It is a real nice night, as my father's mother would say on some porch with some tumbler in her arthritic fingers. I know this not because a window is open--it's too cold for that--but because I can just tell, the way that the night is smudging itself against my dirty windowpanes, and reflecting against its darkness all the several lamps in my livingroom. I've cleaned up after weeks of filthiness (mostly because this fucking erotic fiction project has sapped the life out of me; you'd think it was easy and you'd be thinking wrong!) and everything looks so much bigger and ampler and more glowing. I put some bookcases in the places where they belonged. And the walls they are as silver and the floors they are as pale gold. Where have I read that? Some book or genre of stories where they polished the floors to look like pale gold; probably some book full of ascetic heroines.

So I'm working, and in trouble vis a vis my deadline, and dead tired, and held up by the scruff of my neck with blackberry tea, but yes the night is beautiful and yes I have a little rabbit-head hanging from a knob on my dresser and hanging from the rabbit-head is a little silk sack of Cadbury mini-eggs, the most delicious candy in the entire world. Had I been little Edmund the White Witch would have offered them to me. This little sack means that Easter, at home with my maman & my daddy, was good & fruitful, and the weather was good, although I never left the house because I was up to my neck in quiches and berry tarts with lime-flavored custard in them. It is always very nice to see my family. Grandmaman (Dot, the maternal one) appeared as she does, wearing a rose-pink silk suit, carrying little French eggs filled with chocolate. She made polite conversation with one of my father's colleagues from the University & the colleague's mother, who was too gentle to understand that Dottie is kind of wicked. Eowyn's family did not deign to cross our threshold, but ate lamb & twice-baked potatoes in their house on a hill with other members of Daddy's family. I held secret hands on the back-stairs with that family friend I'm kind of in love with, and held my cheek quietly against his lovely shaved cheek, and didn't tell him my troubles but talked to him quietly about the Iliad, and gave him a little paper bag of croissants to carry home with him when he left. Perhaps it would be best if I moved back home and married him, but who knows if we would actually like each other if we saw each other more than three times a year.

The troublesome important thing now is to plan a baby shower for the IR, which really should be done somewhere pretty crazy where all her slutty artistic friends could get good and drunk, or maybe at some brunch place where they can pretend to be sophisticated. I'm actually leaning towards renting a little beach-house for a weekend and making everyone go there in May and go fishing and sit around rubbing the IR's tummy, which is starting to be huge. There's one place I found with a vernal pond & flowering trees everywhere, and possibly some otters. The IR does not know the sex of her baby. She is sure that it will be a girl, though, and insists that if it is a boy she will call him Vertumnus because some guy she met on the street suggested it. A girl of course will be Isadora, and her middle name will possibly be Milk.