Nesting anew.

Today I'm shooting film, so I'm giving you a picture from a week ago.

Today I remembered all over again how much of friendship--real, true friendship, not the stuff that just pretends--is about knowing exactly how to push, which sometimes means exactly how to tell someone else she needs to push. Today I remembered all over again how much I sometimes need exactly the right person to say, "Now tell me ..." at exactly the right time, and then to say it again when the first telling's done. And so it is that I go out of this day--with, gloriously, a whole hour of light left to go--having drafted one piece of writing that I need right now and having sketched the next one, which also happens to be the outline of my first book. I've been meaning to write up that outline for about a year. And today a combination of exigency and just the right amount of prodding made it happen--in an e-mail, of all places--before I was even out of my pajamas.

As a reward for one of these accomplishments and a goad to start the other, I loaded up a roll of TMax 100 and wandered to the officehouse taking pictures. Something about shooting film makes me feel strangely unworthy, low on vision itself. It's as though all the rules are completely different, as though the pictures must be more interesting if I'm even going to put the camera to my eye and take a look at what I might see there. Just as I was starting to get over that feeling this afternoon, some stranger with his own camera turned up in his S.U.V. and seemed to be taking pictures of my taking pictures. Now, at best that's just absurd. At worst, it's too weird. And in either case, it made me self-conscious again, and for that I could have kicked the guy's ugly white car.

A crow flashes a shadow, flying between me and the sun; he's carrying something big in his beak. The crows have cawed and rattled all day. Yesterday four of them traced the perimeter of my lawn, turning up one small pile of leaves after another with swift tosses of their heads. They are big like dogs, these crows, and (while on the ground) clumsier.

By tomorrow, the dirty remains of our snow will be even smaller.

We're all heliotropic now.