Conventional ostrich eggs.

One would think that out of a day spent being pulled and stretched and kneaded and unkinked on a massage table, and then being rubbed and clipped and trimmed and polished in a pedicure throne, and eating beautiful sandwiches with my excellent friend, and sipping spiced tea with my flaming-sworded friend while our excellent friend was massaged--one would think that one piece of all of this excellence would take the cake as most notable of the day. And yet: when we decided to stop in at Columbus's majestic Whole Foods store at the end of the day, since we were within ten minutes' drive of it and could instantly conjure up twenty things we either needed or wanted (or both) there, I was in for a surprise.

To be sure, the fact that a massage and pedicure had undone much of my shoulder tension and pretty thoroughly blissed me out had something to do with my appreciation of said surprise.

Whole Foods sells its eggs in the produce section, in a display wherein they're arranged not in styrofoam cartons labeled by size but rather in straw-lined wicker baskets organized by type of bird. (All of this Whole Foods store's eggs come from a farm in Mt. Gilead, Ohio.) One chooses one's eggs one by one from the wicker baskets, placing them into a wire basket to carry them through the store to checkout. Presumably, at checkout they get placed in some sort of protective container for the ride home, but I didn't find that out.

Above the egg display, I noticed much larger egg-shaped objects. Assuming they were, oh, white eggplant or something, I said to my excellent friend, "What are those?" "They're ostrich eggs," she replied. I refused to believe it. But when I approached, I saw that they were indeed ostrich eggs, for sale in the grocery store. Having decided that if people are going to walk around the grocery store talking on their phones, I'm going to walk around taking pictures, I pulled out my little camera.

Ostrich eggs are, apparently, the equivalent of roughly 20-24 regular chicken eggs. Whole Foods claims that they're generally purchased as novelty items but can be cooked up into enormous egg dishes. Mt. Gilead does not supply the ostrich eggs; they come from California.

I'm not saying that seeing (and touching) the ostrich eggs was the best part of the day. It might not even be the most noteworthy. But given that most of what was best and most beautiful about my day isn't the kind of thing I'm up for writing down now, at this moment I'll give most notable to those massive eggs.

Icelandic chocolate? Also very, very fine.

Back to particularity.

This weekend, I've been feeling a need to get back to the details of my world; in some paradoxical way, it seems that even in the process of hauling and handling every single thing I own during my move, I managed to get frustratingly abstracted. Ungrounded might be a better thing to call it, given that what I fell away from was watching and documenting what's happening to all my places.

And so tonight I went out for a walk with one of my students. Though we went out seeking cows, we were soon thwarted: no doubt partly because I was carrying my camera, the cows turned out not to be on their hillside. We listened and looked, but they were nowhere to be heard or seen. And so we simply walked and saw what there was to see, eventually ending up at the prairie, where the grasses are exquisite in their variation and a few flowers showed through before the sunset.

I've come back more sighted, more settled.

Green seas.

The day passed in a steadiness of breeze, a constancy of windrush and glittered light behind the full greens of midyear. I continue to learn how to use my space: in the late afternoon, the desk is alight and a-flicker, the shadows of my ink bottles cast huge from the windowsill by a slow sun. In the evening, I went in search of food and photographs. My pictures have fallen away since just before the move, though I keep finding space and time for most of the other things I need to do. But tonight, I wanted pictures of our corn, that curly speary green. It's long enough now to ripple and wave like water: that's what I went out to find, that more than the milk and cheese and good bread I needed from the store.

And it's hard to find the views I need when I'm behind the wheel of the car, and it seems well-nigh impossible to find them without getting behind the wheel of the car. I'm approaching the day when I shorten the camera bag's strap and hop on my bicycle, in the hopes of being able to get farther into the county than I can manage on foot.

"This is how you know I'm from Indiana," I said to two students last week on the way to dinner. "I'm this excited about the corn." To eat it, yes, and as simply as possible. And, oh, to see it, to gaze at its stretch and sweep. To find half my roads now at the bottoms of green canyons. I will not see the end of this year's crop; the stalks will still be standing in the fields when I fly away. And I will not see the beginning of next year's crop, in its different fields, the fields where beans grow a thicker green this year, or where only scraps and weeds interrupt a fallowing.

