Long Days.

Looks like they picked up late rain out east of us, but nothing here. A third gray day. A nicer morning than we deserved. A semi-failure out in the writing shed mitigated by moderate evening success. These lazy days, work-ethic-wise, save me. Write in the morning half-assedly. Write again after lunch, even more half-assedly. Go back outside once more in the evening, full of self-loathing for your abiding half-assedness, and crank the six or ten or twenty paragraphs out of your sad self that you should have found the first time around, in the morning. Those evening paragraphs are enough to carry you through the rest of the night believing that you'll be better tomorrow. What people with real jobs or work ethics do, I don't know.

This week's grand happiness is a storm-felled gladiola, cut and in the vase on the dining room table. Coral-colored. Thirty inches tall. It's been in here three days and looks like it may last at least three more. The impatiens are blooming at magazine quality. Persistently green fruit on the tomato vines. The gray days have been cool, relatively. We're holding. The novel comes in fits and starts. Too easy to say so, but so does the weather.