Make me a list of every book I have written about in my journal.

No school yesterday and none today. The snow began Tuesday afternoon, and by Wednesday morning the drift against the garage door reached the handle. R. measured 17 inches on the picnic table with the folding rule and wrote it on the calendar. He cleared our drive and Marlene's with the snowblower and came in with ice in his eyebrows.

Eight of us were at Lorraine's on Tuesday night for "Major Pettigrew's Last Stand" when it began in earnest, and I drove home at fifteen miles an hour. A comfortable book. I liked the Major more than I expected to like a man who cares that much about a pair of shotguns.

Yesterday I read three hundred pages of "Cutting for Stone" between breakfast and supper. It is March's book and the club meets here.

Gus will not go past the back step.

Fourteen below with the wind. The Packers lost to the Giants at home after losing one game all season. R. turned it off with six minutes left, said "Well," and went down to the basement to sharpen chisels.

Sunday calls: Ellen at 6:30, tired, Owen has an ear infection. David did not pick up. Kate texted "busy can I call tmrw" and I answered that tomorrow was fine.

I am rereading "Kristin Lavransdatter" before Norway, in the newer translation this time.

Bergen. It has rained since we landed, a fine steady rain that nobody here appears to notice. We have walked the wharf, eaten fish soup twice, and ridden the funicular, where R. spent the whole climb looking at the cable and the track instead of the view and declared it "well maintained."

Every third woman on the street has Aunt Inga's jaw.

I finished "Out Stealing Horses" on the plane. Spare and cold.

It is 10:30 at night and light enough to read at the window. I cannot sleep.

Christmas here, everyone but Kate, who was with Samir's people in Michigan and comes at New Year's. I made the gravy Mom's way.

R. gave me a photograph, framed. Walt found it among the farm pictures: Mom at about thirty on the porch steps with a dishpan of peas in her lap, squinting at whoever held the camera. I had never seen it. I had to go and stand in the pantry for a minute.

I have been reading "Being Mortal" in the evenings, aloud in part, until R. asked me to stop. He said it was a good book and he would like to hear the rest in the spring.

Kate telephoned on Christmas Eve, from Michigan, with Samir beside her. It will be June, in Portland. R. said, "Good," and passed me the telephone.

The week of the Fourth, eleven of us, with Samir now official. Rain on the 3rd and the 4th, so: Monopoly, a thousand-piece puzzle of the Mackinac Bridge that R. would not leave until it was done, and the children in the boathouse loft putting on a play of which I understood nothing except that Owen was a bear.

I read "Station Eleven" in the green chair while it rained. What has stayed with me is the man who starts a museum of useless things in an airport.

Two loon chicks. Bev counts them every morning from her kitchen window and telephones if she sees only one.

R. has given them the date: Friday, January 29. Thirty-eight years at Brennecke & Voss. He told the partners on Tuesday and me on Monday.

I have a year and a half to go, if I go when I mean to. I asked what he plans to do all day while I am at school. He said, "Whatever I want, quietly."

Julia is expecting again, in March; we have known since Thanksgiving. David rang tonight to say that all is well.

Reading "Our Souls at Night." It is very short and I am making it last.

Waiting. I have reshelved the entire 500s, which did not need it.

I picked up "When Breath Becomes Air" at Paper Birch on Saturday because Connie had praised it, got thirty pages in, and saw what I was doing. It is on the hall table with the bookmark in it. Not this week.

Since Friday R. has rehung the storm door, fixed the latch on the gate again, and sharpened every knife in the house. I cut myself on the bread knife this morning.

I put it in writing on Friday. The letter to the district is two sentences long and took me most of an evening.

Reading "News of the World." An old man goes from town to town in Texas reading the newspapers aloud for a dime, and is handed a child to take home who does not want to go. It is as plain as a fence post and I could not put it down.

Ninety-three school days left. A second-grader worked it out for me on the whiteboard, unasked.

Sixty-two today, and spent it weeding. I would rather do it myself than leave it to my successor, who will not know which ones are loved by one child every six years.

I withdrew 214 volumes. I kept one back for myself, with the district's blessing: our oldest copy of "Charlotte's Web," rebound twice, with due-date stamps going back to 1988 and somebody's breakfast on page 40.

R. took me to the Nordic Table. All three called, Kate first.

The first Monday. At 7:45, when the first bell rings, I was standing in my own kitchen holding a dish towel.

R. came in from the shop at ten for coffee and found me reading at the table in daylight. He looked at me over his glasses and said, "Now you know."

Otherwise I have walked Gus around the loop, slowly, at his pace; put the spices back in alphabetical order; telephoned Lorraine, who laughed at me for a full minute; and started "Olive Kitteridge" over again, which the club read in 2011 and I read too fast. Olive is a retired teacher, large, rude, and right about most things.

At 10:40 this morning I looked up from the page. That is when the first-grade bell rings. I have been listening for bells all week, like a horse that still stops at the houses on the milk route. Nobody has asked me for anything since Wednesday. I had thought I would like that more.

Rain since Sunday. R. is tying leaders at the table, and I have read "Olive Kitteridge" to the end and gone straight on into "Anything Is Possible," the same author, a different town.

Christmas here, with Ellen's four and David's four: ten in the house. Kate is eight months along in Portland and not allowed on an airplane; she joined us on the laptop at the end of the table. Maeve is twenty-one months old and calls me "Gamma Pig."

R. and I have, for once, read the same book: "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes." He read it for the engineering and I for the story, and we have talked about lampreys at supper more than is usual.