Right now, most pleasures have that sudden edge of homesickness. I surfeit: this is my first packing.

I quote my father.

Tonight, in the aftermath of a long, harder-than-I-expected day (which, fortunately, concluded with some homemade ice cream cooked up the old-fashioned way--with liquid nitrogen--in a chemistry professor's front yard, and then with delicious fish, and then with my favorite Dracula adaptation), I am sorting through old e-mail, and I have found the following, which my father sent me (in the middle of the night, with no provocation) last summer.

Only as I grew older did I realize what good faces could be made from large, thin pepperoni.

It's pretty simple, really: I don't know anyone as cool as my father.

Rubber ducky is my sign.

I reminded myself of the dog last night, pacing and pacing, unable to settle down, needing to go pick up one more thing or settle one other pile. Task piled onto task so that a dash to the living room for a box of tissues became a beeline into the study (tissues in hand) to clean off the desk for the morning. Back in bed and attempting to read, the realization came: where were those tissues? still on the desk? But they were the reason I got up ten minutes ago! After about an hour of this kind of rising and settling, rising and settling, I finally lay down for my first night's sleep here.

After milky strong coffee in bed this morning, after a two-hour phone conversation with my beloved Lexingtonian, after the end of the book I hadn't realized I was about to finish, I received yet another revelation about why it's good that I'm here now: my Japanese rubber ducky works in my bathtub.

My father's company had him working long stretches of weeks in Japan several years ago, and at the end of each of his sojourns there, he would send me a package of things he had acquired for me in various Hiroshima department stores. Striped socks anchored these packages--he would send ten pairs of socks at a time--but the packages also contained a wide array of the unexpected (though generally not the unthinkable). In one package, I found a little rubber ducky, attached by a long white chain to a bathtub stopper. But my drain in the tub in Ithaca was the wrong sort, so I left the ducky in his white mesh bag and moved him around with me year after year. I've had him since 1998 or 1999.

And early this afternoon, I put him to work for the first time.

According to the illustration included with the ducky in his mesh bag, I'm supposed to cut his chain before using the plug or the ducky. But that seems to me to take away the terrific fun of having a tethered rubber ducky drifting about at one end of the tub.

And the fun of having a rubber ducky in the tub at all? Worth the years of wait. I'm thrilled that he wasn't the victim of a previous move.

Coming back from dinner tonight in Wooster, we passed an inflatable swimming toy, an inner tube with a ducky head, lying abandoned at the side of the road. A strange bookend for the day.

(For those keeping score at home: I did indeed write today, at the studio, and it was an almost entirely pain-free experience. Invigorating, even! And so I will go back to the keyboard tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow again.)

Mercy waking.

In this dream, I have gone to Cambridge, only while I'm there, I'll be living in a tall, narrow house with many people, some of them undergraduates, none of them my undergraduates. I have somehow packed and/or shipped whole rooms' worth of books, so many books that, by the time I arrive (late, somehow), the others have begun unpacking my books and stacking them wherever they'll go: on shelves, on other books on shelves, on the floor, everywhere. Dismay begins its cold rise in me, and just then a person I dated for a couple of months walks in, and I realize (icing over altogether) that he too will be living in this tall, narrow house. We acknowledge each other, if only a little, but do not talk again. My room will apparently be on the third floor. Somehow, I never make it to my room because of miscellaneous things that must be accomplished--like fretting about why I brought all these books, and about how much it's going to cost me to ship all of them, plus all of what I'm no doubt about to buy, home again. Meanwhile, the person who never even achieved boyfriend status seems to be relishing his superior standing with the others who have all been settling in for days. Somewhere, someone does a chemistry experiment, but nothing explodes.

Upon waking, I find the excellent dog sound asleep on the floor in the living room, being patient until I wake up again and take him out walking. When he sees me, he rolls over on his back, balances on his long spine, greets me with his massive white belly. When I drag the wire brush through his thick fur, his lips part into a smile. By evening, his excellent parents will be home; by nightfall, someone we don't know will have mistaken us for a biological family, out walking the dog who will not be just in the other room if I wake up tomorrow from another strange and grim dream.

But rather than dwell on this short-term goodbye, I go home--really go to it as home, for the first time. And I set a mousetrap. And I rewire a lamp, and it is just as simple as my father promised it would be. And now I'm ready for a first night's sleep in this new place.

