She struggled only an instant. “Well, tomorrow, then. Perhaps you might wear your blue?”

I smiled again at her in the gloom. “Nay, Sue. This one suits me.”

June

There in the silence, Mother’s smile in her olden days crossed her face, and she held out her hand to me as we walked through the woods into town. I stood up in my strange between state and walked to meet her there across the hall, shyly stretching my own hand to touch hers.

But my fingers met cold glass, and with a start, I recognized this mother as myself, forlorn and sad, my eyes starting out from the gloomy hallway as I caught my image in the mirror.

July

I have moved my bedding, and a desk and chair, into the attic room that stretches the length of this house, establishing my residency there. The stair ascending to the room is fearfully dark and narrow, so that as one climbs, one has the sense of tunneling upward in an unknown direction. Yesterday I came up here to find Susannah waiting for me, and her head appeared at the top of the stairs, drooping over the banister like a bud. I had the strangest sensation I had seen her in this fashion before, but then later I recalled this is how I imagine a mother appears to her newborn child, as a distant flower peering down into the small cradle.

Oh! I am uneasy.

Susannah—but never mind. I write now, just to pass myself through this eyelet in the morning. I am the damp guard of the day.

July

Susannah breathes so softly when she sleeps, she would not trouble air. I have just stood over her for a little and watched. It calms me to have her so beside me, her face unshuttered, as it used to be when we were heedless and we talked.

The baby knocks a tight-closed fist in me.

August

Smooth white faces of birches stare back at me this afternoon, insolent and quiet. It is a damp, hot day emptied of color, the sky a drab hue, windless and lonesome. Susannah disappears each day now before dinner and is gone until sundown. I sit here at my window, like the lighthouse keeper, watching a small craft hurl itself into wetter and wetter weather.

And I? I stare at the face of my page and ask it to speak as it used to, but the swift singing in my head is hubbub now—I cannot write as I used. I have only the insistence of those I carry.

August

A miraculous perception that all occurs simultaneously and in an uninterrupted stream flashing below the habits of our house serves to disavow the call to mark off minutes, hours, even days. It is as if I have stepped through the fog and to the other side, at last.