"How sociable the garden was.
We ate and talked in given light.
The children put their toys to grass
All the warm wakeful August night."
- Thomas Gunn, Last Days at Teddington

Overcast, cooler, a 3-mile slow run into the woods. At my desk, I need to write a new poem for tomorrow, but a revision comes first, unplanned. A psychodrama session with Nina after. It’s so enriching to have a mentor from decades ago, this reconnection, this pre-established, long-established knowing. Getting right to the quick of the matter and revelation. There is a bounty of tomatoes, an eggplant to pick. My youngest stops by, we take our swim at the pond. We both have low energy and the water is surprisingly cold. Just dive in, I say, and we’re off, easy as that. I swim to the pump-house and back, she goes a bit farther, and faster too, but not by much. On the surface of the water at the shore there are white flakes of chokecherry blossoms floating. While swimming an idea for the poem I will write in the afternoon comes. It’s in my head. I manage to sit in my office in the afternoon and begin writing it down. There are interruptions. I am needed here, there. Then, dinner. I don’t like the rough, rough, unfinished first draft shape it’s in. Somehow, I get enough more quiet minutes in a noisy house to find an ending, send it off. This, I have learned to do, as a motherwriter. Write in the midst.