Twining.

As suddenly as they arrived, the multitudes who were here for reunion weekend vanished today. With the weather so cool and threatening rain, there was only one thing to do after I'd finished with the Brownings, after the last person had left, while the peonies keep blooming over and saturating the kitchen: slip into the bath with my Michael Chabon novel, then pad back downstairs to the porch to curl up under a throw and read myself to sleep in a wicker chair.

It's yet another day for recharging, one of those days when I putter and reset myself, sensing that tomorrow will be a day for being on. It's also been yet another day when I feel my time in this house growing acutely short: where else do the trees make quite this sound while I nap? Where else would I have an artificial moon just over my porch each night, making the front maples green and translucent in the near-dark? Where else will I find so many places to hear the rain's hiss and hit?

On the other hand, as I packed four more boxes, I realize just how much my study and all its books have come to smell like a basement, here in this damp, shady spot. And so it is that everything continues to be a trade-off: a changing in of comfort for vaster possibility, a striving to keep that curl, that little flourish of grace, now that it's time to find the new latching spot.