge to move.

I've got a notebook packed with Frost Place blurt-drafts that are another possible project for today: transcribe a few into my machine and begin to play around with them. New thoughts, empty time . . . something good could happen.

And in actual good news, after emergency second surgery, my sister's eye is finally showing signs of improvement. That's been a horrible lingering worry, overlapping with the last couple of days in New Hampshire and playing out gruesomely during these first days of return.

And so, on this unhurried Monday, the rain continues to rain, and the cat continues to cat, and the house is beginning to smell like a closed-up summer camp, and I am a green walnut rattling in an empty jar--contained, also awake.

Again, fog blankets the little northern city by the sea. Upstairs and downstairs, fans hum in bedrooms, summer soundtrack, air upon air, fog stirred into humid breath and sound. The cat and I are the only risers, and he has already slipped into the shrubbery, snaked his way across the dew-dripping grass. I have made coffee, emptied the dishwasher, unfolded clean dish towels, and now I listen to a freight train grumble past at the crossing, now I sit in my couch corner, under my circle of lamplight, and watch my fingers figure out what to say.

It was a funny evening, our impromptu dinner party with the poets. Flank steak and peppers cooked over the firepit; roasted potatoes and an arugula salad, and then brownies and fresh strawberries; also hilarity. We had no plans to have a party this weekend, yet the party turned out to be just the thing to have this weekend. Now I am sitting here in my couch corner, in this house draped with sleep and fog, and my fingers are writing to you, and for the moment the future feels immaterial. Only this brief space of now exists; I cannot tell if I will pour another cup of coffee, if I will wash my hair, if birds will begin singing, if the glaciers will melt, if the stars will blink out.

But the future slides forward regardless, dragging the past and the present in its wake. This morning, in my inbox: "an essay by Dawn Potter," which I seem to have written and will perhaps read again, but for now it is simply a glint of letters and spaces.

The cat complains at the door, the coffee pot steams and beckons, I cannot rest in the present, everything in my slow world, this slowest of slow worlds, pushes me to rise and engage: to imagine, to desire, to fear . . .

Meanwhile, fog blankets the little northern city by the sea. Meanwhile, the cat crunches chow, and the fans whir, and I pour that cup of coffee, and outside in the wet lilacs a robin begins to sing.

I want not to think about the Supreme Court. I want not to think about my sister's eye surgery. I am thinking about both of those things.

Yet, somewhat unexpectedly, my Frost Place life is about to rekindle today because my friend and sort of boss M is stopping by to spend a day and night here before heading south toward home, and that means our mutual friend Z, who lives in Portland and was at the conference, will also be here all day. Hurray for unplanned holiday parties that balance out the fury and the worry--

One great thing about the Frost Place is that everything there is so grubby that my own home, unvacuumed for a week, looks pristine. So I am not going to be rushing around like banshee: a little bit of cleaning here and there, fresh sheets on the guest bed, and a steak on the grill. Good enough.

And remember that crazy mulching I did before I left? The gardens still look damn near perfect. Some things really do work out the way you imagine.

Yesterday, fog hung over Portland all day long. This morning it's back but supposedly there will be sunshine, sometime, before the rain starts up again tomorrow. I don't know if I'll ever get anything dry on the outside lines again. The humidity is deep, even when rain isn't falling. But this evening we can wipe the dew off the outside chairs, and sit beside the fire pit, and talk and laugh and watch the flames. Independence Day. Let it mean what it needs to mean, for you.