Life starts again here in the smallest ways. Some of them are expected: I know which trees to watch for which signs, and when. I know the rise and fall of these last weeks, the ways I will see something that is required of me and all but turn my head away from it--only to turn toward another thing that is required of me, so that it should be difficult to feel bad about putting things off, which doesn't always stop me.

Squirrels race and fall in the high-sunned downspout just outside my bedroom.

Last night, after one of the most joyful readings I've ever attended, I saw the near-full moon coming up behind the new officehouse on the hill, and all I could think, again and again, was When the cupola is finished, can we go and see the moon?

In my dream overnight, I was moving house, again, as I will do soon. And in the dream, my old landlord was somehow planning to rent my new house from the friends to whom it belongs--only so that he could then rent it to me at a higher price. Meanwhile, I did my best to convince everyone that the house (which was not my friends' real house, though it was theirs in the dream) could be split into two flats, since I had never used one whole floor when I had lived in it previously.

When my beloved classicist retired from the college, his wife handed me an empty box during one of my visits and told me that I wasn't allowed to come back into their house until I'd filled the box with books from his old office and packed them away in my car. For several days, I have contemplated making a similar move with myself, though on a vector from home to office, in the hope of minimizing the trauma of hauling large numbers of book boxes in May and June. Each time I go in to the office, I tell myself, I should carry one box of books with me. Which would require the car each time I go. Which might not matter, since these days I'm coming home so late most nights that I'm driving the car anyway.

You see the circles in which my mind is running these days. It seems clear to me that loading a camera with film and going out to take slow pictures would be a good idea right about now.

And yet, and yet: one of these days' small dissonances is that underneath the gritted quickness of so much of what I do is a kind of persistent and solid pleasure in this place and in this particular life. It's no inviolable joy, no perfection; small and inexplicable sorrows have sprung up as the spring's unexpected afflictions. Instead, it's a kind of contrapuntal determination toward a strange, sad, and sweet kind of joy that I think I've known for much of my life but am perhaps only now embracing as my own.