Pieced squares from a dark corner—they have not yet been joined and this is merely twelve of eighteen pieced, of the eventual forty-nine in the center panel. I kept finding more golds and oranges for the stripes, so there will be another quilt, “Blue Streak,” once this one is done, I think.

Though the sky is clear blue and I sweat as I sew (which involves pressing with a steamy-hot iron after each stitched seam), I know the weather is changing. We can feel the cooling and are grateful for it. Our contractor assures me the duplex roof will be on “asap.” Our tenant does did not have water dripping from the ceiling during the recent rainstorm. And yesterday I found glass. All good.

Kids are back in school, we have less than a week left of summer, and last night I had a teaching dream. Most of my dreams about teaching from while I was actually teaching, at least the ones I remember, were about teaching a subject I knew nothing about. The Boer War or Physics. I would be standing before a class of teenagers, who listened intently to every word and took neat notes in a way teenagers never do in real life. I was aware, in a kind of horror, that they would remember what I was telling them, that they would recall all the details I was concocting about a historical event I could not claim to know. I was making stuff up and they trusted it. Is that every teacher’s nightmare? It was always mine, that I would mislead my students.

Last night’s dream was quite different. The dreamt students attended an elite private school, both boys and girls. (I taught for from 1976-1979 at Forest Ridge, a girls’ prep school in Bellevue, Washington.) Some listened and some were inattentive and a couple were rude, and I was teaching them something I am familiar with: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” which I taught most every year. I used to be able to recite Stevens’s poem, and in my dream I certainly got through introducing it as haiku and reciting several stanzas as well as the parody I wrote, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Computers.” It was not a nightmare, nor yet completely peaceful. There was some rushing about toward the end, some issue with wearing only a tunic and underpants and searching for my pants? (Why dreams about nakedness?)

From the bottom, a chipped but well-buffed piece of blue-green glass and a beautifully rounded piece of faintly green glass, a rough agate, an “ugly clam,” and several “butterflies,” which are really the back plates of chitons. Two of those are fan-shaped “tail” pieces.

I slept long this morning, till after six. We were late out onto the beach for our walk, the surf is a tame animal today, and I do not need ice in my morning iced coffee. The coffee has chilled since yesterday and the heat has relented. I plan to complete three more pieced squares of the purple-and-orange quilt this morning, finishing the third row of seven. This afternoon, I mean to piece the entire fourth row of this center panel. That row will more clearly reveal the shift in background hue and shade. I might put this one on a bed.

Mom’s house, my parents’ house, the house I lived in from first grade until college, is owned by two delightful people who have remodeled and gardened. Marti showed me where she had transplanted the rhododendron and vine maple (acer), the way they used what we had called “the hut” as a workshop, the expanded master bedroom (just as I would have done) and second bath, the preserved paneling in the family room. They have lived in the house since buying it from Mom.

It was Gary’s idea to drive by last Saturday. When we slowed down, there she was working on the garden and Gary pulled the car over. Hello, I said as I approached her, forgive me but I used to live here. She smiled and said, Are you Mrs. Priddy’s daughter? and it was lovely. She and her husband Jay have lived here far longer than my family did. They have made it home.

Our home remains the Oregon coast. We have lived here now for over forty years. Gary was saying he had never lived anyplace for more than five or six years before we moved here. Often he lived in a place for a couple of years before moving on. There were the houses around Seattle, the three houses in seven Arizona years, more back in Shoreline and Seattle, the last two with me. I have only lived in six houses, counting the month with my grandparents in Portland before moving to Seattle in time for me to begin kindergarten. Most of my life has been in Oregon, more than forty-five years now. It is home.

I can see the ocean from here, and I should be knitting. I have thought of other ways to tell my butterfly SF story: as history or from the perspective of another character. I should be writing them. But there should be no shoulds. If it matters I will write it. If not, I won’t but do something else instead.

But I really must begin knitting my grandson’s sweater. I knit half the back before ripping it out last week. It was going to be large enough for him to grow into . . . in about five years! He chose the colors and was excited when I showed him the gauge sample. I need to start knitting again. Do I try using a top-down pattern, or merely revise my own so that it will fit him? Once I find an answer, I can begin again.