My horoscope for today arrives when the day is almost over. It tells me that today will be a turning point and that I will need to manage it well if it's to be a good one. I know what the horoscope means. I'm not sure I've managed it well. But I know that tomorrow I will manage it splendidly.

Vacuuming Elvis.

About a month before my twenty-first birthday--which was near the end of my senior year in college--my parents started telling me about the fantastic gift they'd found for me. "You've wanted one of these for so long that you don't even remember wanting it," my mother said on the phone about two weeks after they started teasing me about how I'd never guess what they'd gotten.

My friends and I talked this mystery gift over at dinner nearly every night. I only wish I could remember the things we guessed it might be. "Should I be scared?" I asked them. They knew my parents. They said, "Maybe."

My whole family came to Gambier for Honors Day that year; it fell very near my birthday, and so they brought my presents with them. I drove to their hotel, equal parts nervous and excited to know, at long last, what they'd been hiding all this time.

When I walked into the room, there was nothing out of the ordinary within sight. Knowing me as well as they do, they said, "It's in the bathroom." There were some dramatics involving my having to go into the darkened bathroom to retrieve the gift, and then suddenly having something whisked into my hands--it happened so quickly that I barely remember how it all went--

--and then I was left holding the bag. A black garbage bag, wrapped over a large wooden frame. I pulled back the garbage bag, and there was my very own velvet Elvis.

Now, I don't remember ever having wanted a velvet Elvis. But it's the kind of thing that, once you have it, you can't quite imagine not having acquired. And the story that came with it was its own brand of priceless.

On his way home from work, my father used to turn right at an intersection of two state highways, on one corner of which vendors would sometimes set up stalls in a gravel parking lot. One evening in early 1997, he was getting ready to turn when he noticed that a person was selling velvet paintings--including a couple of Elvises. He rushed the rest of the way home and picked up my mother, telling her that she had to come with him, that it was really important. They dashed back to the intersection, where the vendor was still selling his velvet paintings.

My mother stayed in the car. My father went to the vendor and started talking with him about his Elvises, deciding which one he was going to buy for my birthday. But while he decided, he spun another narrative, this one about my mother. "My wife's so emotional she couldn't even get out of the car," he told the seller. "She's just so choked up about the King. She thinks this one is just so beautiful." He gestured to the tear running down the face of the Elvis he had decided he was about to buy. "Good God almighty," the man replied. By this point, my mother was probably covering some part of her face because she was laughing, or feeling embarrassed, or both. My father paid the man and got back into the car with the painting.

Elvis has a prominent place in many of my photos from the week leading up to graduation. He had pride of place in the kitchen in Ithaca. In 2002, he acquired a red feather boa. We hung him--boa and all--over the formal dining room fireplace in the house I rented in Rochester. He rode in the backseat with me when I moved to Gambier. And he's been living at the top of my stairs for three years.

Today, I reached the moment in settling in to the apartment where I had to decide where he's going to go now. Because I'm trying out a somewhat new aesthetic--one based around frames and invisble hangers rather than thumbtacks, for instance--I've decided to downplay him a bit. And so it is that I've given him a spot on the back of my bedroom door, a resting place from which he can come out for fuller view but where, in the meantime, he'll be safe.

Sometime in the last three years, the feather boa rotted in some crucial way, so that as we emptied my house onto my front lawn a couple of weeks ago, red feathers fell everywhere. By the time we got the boa near the apartment, I'd made up my mind that it shouldn't come through the front door, not into a relatively clean space. (One of my Clevelander students promptly claimed it, rather than see it go in the garbage.) But this morning I noticed just how much damage the boa had done to Elvis: little red featherwisps stuck everywhere on the frame and on the velvet. And Elvis was far dustier than I'd remembered--which is not so surprising, given the length of time I've had him and the relatively small amount of cleaning him that I've done.

And that's when the Dirt Devil got involved.

I bought a new vacuum cleaner a few weeks ago, because the one I already had was a little floor-sweeper--something that worked just fine when I had only hardwood floors and area rugs but that wasn't going to cut it in a carpeted apartment. It's the first time I've ever picked out a vacuum for myself. All I really needed, I decided, was something with a HEPA filter and with some basic attachments. I went with a middle-of-the-road Dirt Devil that has turned out to be a small miracle. (My flaming-sworded friend liked it so much when she was cleaning my house as I was moving out that she actually bought herself one the next day and proceeded to vacuum her house from top to bottom, too.)

