A little weirdness. A little anxiety. Don't know why. Free-floating.

The neighbor kids climbed into a U-Haul truck with their Mum & Step-pop yesterday and drove away forever. I had laden them with stuffed animals and glossy picture books and double-A batteries to keep their other toys going, a big plastic tub of scissors and paper and paints and brushes and glue in case the neighbor lady where they moved didn't have these things for them to borrow. A porcelain statuette of white doves on a branch for the eldest girl, grown remote from me in adolescence who was a nervous grinning whirl of energy when we met four years ago.

I cried a little, and then in the early evening in the front yard as I untangled the skeins of garden hoses I'd finally pulled out from winter storage I met the new neighbors - Samuel, Akyra, Freya, aged 6ish, 4ish, and four months, respectively - as they took a constitutional with their proud parents. Not the same, these guys, though cute as buttons all of them, but I feel a little better knowing they're there. Spent my whole life expecting to channel the grandmothers who did so well by me when I was small - wanting to pass on some of that - not understanding the vast misunderstandings that would intervene to prevent this expression to my own grandchildren. So the kids around me give relief in a way, accept what I have to give. I feel a little less pointless.

As for the hoses, they survived winter intact, and now the sprinklers are squirting the white clover and yarrow. Later I'll grease up the lawnmower and see whether it will start.

In the new New Yorker
I read the story by Bolaño
and swooned. I read the three poems
and felt envy and remembered.

Earlier I wrote a directive to myself
to remember to write an essay
about my deforming thumbs.

My brother's radio is loud with stupid music
and my language evaporates like steam
in wisps I grasp vainly for
like a dream I must remember
but which cannot be recalled.

***

The redhaired children, little neighbor boy and girl,
confusing their dates, stayed the night here
Saturday, and tried to spend the days on either side
as well. I spurned them before and after,
weary and dreary as I am now always.
So only the late afternoon and evening -
they drew pictures of my cats and colored them
orange and purple and green; they
watched the supper assembling
and exulted later in their full plates.

When they slept it was together on my brother's bed,
like diminutive angels curled into themselves
and somehow glowing, and the morning was all toast
and oatmeal and further drawings, more ambitious
projects using colored paper and glue - "Deaven's House"
with three upper-story window flaps that opened and shut
and behind each flap a sibling facing out,
and concealed in a corner at bottom
the mother
and the new stepfather
facing each other.

They went home when I shoo'd them away midmorning
with smiles and hugs, and later in the day I slept three hours
and hadn't known how tired I was. They'll move away
next Saturday. Already their trampoline
has been dismantled and removed.

***

Last night I dreamed I saw my father's name
in a scrap of newsletter, as offering a class.
I traveled to North Carolina to the address shown.
I entered the home he shared with parents
and siblings' families. George Mills. Taught literacy
evenings to the underprivileged. He was quiet.
He wore glasses. He was respectfully distant
but not un-warm. Hurt, it seemed by my years
of absence. I didn't know, I didn't know my refrain
and my excuse. There was a pier and a ferry.
I embraced my father, held my lips near his, knew
it would be misconstrued, I just felt so loving
and grateful to have found this missing piece.

I'm always surprised by the fact that the more exhausted I am the less able I am to sleep. Dropping off is easy enough, but lately waking occurs not at my usual 7 but at 6 or 5 or sometimes 4 a.m., as today. It seems always to correlate with liver stress from heavy lifting, but what a drag. Still, it's nice to have some hours entirely alone - well, almost entirely. Cats and dogs welcome an early breakfast, and even the dimmest kitchen lamp will elicit the lovebirds' piercing It's-morning! bleats and shrieks.

The exhaustion sets in in the midst of a thorough reorganizing of the Friends-of-the-Library bookshop behind the donation and installation of nine large new shelving units. I can go no further alone. Today I put out the call for volunteers. It's risky - everyone seems to determine the difference between fiction and nonfiction via cover art - but it must be done. Or I just might fall over dead.

***

The hugs-dispensing chatty bright gorgeous neighbor kids, my beloveds since the day I first looked over this property four years ago and they clambered over the back fence to introduce themselves and welcome me, are moving away next week. I'm a little griefstricken about it. Strolled about the grocery store yesterday weeping a little (see exhaustion, above) to think of losing them. KierstuhnDeaven&Jewell ages 12, 9, and 6 will leave this remote little town next Saturday for a beautiful new home in a big city hundreds of miles away. And my life will be so much the poorer.

We have a tentative plans for a farewell sleep-over here on Friday night.

I'd better rest up ...