Early Morning Bus. Music. Books. Murmuration.

There is something clarifying about delivering daughter to Greyhound bus station at 4:30 in the morning--one is whisked nonstop downtown like a VIP on empty roads with blinking yellow lights to a glass box packed with humanity. A polite man in a white cowboy hat and bear-claw earrings offered me his seat, next to a woman hunched protectively over her boombox. We installed India beside an Amish boy and his black-bonneted mother at Gate Number Three, a door in a short row of four which all open onto the same small patch of sidewalk where the buses are nosed in.

Last night Tom and I were at Ann Patchett's new bookstore, Parnassus, to hear Barry Sulkin's guitar duo, Heavy Mellow. Definitely a Bells Bend invasion of Green Hills! We caught up on all the news--orchards, who (JimTheArtist and Heather) has moved into the neighborhood (Sandra's apartment and Ayla's little studio), who is buying property, easements for road and water access, and how many birders have visited the cranes in Hiawassee (two thousand). Tom ordered up several copies of the new Iliad translation to share with Mike and Jimmy. Though our shared peregrinations around the globe hardly constitute an odyssey. (And everyone's Penelope was along on the trip--none of us much into staying home to spin.)

India and Rachel threw a LastNightHome cocktail party--hot spiced rum cider (I think) and a viewing of the murmuration, our swirling flocks of blackbirds who circle, settle, flare back into the sky and eventually fall like tiny grenades into the bamboo to roost at dusk.

Like the birds, I plan (or maybe they don't actually plan--maybe they just do) to circle back, to the holidays in my case, and record a bit of the Farm doings over the last few weeks. But now--literally, alas--off for the root canal. Tooth Number Five.