I hadn't yet used the PowerBrush attachment when I launched the Hang Elvis project this morning, but I decided to give it a whirl. And, lo and behold, it whisked all the dust of the ages--and all the red boa feathers--right off that soulful man and his incredible sideburns and his mammoth collar.

And so it is that the Dirt Devil saved my velvet Elvis. Now he's hanging once more, and clean to boot.

(For the rest of the day, I worked at the officehouse with my furry beastie, who's been taking the heat pretty hard these past few days. Last year when my excellent friends were out of town, he and I tried going to the officehouse, but he was too agitated, and so we went home again. This year, for some reason, he was able to calm himself down more swiftly; within about fifteen minutes, he was as sound asleep as he's been in days.

When we returned home in the evening, he crashed out again. I was in the middle of reading when I heard a quiet yelp behind me. Turning, I realized that he was dreaming. That sound I heard was the obscure barking of sleeping dogs.)

Here's how it happens.

I understand now how it is that I've moved the same semi-unpacked stuff three different times. None of it is stuff I need, but none of what remains lacks in sentimental value. And so I don't unpack it first, because I don't need it in my daily life. And when I reach it at the end of unpacking, I'm too done with moving to sort it for real. And so it stays in a box, in a closet, until the next move, when I open the box, throw a few more things out, put some more things in, and take it to the next place.

Yes: this is my way of telling you that I've now unpacked all of the boxes I'm going to unpack, and I've consolidated and closeted the others. Now the decorating begins: photographs here, the whiteboard (on a wall at last!) there, my sunny Calder print over there. Tomorrow, perhaps my Norval Morrisseau poster. But the study now looks like a place where a writer might work; the bedroom is pretty much ready to be a place where a writer sleeps; the living room looks like the place where many film versions of Dracula could, at any moment, be rewatched in conjunction with an essay's getting done; the kitchen looks like a place where someone might eat if it weren't a hunger-devouring 97˚ outside. And if a restless dog weren't waiting for her at his house. To which she is now departing.

The haze has been so heavy today that it's fogged out the world's colors, whitened them all.

Dusked mirrorball.

One of the new apartment's tricks is that, as the sun starts to set, the mirrorball--hanging, as it does, in the middle of the living room window--sows diamonds of light on the floor and every wall. We noticed this effect in the old house, as the day wore on and the light moved around the dining room, where the mirrorball had landed when it came out of the living room. Now it is a tiny nightly glory.

A lightning bug outside my window glints frantically. Another blinks its way up the glass.

Near the bottom of the second box labeled Files and Papers, I found my father's blueprints for the adult-sized Sit 'N Spin he built in 2001. I put them in the file called "Lovely Notes." Not everyone's valentine arrives in words.

The cows moo their chorus, and I am down to my last four boxes--one of which I cannot unpack, seeing as how it's at least half-full of printed-out e-mails and archived hand-written notes from a long-ago somebody. These are papers with which I do not want to part, a "Lovely Notes" file all unto themselves.

Wherein I make many discoveries, am duly enthralled.

Before I kick things off tonight, I have to give a shout-out to my blogfriend Modfab for naming the Cabinet one of five blogs that make him think. It is, of course, my life's work to make people think, and so I am probably more pleased about this surprise than he had any idea I might be. Thanks, guy!

Now: it was an action-packed day here in mid-Ohio. At about 10, the harnessed dog--who by this point has pretty much given up on the fight against said harness--and I headed out for our morning walk. At the end of my excellent friends' street is a mansion known as the Bishop's Palace, which has a sweeping lawn bordered by a footpath open to the public. If the dog and I follow that path, we eventually end up on one of the village's streets and can make our way back home in a long loop. Today, though, as we were about to turn the last bend toward the street, I noticed a footpath heading off into the woods to our right. Because the path started with stone steps and was dramatically clear, I asked the dog if he wanted to take a different route. He assented, and off we flew into the woods. Eventually, we reached a sign that confirmed what I'd thought about the path we were hiking: it's a relatively new footpath cut by the college's environmental center, and it leads (kind of) to the college observatory. We coursed on through the woods until we reached a place where the path broke out to an asphalt drive (which also goes up to the observatory), and lo and behold, there in the field before us were the cows that I can hear from my new apartment.

