Breezy enough to sweep through the open Sylvia door and keep her innards to 80F degrees or so, and so bearable and actually quite pleasant to work in as the air passes coolly over the skin.

The occasional yellowjacket drifts in then out again. Never had a yellowjacket on the place until I put up the yellowjacket traps last week. The label said it worked for paper wasps too, the kind that sting the bejesus out of my hands and feet every summer as they nest everywhere, everywhere around and about the house. Instead, the trap pheromone simply attracted every big fat bumblewasp yellowjacket in a five-imile radius to a property they'd never noticed before. The traps are half-full of these hapless critters, while the spindlier wispwasps with the mighty stings go peacefully about their papernest building in the eaves and yardjunk unperturbed.

So. A flawed plan.

Studying all day today. Not really writing. Except for a burst of poetry a month back I haven't really had beautymind in a long time. I do not fear. I know it will return one day.

Meanwhile biographies are closely read and notes scribbled, passages transcribed. Nightdreams ruminated on.

Sitting in Sylvia sipping soft coffee, eating soft oats mapled and raisined. Door open a crack - yellowjackets drift in and out ominously, deep humbuzzes loud in the otherwise silence. Earlier I heard a rustle and glanced through the crack to see a large robin eying me from the weeds just outside, cocking his head around. We gazed at one another for a while and then he hopped off and I meandered back to my book.

I dreamed prodigiously all night long and remembered them, mostly. In the last but one (the one that got away) I lived in a women's shelter. They gave me a very nice room all to myself. I decked it out with all my belongings. I went out each day and engaged in the shelter's activities, sat down to meals with the other women. There was a matron called Grace who was firm but generally kind. One night I decided to sleep in a first-floor cell instead of my own room and when I went upstairs the next morning I found myself locked out, some young black man named Quentin living there. But my things! Where had they gone? I was in a panic, ran about the building demanding to know why I'd been evicted and where they'd taken my things. I was assured my stuff had been boxed up and taken to "The Depot" - a storage place in the town. But when I spoke to Quentin through the opened door I could see much of my stuff remained there. He assured me he would'nt take any of it. Later I forced my way through the door to see that my record collection was missing, decades worth of irreplaceable vinyl albums. I was in a rage. Downstairs, Grace informed me firmly but not-so-kindly that if I wanted them back so badly I could buy them at her second-hand shop "Grace's." Fury. The women around me seemed indifferent. Only the caretaker, a black man (played in the dream by the actor who played Lester Freamon in "The Wire") was sympathetic. He went out with me to try and find an agency that would assist me. In the courtyard of some county offices, though, he collapsed, and I covered him with my coat and put a newspaper under his head and continued alone. When I came out again he was standing up. "Do you have narcolepsy?" I asked. "No, that just happens sometimes," he said. I went on alone, trying not to need a shopping cart (although at one point I pulled one along, humiliated to look like a bag lady). I gathered up some bright yellowgold blankets and sleeping bags from the shelter, things that had been my own originally, and walked out with them. They were awkward to lug around town but I knew I'd need them against the cold of night. I didn't know where I'd be sleeping. At one point I was near the sea, and I stood and watched the waves crashing in for a time. It was a clean upscale coastal town, not unlike La Jolla, the first city I ever ran away to in "real" life, back when I was 14. (There I bought a foil "space blanket" from a sporting goods store for $12 and planned to sleep on the beach before I chickened out and took the bus back home to L.A.) Late in the day, in the dream, as I stood at an intersection hopeless and bedraggled and exiled, I looked up and saw a block or two away the great glass edifice of a public library, darkly packed with so many books they were visible pressed against the window-walls. And my heart opened with gladness and I knew that I was saved.