My fingers are stiff from a walk (I carried tired Bea the whole time) though it's so blue and sunshiny you forget how cold it is. I came home, put on the teapot, and watered plants. I found a nice gift waiting for me at the end of a brown peach tree cutting I'd whisked inside after pruning some weeks ago. It wasn't a blossom--those have already appeared--but a slender green leaf, tightly rolled and just beginning to unfurl. I remember my first year of college, when the Women's Chorale left Chicago and headed south on tour. The flowering trees were lovely but it was the leaves that filled me with joy--I remember wanting to eat them by the handful.

So maybe the leaf wasn't waiting for me at all--leaves and stones and sunsets don't, really--but maybe, without knowing in, in my weariness this afternoon, I was waiting for the leaf. And I found it.

I will cap this pleasure with a hot cup of tea and move from there to wine, and then my happiness may very well be complete.

Bea is listening to the soundtrack of "Cars" once again, for the fortieth time this week. You think I'm joking. All I want to say to you people is: I hear life is a highway. Though the option has not appealed to me since college, I'm beginning to want to drive it all night long. Yeah!

Last night I cut my own hair. My regular hairdresser is out of town for a while and I couldn't stand my shagginess anymore. So I stood in front of the mirror and snipped away. Things turned out pretty well, considering the piles of hair that began accumulating all over the house; I'd see myself in the mirror and realized I'd missed a bit. Martin tidied up the back since I had no way of knowing how it might look. The last time Martin cut my hair, right after Merry was born, he concluded my 'do by shaving a wedge into the back of my 'bob' which later morphed into such a short hair cut at the hairdressers ("Just trying to get it even, she said, as she brought out the buzzy clipper things) that a nice old lady at the grocery store called me "sir" until I turned around. Poor lady--she seemed awfully thrown and sorry for her mistake. At this point my distressed mother took me in hand and made me promise I'd never go so short again.

Don't worry, Mom, my hair is still right around my shoulders. My days of crazy driving--impulsive flattening of the accelerator--are gone, and no matter what my brainwashed mind is telling me, I still don't want to drive all night long. A little quiet drive in the hills, maybe, or better yet, a brisk walk around the block.

Bea just sauntered in with my mother's ridiculously bright-rimmed reading glasses. There's no telling where that girl is headed.

Oh, it's back again--Bea has learned the buttons on the stereo. Hey, if you're going my way, I wanna drive it all night long. I'm beginning to see, too, that there was a distance between you and I. . .