Upon seeing the cows, the dog was 75 pounds of attention and strain. I'm not sure whether he's seen or interacted with cows before; he certainly acted as though this were his first encounter--and as though he firmly believed that these were very large, potentially very hostile dogs against which he might want to launch a campaign of aggression.

If you've ever walked near pastures of cows, you may have experienced the funny phenomenon of their turning to regard you and then ambling toward you, en masse, to regard you more closely. As soon as these cows saw me with my over-alert, edgily eager dog, they were on the move. The young cows were especially curious about the dog. I said hello to them a number of times, and we proceeded up the hill, on the asphalt road, I ruing the fact that once again I was having an excellent cow encounter without my camera.

On the other hand, how I would have managed a camera and a straining and jumping dog, I'm not quite sure. In a kind of mixed blessing, the dog tired himself out the more we went up the hill, in the full sun; by the time we neared the observatory (where I had hoped to find some path on which we could trespass our way back to campus without going back to the wooded footpath), we were both pretty winded, and I hadn't realized we'd need water for this walk. (Have I mentioned that this dog will drink from a water bottle? Have I mentioned, for that matter, how lovely and well-behaved a walker he is--when he's not confronting a pasture full of cows?)

And so we headed back down the road, toward the cows once more. There must be sixty cows pasturing on that land, and their basso chorus and the green of the near pasture against the lay of the hills in the distance combined to remind me of hiking public footpaths in England--and then to remind me of how, on my first trip to England, I loved the fact that Devon looks so much like Knox County, Ohio.

Within a few hours, I had left the panting dog behind in his house with huge bowls of fresh water, done a bit of unpacking and filing in the new apartment, and then made my way past fields of towering, green-spearing corn to Columbus for my first haircut in ages--since, in fact, the day I met Granville Jim. I make the drive to Columbus for haircuts because the woman who cuts my hair is fantastic. (For instance, she currently has one of her relatives scouting London salons for me so that I will experience no slackening of style upon arriving in the UK. "He's a total connoisseur," she says.) While she brought me back from the edge of the overgrowth abyss with which I've been flirting for weeks, we talked about where I might want to settle down for the long term. "You strike me as such a city girl," she said, "that the thought of you being up there [meaning my county] always seems strange." But I've never really lived in a city, I pointed out to her. Not a real one. And while I miss being able to walk to good cinemas, and while I love the subway and cheap take-out food (not even to mention cheap delivery food), I also can't quite imagine not being able to, say, discover a pasture of cows during my morning walk.

The day kept me ricocheting between the poles of rural love and (sub)urban desire. At its high-point of incoherence, I found myself at a frame shop, forking over an unexpectedly large quantity of money to have my broadside of Wendell Berry's "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" (which, I know, I may seem to link you to all the time) finally readied for hanging. And then I found myself in the "town centre" mall that has helped suck commercial activity out of downtown Columbus and relocate it to the suburbs. There, I somehow resisted the siren song of Anthropologie's glassware and dishes--reminding myself that even $16 spent on new coffee mugs is a silly purchase right now, given that I'm about to leave the country for a year.

But then.

Then, there was the Container Store, a place I've never entered. At Ye Olde Towne Centre, the Container Store is off to one side, not on my usual beaten track. But tonight, I decided that I would check to see whether said Container Store sold over-the-door ironing board holders.

And do they ever.

When I showed up at the cash register, glassy-eyed and clutching my five items (the ironing board holder, three steel strips that hang on the wall to become bulletin boards, a tube of Krazy Glue for my Cuba Cheese-Cutter, which has lost its feet again), I told the cashier that I'd never been in a Container Store before but that I think it's an amazing place. "You're getting out of here in record time," he replied. "Would you like to take some literature with you?" "What, like Container Store philosophy?" I asked him. He explained that he had a number of things that look like catalogs but really aren't, and he sent me home with all of them.

