Now Playing: Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 6, "Pathetique."

Today has actually been decent for the most part. After breakfast I went for a run. There's one house that I love to run past down in one of the neighborhoods: it's covered with weather-darkened grey shingles, and outside it grow a big redbud tree, covered thickly with those tiny, vibrant purple flowers, and just below that a big dogwood tree, also covered with flowers, but its flowers a pale green, as though each petal were a tiny china saucer. Love the contrast of the white dogwood against the vivid redbud against the dark shingles.

I did my quiet time outside this morning. The morning was extremely windy from the southwest, so I bundled up in a blanket and propped my Bible open with my phone while I read. I spent the morning grappling with the paper for L746. For some reason writing about Heaney is extremely difficult. A good deal of staring blankly at the screen and at the piles of notes I'd arranged around my desk occupied the morning. I listened to Vivaldi's Four Seasons and to Bach and Mozart flute concerti. At about one I got completely fed up with the paper and took a break to eat lunch.

After lunch I worked for another hour or so, and then I wheeled my bike out of the garage, where it's been in dormancy all winter. Thankfully there didn't seem to be anything wrong with it aside from the tyres being flat. I biked to Kroger, bought a pint of cherry tomatoes, a red onion, and a container of part-skim ricotta, and biked home. The afternoon was warm: one of these variable spring days, where the sky is a pasty Easter-egg blue color, and the wind comes and goes in gusts through the new leaves, restless. Again I sat outside on the back patio, with my arms and legs bare to the sun, and read Middlemarch for class tomorrow. Starlings, robins, and a thrasher working their way through the detritus on the hillside made noises like plastic bags rustling in the wind.

At about half five I started to make tea. Laura came home. She and I worked in the kitchen together. On my countertop I sliced up the red onion (skin dark purple and silky) and cherry tomatoes, sauteed chicken, boiled pasta. On her countertop she mixed and kneaded dough for cinnamon rolls. Laura, Lindsay, and I ate tea together, discussing wedding invitations: our household seems to have received a sudden influx of them.

After washing the dishes, I biked downtown to meet Mary and Carmen for dessert. We ended up walking up the square to Tallent, a ritzy local restaurant where Carmen worked as a waitress last summer. I felt definitely underdressed--surrounded by people in suits and dresses, in an atmosphere of dim lights and sleek earth tones on the walls, with waitstaff dressed all in black gliding about.

The three of us had a delightful time, though. We ordered carrot cake with cardamom-flavored ice cream, a rhubarb ganache with rosewater-and-pepper flavored ice cream, and a chocolate tart with mint whipped cream and an espresso swirl. So, so delicious. The best part was watching Mary's faces while she ate: when she took the first bite of the ganache, she shut her eyes and fanned herself with her hand, her mouth spreading into a loopy smile. "If this had been the Victorian era, that would've been a swoon!" Carmen laughed.

We sat around and talked for quite awhile, and then we went for a walk, down Walnut, up Fourth Street (where the smells of the Indian restaurants--curry, cinnamon, garlic, cloves--embraced us), and onto campus. Through Dunnes Woods, where rabbits hopped across the path in the silent gloaming under the trees. Campus is incredibly peaceful at night: an expansive, luxuriant silence, the silence of aisles of trees, of empty buildings, elegant, restful. Down past the IMU, and so up Kirkwood, past all the restaurants and bars, people sitting outside at cafe tables, talking, laughing, TVs flashing and stereos playing through open doors and windows, the smells of cigarette smoke, barbecue smoke, grease. And so up past the library and back toward the square. We said good-bye where I had parked my bike.

I walked part of the way home, talking to Scott on the phone until my battery gave out. Biked the rest of the way. At home Laura was helping Lisa write her resume. It's gotten chilly outside, so I closed my window, but I can still hear the sigh of the woods through Lindsay's window. It had started to sprinkle a bit as I wheeled my bike into the garage.