Two nights ago I dremaed that Alan, my dead ex-husband, has taken up knitting. He had a gorgeous, multi-colored skein of yarn that I was admiring/envying.

"Where do you get your yarn?" I asked him. "When did you learn how to knit?"

He was working on something beautiful and complicated--much harder than anything I'm capable of doing at this stage.

"Oh, here and there," he said vaguely. "I read knitting blogs and get ideas."

The dream was brought on, no doubt, by my own adventures in knitting. I made a beautiful forest-green and gold scarf for C which matches his eyes. Unfortunately, I used needles that were too small for the thick sumptuous wool, and the thing has the consistency of chain mail. Oh well, he can use it as a bullet-proof vest at Junvenile Hall, where he works.

Last night I dreamed I was sculling in the sky--not quite a flying dream, I didn't get very far up. I was just running and floating, hovering right over earth without touching it. I was at some sort of workshop, and later it developed that I had run next to a monastary where people were meditating. I was using the energy of the meditators to fuel my extra-terrestrial leaping, and that was not kosher. Not bad exactly, but not the best possible use for that energy. It would have been better to concentrate and make it go up the center of my head and out the top.

It's appropriate that I dreamed about knitting with Alan, because that's what I'm trying to do, knit up our story, recapture the dropped stitches. Most people would just let it go, and perhaps that would be the best thing. I seem to have this compulsion to comb back over things again and again until I find a way to work in all the loose threads.

I decided that before I turn 50 in October of '08, I'm going to plant fifty trees. By hand. So I've started making phone calls and inquiries about how to go about doing that. I'd like to plant them on public lands, someplace where they are needed.

I called my friend Donald, a professional gardener, and he said he'd help me with that, also with putting in a vegetable garden. C and I go through so many greens every day that it makes sense to try and grow some. I wonder if I could grow lettuce in big pots, so the snails wouldn't get to them?

I revised the essay The Insufficiently Caffeinated Poetry Teacher vs. The Problem of Western Civilization and re-sent it to The Sun. It's so much stronger now than it was when I sent it to them before. if they don't take this version, then I'll enter it in a contest. Meanwhile, I've started another essay, about Las Vegas and Malawi, consumption, simplicity, excess, family love, and the material world, of which I am a somewhat imperfectly adapted part.