I think that they will be my bedtime reading. I think that tonight I will dream of cabinets with innumerable drawers, full of unexpected paths and tiny cows facing off against tinier dogs, and tables of students eating oversized meals, and tiny spotted fawns dead at the side of the sunset-lit highway.

Or perhaps I will dream of this strange building in Bangs. Having glimpsed it from the state highway for years, I finally detoured to see it on my way home tonight and think I may have to present it at greater length later. At heart, I am no trespasser, and I have too much respect for principles of structural soundness (or lack thereof) to mess around with an abandoned building--even one that, tantalizingly, still has curtains hanging in some of its windows. But I do have far better lenses for scrutinizing this kind of structure than the one I was carrying tonight, and now I have plans.

Apparently the fireworks continue.

All week I've heard fireworks, even though the holiday was at midweek. On Tuesday and again on Wednesday, they rattled off for an hour. Yesterday and this afternoon, they appeared in my poet colleague's stories of (and new poem about) trying to get to a good vantage point down near the railroad south of the next town over, along with a throng of other watchers. Tonight, they sound off again and again, growing fewer and farther between, but nearer, louder, somehow more desperate.

I keep settling in.

When I moved to Ithaca, my parents came along with me, driving the Ryder truck containing all my stuff. They stayed for a few days to help me move in, and so they were the ones making trips to the local hardware store and to KMart, picking up all the little things one suddenly discovers one doesn't have when one sets up house in a new place. At the end of the trip, they gave me their sheaf of receipts so that I would know how much it costs to make oneself at home. This afternoon, I started passing the lesson on to my students, just before heading to various stores for things this apartment requires that my house did not: magnetic hooks (so elusive!) for potholders, because the drawers are in weird places; hanging shoe bags because the closets are different; hooks for bathrobes because I'm sick of throwing them on the floor. Hanging file folders. Kitchen garbage bags.

And zinnias, my first of the season. How many can I get for $10? I asked the man on the path. They're $3 a bunch, he replied. I took the three, and my dollar, and cherished them all home, all to the new home, to the kitchen space I feared would be too small, and they are over there and bright and I am over here and bright too.

My favorites are blooming.

The new apartment has a picture window in every room. In the living room, I sit in a corner and type, and a massive thump stops my fingers, makes my heart stutter. My eyes go left just in time to catch a dark shape falling; when I stand and peer, I find a stunned female cardinal huddled and trembling under the window. She has black eyes. They glitter hard. I start to fear that she's broken a wing, or a rib, or her spine. But she gets to her feet, stumbles, flies off awkwardly, finds her grace again as she angles into the woods.

Cohabitants.

I continue to work on making the apartment livable; though I had planned to tackle the study last, I plunged into it this afternoon, knowing that it's going to take multiple days (given that at least two of my boxes are labeled "Piles of Paper"; packing each one literally involved putting a small moving box up on end and stacking paper inside until it was full, and now these papers are going to have to get sorted into files). And I continue to be thankful that I don't have to be here around the clock while this work is ongoing.

The main reason my writing here continues to be sparse is that I'm caring for this furry beastie (who, in this picture, is watching out for his excellent parents to return--about ten minutes after their departure)

and his household is not Internetted.

This evening, he and I had our sixth stand-off in two days--that's one for each of his thrice-daily outings--over whether or not he would allow himself to be hooked into the harness he wears when he walks. So far, the score stands at 6-0, in favor of Dr. S, but he will protest tomorrow morning anyway. I know this dog. Today I have figured out that putting the leash in plain view and leaving the front door open (so that he can see how lovely it is outdoors and can thus have even more incentive to let himself be readied for strolling) speed things up. What's getting me out on top each time, though, is the fact that I have more patience than he does. Eventually he just lies down and gives in, which occasions its own sadness; a large dog's surrender rends the heart.

After I won the sixth standoff, we headed out into the late evening, our destination Dr. S's new house. My old house, formerly known as Dr. S's house, was a landmark on his walks. My excellent friends and I have been working since Sunday to retrain him, and so it is that he can lead us right to the door of the apartment. On Monday, we even brought one of his old beds here so that he could hang about with me while I work. But if this evening is any indication, that plan might be futile.

