When the sun is higher in the sky, the yard I am working in will smell like old dog shit. I know this well before the eventuality and I am ready for it. I am doing volunteer work at a house that had been abandoned, a catastrophe of faulty decision-making. The neighbors, or at least the neighborhood dogs, have added to the insult.

When I left my husband this morning, he was sitting up in bed with a large cup of coffee, and a fleet of freckles on his arms. He is thinking about poetry. After my day of uncovering ossified logs of excreta, hauling broken concrete and pulling up weeds he will have become even more Irish. He will have had enough to drink to make him talk about poetry, exclaim his love for me abundantly, and sing without care to old songs on the radio.

When I go to work tomorrow, I will have no way to talk about this. With my dog shit and soggy husband I have drawn a circle around what I would call a lovely weekend. I have no way to translate that weekend, except here.