It's been a perfect day: a walk along the Bay, dinner at a delightful neighborhood restaurant, the spring song of birds, and the fragrance of early spring flowers.

I wrote for a couple of hours, but the words aren't flowing like they did last morning. Looking for a gardening book to nail down a quote, I stumbled upon Dylan Thomas's Under Milkwood instead, which I haven't reread for a while. So I started in medias res:

"FIRST VOICE

Mary Ann Sailors dreams of

"MARY ANN SAILORS

the Garden of Eden.

"FIRST VOICE

She comes in her smock-frock and clogs

"MARY ANN SAILORS

away from the cool scrubbed cobbled kitchen with the Sunday-school pictures on the whitewashed wall and the farmers' almanac hung above the settle and the sides of bacon on the ceiling hooks, and goes down the cockleshelled paths of that applepie kitchen garden, ducking under the gippo's clothespegs, catching her apron on the blackcurrant bushes, past beanrows and onion-bed and tomatoes ripening on the wall towards the old man playing the harmonium in the orchard, and sits down on the grass at his side and shells the green peas that grow up through the lap of her frock that brushes the dew."

The book brought back happy memories from my undergraduate days, and I decided to do what I often did back then: take a walk to hear the waves splash on the shore. With luck, I'll also hear an owl hoot softly.

I can always do more writing when I get back.