Because the apartment is about half-unpacked, there are still boxes and miscellaneous objects cluttering pathways and floorspaces. Add those obstacles to the considerable challenge of figuring out a whole world of new smells, and you end up with a dog who won't stop moving--who sniffs every crevice, every corner, every open box, every piece of furniture, every dot of styrofoam on the floor. I don't know what he's seeking, but I'm going to guess it has something to do with my flaming-sworded friend's dogs, who lived here with her during the summer writing course.

On the other hand, perhaps the dog just needs to be eased into this invitation a little more gradually. After all, he hasn't spent much time in Gambier homes not his own; for the most part, his daily round takes him from his home to the other officehouse to his home again.

Tonight's visit turned out to be a short one, and the dog seemed mighty relieved to be back on the road, heading homeward. He also seemed mighty perplexed at my prompt re-departure, but I'm nearly certain that when I rejoin him at his house, I'll find him striking a pose not unlike this one.

A short narrative involving two of my favorite neighborhood denizens.

Yesterday on my way home from the officehouse, I was finally able to stop and photograph the dragon, who joined these hydrangeas last week but for whom I could not pause.

While I sprawled on the dragon's lawn, one of the other denizens of his house wandered out to the porch to see what I was up to.

She watched me from the top of the porch for a few seconds before coming down the steps, looking behind the dragon all the while--presumably trying to see whatever it was that I was seeing.

But though she looked, she couldn't figure it out. She mewed a bit, perhaps to distract me from my photography long enough to scratch her head (which I try not to do because of allergies, to my sorrow).

Eventually, she started looking beyond the porch steps.

When the search yielded nothing but more of my camera's clicking and snapping, she moved on to the lawn and I gathered my things and headed home.

In a completely unrelated development, when I walked into the bookstore this afternoon after lunch, a former student--one of last Saturday's intrepid furniture-haulers--walked up to me holding a dried cornstalk. One of his pantlegs was rolled up to the knee. "I have to show this to someone," he said, extending the stalk toward me. "Would you like me to take its picture?" I said. "Yes," he replied. And so I did.

Neither of us knew what it was. I wonder how long he carried it around.

In my dream this morning, in second sleep, I lay down for a nap after a full night's sleep and slept for nine hours. I have gotten so tired in the past week that it's the second time I've dreamt about sleeping, sleeping a second time in my sleep.

Small insects find their ways into the apartment through tiny holes. Fireworks erupt miles away. A lonely dog waits for me in another house, and so I will leave this half-finished home once again and tend to his worry.

Not yet.

But soon.

My fast glass arrived today. I got it cheap because I got a refurbished one. Ecstatic, I played with my village through it.

In another place.

Just a little longer, I promise, and then I'm back on and offering you pictures and words. This evening, Project Exodus officially became Project Excavation, as I discover the inventive and amazing ways my crack team of excellent friends and students liberated me from the house down the road. Tonight, I sit at my trusty desktop computer, back on my trusty high-speed internet, hooked back to (though not currently using) my super router.

Unpleasantnesses happened today. But then: hours of phone conversation with my excellent parents. And then: key lime pie, a spontaneous gift from a student in the middle of last night. And then: dinner with my excellent friends and an after-dinner walk with their furry beastie. And then: mugs back in place, and a first cup of chamomile in the place that is now my Gambier home.

So: tomorrow, more unpacking. And then it will be time to rock out.

Overwhelmingly, this weekend has left me feeling that I should have made this move (or similar) at least a year ago.

Radio silence redux.

[I really meant it...]

Radio silence.

When I tried to write in the middle of the night, I couldn't contact Le Bloggeur. And I kept falling asleep over the computer anyway. And then, this morning, I diagnosed the problem: when Janice at Embarq promised to transfer the phone service to the new apartment on Friday, she meant on Friday, as in just after Friday began--in fact before it could even dawn. The house is closing itself down, thing by thing by thing.

Subside, subside.

Coming up the stairs, I thought, I am going to need to run the window fan for a long time to get that bedroom cooled and quieted. And just then I could hear the fan, already running. I guess I did manage to leave it on when I left for my penultimate office hour of the summer. Sometimes I do good things for myself.

Once again, I'm so tired I could drop--so tired, in fact, that it was all I could do to stay awake at the keyboard downstairs.

My brother has me dreaming of faster glass.

(Speaking of sleeping and dreaming.)

Bearing on.

Some days, my brain just gives and gives and gives.