Today I finally resolved to study more for my upcoming GMAT. I was about to get underway, only looking for a notepad, when the whole family spontaneously organized into a mighty Trundle. Owen must have been pleased out of his mind. I declined. I would have gladly gone if I had already been planning to trundle on Saturday, but instead I had been planning to take a four-hour practice test starting at 8 a.m. in the morning. It was far past eight o’clock and nothing resembling studying had occurred, but it was truly in the offing; to back at such a crucial juncture would be utter defeat.

In the end I still gave in to pathetic compromise and took a short quiz instead of a full practice test. It was not a total capitulation because the quiz still exposed some egregious lapses in my ability to think like a test-maker, but the affair concluded quickly and left me in an empty house on a Saturday with a suggestion of sunlight flashing through the windows.

I left for the woods. It is an unhappy bit of woods we live in now, pimpled with rocks and snarled with ill-tempered wild rose, and running with soupy muddy rivulets that haven’t washed themselves out a proper crick bed. The soil gives no purchase for the trees, so many lie in defeat amidst dense clusters of unruly brush. This failed attempt at a forest betrays a failed attempt at pastureland beneath it, in rubbled stone walls and paths transgressed by modern boundaries.