Second day of classes began a little sadly as I said good-bye to Stephen before leaving the house. He drove back to Geneva for college today.

The morning was clear and cool again. This term I'm taking two MFA classes, one of which begins at nine o'clock. It's the MFA practicum, which is difficult to explain to anyone who's not in the MFA program, and difficult (sometimes) to justify to myself. We started off in Ballantine and then made our way to the Hilltop Garden, which is IU's community garden up past 10th St.

We spent all of today's class time planting our four plots in the garden. It's a fairly large, enclosed garden, right on the hilltop, as the name proclaims. In other beds lettuce, arugula, kale, chard, sunflowers, basil, tomatoes, and peppers were growing. A lot of the garden space was blank, though, baking under the morning sun. I discovered watermelons hiding under dense leaves and still vaguely blue with dew. Also squash and zucchini. We planted radishes, turnips, carrots, beets, cilantro, and fall greens (kale and the like). Why a literature class bothers to work in a garden is an abstruse question to answer. To me it makes sense from a practical perspective: if you're going to try to write nature poetry, you'd better be out in nature. Also some people in our class have never gardened before, which is a weird idea to me (about as weird as the idea that some people have never seen a live cow up close before).

Anyway, scraping furrows in the pale brown dirt under the morning sun, with the unexpected shadow of thunderheads on the western horizon, was a good way to start the day. After class I ran errands: post office, bank, Boxcar Books for the textbooks for this class, and streambank, where I ate lunch and read Britain After Rome and threw crumbs to the fish.

At half two I biked to Cedar Hall for workshop. Oddly enough, I taught my first W131 section in Cedar last fall, so the trek from the centre of campus to Cedar doesn't feel too foreign. We're in a nice room, too, much better than the windowless cinderblock pressure cooker at the top of the library--this one has a whole wall of windows and no disconcerting echoes.

At home again after class, Alex had left, and Laura, Scott, and I lounged for a bit. I tidied up my calendar and books for the semester ahead; Scott did legal work; Laura read Anathem. For dinner Scott grilled salmon, and Laura steamed quinoa and broccoli (not in the same pot). We sat outside. The evening was perfect. As Laura said, the light looked like something out of a film, catching everything just so. Blanche sat on the deck railing to keep us company, and after we ate, Scott and I wandered around the garden, admiring the roses.

For dessert we ate Laura's ice cream and a delicious chocolate-chip-oatmeal skillet cookie that she baked in the oven. We watched Groundhog Day, which sparked a discussion afterward about grace, realizing that the world doesn't depend on you. Scott thinks that the main character's moment of redemption arrives when he understands at last that nothing he does (nothing good or bad) will change his existence, or even save the lives of people around him, and he becomes content with that, happy just to relive the day looking out for other people whether that eases his own situation or not. Interesting.