The Black Monster is no more.

I raked the last of its remains in the twighlight across my front lawn tonight, and paid teenagers have piled them in great heaps on the flower beds. (I had to shovel it off the house and the fence.) Maybe you're thinking, 'How can she post so much about yardwork?' My reply is that you don't have a huge heap of compost squatting outside your dining room for a month without coming to believe that it's a sentient being that bears you ill will.

48 hours from now, I should be at my mother's house. Oy. That's a terrible thing to say about one's only surviving parent who has a potentially lethal illness, but that's how I feel. Oy.