I made a lot of lists last week, and I ran a lot of errands. I chopped a lot of vegetables. I chopped so many vegetables that I became seriously fatigued, and, as I watched my hands chopping vegetables, some of my fingers holding the vegetables down and then four other fingers on the handle of knife, which wasn’t as sharp as it should have been, I thought, I am so tired but I must focus, so that I don’t cut off my own fingers. Focus. And I did focus, and I cut all the vegetables into very thin batons and teeny tiny little mince and I did not chop off even one of my fingers, not even one.

Lately I am estranged from my own hands, I look at them on the steering wheel, or taking off their rings to wash the dishes and am interested by them in a friendly but, given that they’re my hands, kind of distant way. Of course this is because they look like my mother’s hands, as they were when I was young, and they are doing what her hands used to do. And they are glamorous as my mother’s hands used to be for me, bony and veiny and useful.

It’s not that I’m not doing things, I am doing things, I am doing a lot of things, I’m taking trains into the city and ripping my skirt on the arm rest so that my underwear shows and I have to run into a store and buy a new skirt, I’m meeting my youngest sister for dinner and getting schmackled on a bubbly red, I’m walking home from the train station at 11 under a full moon, I’m reading the entire New Yorker in bed in the morning while the men hammer and bang things somewhere else on my house. The house! I’m driving to Stamford to look for wood flooring, I’m agreeing to expensive additional procedures for the renovation, I’m calling the tree man in for a consultation, I’m talking to our contractor about our progress and handing him an enormous check, I am in pursuit of the perfect front door.

I'm reserving a room at a midtown hotel, where I'm planning to meet my husband tonight, I'm holding an appointment for a haircut on Wednesday, before I head to the Open with my father. I’m slowly making my way through Saturday, although it’s overdue, I’m going through the children’s papers for the first day of school, I’m following Gonzales’ resignation, and the arrest of Larry Craig. I'm eating breakfast, and I'm even doing the dishes.

The children are gone, is the dramatic way of saying that they are at their grandparents’, and happy, and that they slept through the night. I had so many things to do in their absence, but I didn’t understand how I would feel, doing them.