He is doing the Sunday night trip, taking the kids back to their mother. I am getting gas for his car, buying milk for tomorrow's coffee. Coming home, I am maneuvering around the garbage cans I have lined up at the curb, noticing the grape vines come down from the fence, reminded of the old mattress that need to be deaccessioned. I know my life has not really gotten this small, it's just that the battles don't feel so epic and uncertain. That's what I tell myself.

I am putting stamps on envelopes at the dining room table when I feel sweat sliding down the back of my leg. I don't realize that I can look up the weather until it's 5pm already, and now only 99 degrees. He says it's not uncommon for writers to stop when they are happy. Happy is a state I can express, it is satisfaction that is more dangerous, more torpid. That, and getting entangled in the petty thievery of dignity, the daily jockeying for worth that seems to be an entire current or currency here. People who tell you everything they think of you, or that they refuse to think of you at all, in the way they park their car, the placement of their yoga mat in a crowded classroom, the position of their feet in the line at the gourmet food counter. It could make me mean and intolerant, and I know I have to keep reaching back to moments over the winter, when I felt gratitude and joy in the simple, relieving act of caring.

A glass of port after dinner and a view, over the tiring rhododendron, of the lights coming out on the hills. In the morning I open the blinds in the bedroom and observe the neighbors pool and the growing moss on its bottom. On a day like today, that might be the most interesting thing I do and I might only realize that at 4.56, when the automated watering system for the yard turns on.

Nearly every day I write little pieces in my head. But I don't get around to actually writing them down. So I feel like I am writing, even though it is clear to you I am not.

I am trying to get used to everything. Like getting used to being loved is not a huge job unto itself. I recall, and not infrequently, the looks on my girlfriends' faces once. I told them what my answer was when he says he loves me. It's an answer that makes perfect sense to me: thank you. They each cringed at me, 1, 2, 3, and apparently I am inept, although thankfulness seems a complete and sincere response. On second thought, I don't think getting used to being loved is a wise idea. I'd rather be grateful.

The orange and lemon and grapefruit trees in the yard seem to be taking a break from producing. Now it is burgeoning grapes and olives and lavender and shrub roses that are no good to bring indoors. On my walk to the post office today I am passing thickset thistles, wild poppies, free range anise, and things that resemble windflowers but so uniform and fuchsia they look like plastic decorations on a bicycle basket.

At the grocery store the check out boy speaks to me in spanish, like of course I will understand him, this was his country first, anyway. And I do, but only because I took a couple of years of it in college, when I finally dropped the fantasies of travel and rarefied study, stopped with the italian and french and german and russian, and realized that I valued more the chance to speak and understand people living around me.

This is not what I meant to write today. But it will have to do.