Mrs. Stein is home. AJ went with me to the vet to pick her up. The brought her out in her carrier, growling and hissing, which alarmed AJ. Usually AJ likes her to be on the seat next to him in the car. This time he asked if I could keep her in the front seat instead. �I don�t like that noise she�s making. It�s scary.� It was took, a possessed spirit kind of sound, gutteral and raw. But fortunately, she ceased making it the second we walked out the door of the vet�s office.

We released her as soon as we got home. She teetered out of her carrier like she was drunk, her legs veering off in alternate directions. Once she turned around too fast and whacked her head hard on the banister. But within a few minutes, she was mostly recovered, purring and happy and hungry. It�s nice to have her back.

AJ and I were missing her at his naptime today. Mrs. Stein always joins us for story-reading, hopping up on the bed and curling up in a small grey circle while we read about astronauts or great glass elevators or hurricanes or Peruvian bears with duffel coats. This evening she had a little trouble getting up on the bed, but she made it. She stayed a little further from AJ�s wiggling toes than she usually does (normally she likes to sit right on top of AJ), but she was there, accompanying my reading of a tale of space travel with an endless purr.

It was a quiet day in the harriet household, too drizzly to work in the garden or run. I had the house to myself this morning while AJ went to camp and my husband worked at the library. I had planned to go to the library myself, but being alone in the house is such a rarity, that I couldn�t bear to leave. I worked and played fiddle tunes and worked some more. Then I picked up AJ and dropped him off at Ben Franklin Boy�s house for lunch and returned home to more editing and fielding of telephone calls. A peaceful day, more or less. My fingers are cramped from penciling notes. My jaw aches from the long disuse of my neck for holding up instruments. But it was a productive day.

I was distracted just now by a mother deer and two tiny fawns wandering through our side yard. The mother headed down the path into the woods. The first fawn followed; the second stopped to scratch its nose delicately with its hind hoof before skittering on toward the others and disappearing into the trees among the fireflies. No matter how often we see them � and we see them almost daily � no matter how many of my flowers they eat or trample, I never get tired of seeing the deer grazing in the yard. It seems so improbable that they would be here, squeezed between houses, vanishing during the day in tiny forested swaths of land, harrassed by humans and coyotes and hemmed in by roads and the river. They are magnificent creatures.

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