I slept badly for most of the night, then fell asleep har...

I slept badly for most of the night, then fell asleep hard at around 4 and didn't wake until after 6. I do appreciate these unclocked weekend mornings. So many years and years of 5 a.m. alarms . . . it's been wearing. I'm naturally an early riser, but there's something exhausting about being constantly told what to do.

The house is quiet. Tom and Chuck are still a-bed. I hear a distant growl of traffic. I hear a crow.

Yesterday I tore out the cucumber, bean, and cherry tomato plants. I took down the groundhog fencing, pulled up stakes and trellises, emptied flowerpots, lugged everything into the shed for storage or to the leaf pile for composting. I cleaned and trimmed the garlic that had been curing in the shed. I chopped hot peppers for the freezer. I simmered a batch of sauce.

And I worked on a poem, the first I've attempted for many weeks.

The garden isn't bare. There's still kale and chard and lettuce. I left the okra and pepper plants. Marigolds and nasturtiums and zinnias and dahlias are blooming wildly.

I wish I could say that my poem draft is also blooming wildly. But I'm not sure what it's doing. At least it exists, and at least I am attending to it.

My plan today is to do some weeding and then start spreading bagged compost over the garden beds and boxes. And to read Woolf's The Waves and Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion. And to attend to that poem draft.

What I am is tired.