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.

The world holds whispers in it. I cannot but hear others’ voices underlying my daily sounds: women in the birdcalls, a child beneath the twitch of branches at my windowpane. I am their captive listener. In the market, I look into the faces of boys and see below the lineaments of their adult faces. I see also the twelve-year child in the cheeks of old men, and the prance and twinkle captive in the feet of the tired women who drag themselves in a weary line from home to the public well. I understand now what I had early learned: There resides a kind of sight in books; the men and women there are more real than the four walls in which a reader sits. I had long ago heard the words of those I read in the tones of my mind’s voice, but this new crossing over, this simultaneous life and underlife, is unlike all I have ever imagined.

September

I am strangely apprehensive and cannot concentrate on tasks. There is a wind in the trees, like to keening. I will walk out.

September

There was a breeze begun to whistle slightly, or it was my mother already reached the old blacksmith shop and singing to herself as she did. I turned in the direction of the music and fixed my attention on the way through the trees, picking over the thick roots and marking the bright tops of mushrooms looming above the moss. My skirts rustled in the needles behind me, almost, I felt, as if I walked over a wood floor strewn with the rushes cast off at threshing. I closed my eyes, instinctively yearning away from what now I see I must have known awaited me.