This month really is the cruellest this year: I feel as though I'm on a rollercoaster with someone half-awake at the controls, and that someone is me and the coaster just keeps plunging down, and I just keep gritting and going and drowsing and doing. More and more, I'm grateful for the quiet noise of intense color in those Ottawan galleries. But look: today, magnolia and hyacinth and daffodils and treebuds, clamoring for notice, elbowing each other out of the way to get in line for the pictures, and the scent on the streets of the village is something I would put in this writing if I could. Six p.m. found me crouching beside flower beds, then coming home to be bowled over all over again by my tree. I must have taken sixty pictures of the tree alone. Not a single one is a particularly good picture, and yet they all look beautiful to me.

Within days I may be able to write lengthily again. For now, I give myself flowers on the last night of my life as a twentysomething, and I give myself the scent of the street and the lawn and the fallen petals after our freak flash-through thunderstorm, and you can share them, if you'd like, because I'm friendly like that, always did know how to play well with others, once I got over the initial awkward shyness.