When I was a kid I had this book of seasons, or perhaps my father did (up on a high shelf, next to the forbidden book about conception and fetal development, with its mysterious, blue-violet images of membranes and organs). It was about development, too: the seasons, or even the months, their birth and flowering and death. Each month or season was personified, a woman in a green dress with poppies in her hair or in a brown dress with apples, but it was richer and more complicated than that, and the death of each month was suffused with the kind of grief you're not supposed to acknowledge, but that is as old, at least, as the hills.

Anyway, that's what this soggy, grayish August reminds me of: the slow, half-tragic death of a summer that was kind of stupid anyway as summers go. I guess July was good, which is why I didn't write: lots of parties, trips to the seaside and rides on ferris wheels, endless afternoons with the IR and OVW (who is a month old now and still red as a beet with tufts of orange hair on his enormous head, and also is quite a screamer), rowing on a lake with Stephen as he reads me the Rubaiyat or rolls his own cigarettes and I read him Zuleika Dobson or let my fingers trail in the dirty green water and try not to think about I'm simultaneously elated and panicked and violently angry every second I'm with him. It has been difficult lately to be very calm, but in a rowboat it is occasionally possible.

Mostly there have been too many people in my house lately: babies, untrustworthy lovers, people celebrating birthdays, my suddenly-intrepid parents, various old friends from various eras of my life expecting to be entertained when all I want to do is sleep, sleep, blessedly sleep, and maybe get some work done on all of my projects, the latest of which involves a study on the effectiveness of reverse-aversion-therapy on people whose food-related harassment provokes relapses in anorexics and other individuals with eating disorders. (So far, this study involves M&Ms and posterboard.)