I also got through "Lincoln in the Bardo." I thought about Mom the whole way through, and admired it more than I liked it.

The star in the windshield ran, as predicted, clear across to the driver's side in the first hard frost, and a man came on the 1st and replaced the whole thing in our driveway out of the back of a van, in an hour, whistling. The insurance paid all but a hundred dollars.

The club did "Educated" in November, at Nan's. Most of us believed every word; Helen believed about half; I believed the mountain and the junkyard and reserved judgment on the rest, and thought it the best thing we have read in two years regardless.

Snow tonight.

Gulf Shores, the third week. Seventy degrees, and a fog off the water in the mornings that burns away by ten.

R. has walked to the pier and back every day, four miles, and is brown and nearly cheerful. He stops for every dog on the beach. There is a yellow Lab that comes down at eight with an old man in a Navy cap, and R. knows its name, its age and where it came from.

I have read "The Overstory" out on the balcony, about trees and the people who lose their heads over them. It is too long and too angry, and I will not look at the white pines up north in the same way again.

Home Saturday.

Three weeks one-handed. Things I cannot do: button a cuff, open a jar, cut meat, put my hair up, fasten anything behind my back, knead. R. does all of these now, the last under instruction.

He has cooked every night. Chili three ways; walleye; an omelet with too much in it. He washes my hair in the kitchen sink on Saturdays with his sleeves rolled, as carefully as he would bleed a brake line.

I missed hanging the quilt show. I am reading "Middlemarch," propped on a pillow, a hundred pages a day, for the first time since library school.

Lorraine has given me "The Library Book," about the fire at the Los Angeles public library in 1986. I read it in two days and telephoned her about every chapter.

The cast is off and a brace is on, and twice a week a young woman named Priya has me squeeze yellow putty until I could weep. The scar runs down the inside of the wrist, four inches, very neat.

The thyroid pill has gone up as well, on account of something they found in the blood they drew for the surgery.

Christmas here, quietly, with Ellen's four. Birdie ate a wise man off the crèche, the wooden one.

I read "Olive, Again" in two sittings on Christmas afternoon while everyone else slept. Olive is old now, and has had a heart attack of her own, and is exactly as rude as ever.

Also this fall, in waiting rooms: "The Dutch House." A brother and sister who cannot stop driving back to look at the house they were put out of. I gave my copy to Lorraine with the corners turned down.

Second shingles shot yesterday, and today I am in bed with an arm like a fence post and a low fever, exactly as promised. I had the real thing in 2013.

Reading, since I can do nothing else, "The Salt Path." I believed about three-quarters of it and liked all of it.

Birdie was spayed a week ago and is in a plastic cone, with which she has cleared the coffee table twice. R. has two patients. Tea at ten, dog out at eleven.

Closed the cabin today after twenty-four weeks, the longest we have ever stayed. I did the inside list alone and slowly.

Bev and Arnie on their dock and we on ours, forty yards apart, with a thermos each, most evenings from June on. Fish fry in boxes from the Thirsty Loon, eaten on the tailgate. Both loon chicks raised and gone.

I read "Hamnet" twice. A boy dies of plague in 1596 and his mother cannot be consoled, and I do not know why that was the book for this year, but it was.

Now home, to a winter of the two of us and a screen.

A quiet Christmas. Dr. Aumann retires at the end of the month. He has looked into my mouth since 1987. A young woman is taking the practice and keeping Trish.

From Kate and Samir, a Kindle. It weighs nothing, and I will take it on airplanes. I still prefer paper.

The two best things I read this year. "Cloud Cuckoo Land" has a librarian in it who is eighty-six and puts on a play with five children, and he got us right. And "The Lincoln Highway," which has a boy in it who carries one book everywhere and reads it to anyone who will sit still. I had him in every class.

Lorraine has had two of the six treatments. She has lost her hair and bought three hats.

Gulf Shores again, after a year away. Dottie's condo, the same blue couch. Jeanette and Norm were at the door before we had the car unloaded, and Norm had the notebook.

I walk with R. in the mornings now, as far as the pier. He is slower than he was two years ago; the right knee has begun to give him a hitch that he says is nothing.

Lorraine telephones on Sundays between treatments. Four down, two to go. She wanted every bird. I gave her the list from the refuge: nineteen kinds before lunch, a roseate spoonbill among them. She said to describe the pink.

I read "Small Things Like These" on the balcony. It is a hundred pages and takes an afternoon, and I have thought about it for three days.

On Friday I put the last nine of R.'s pain tablets into the drop box at Heron Lane. He took eleven of the twenty and wanted the rest out of the house.

He walks with a cane indoors now and goes to therapy twice a week with a young woman named Megan. He may not drive until January. I have learned where he keeps the ice scraper (under the seat of the truck, not in the RAV4, where one might need it).

I am reading "Demon Copperhead" a chapter at a time in waiting rooms. It is five hundred pages of other people's trouble, and it has been a help.

I am tired.

She cannot hold a book up any longer, so I read to her. I asked what she wanted, expecting something improving, and she said "The Wind in the Willows," which she read aloud to the third grade at Stony Brook every spring for thirty years and has nearly by heart. I do a chapter a visit. She corrects my Toad.

Today was the river and the picnic. She had her eyes shut, and I thought she was asleep and let my voice drop, and she said, "You've left out what's in the basket."

Hal sits in the kitchen while I read and does not come in.

Home since Thursday, for the car and the tomato plants, after two weeks up north. The warblers came through the alders last week, and twice I had the telephone in my hand to tell her about the Cape May before I remembered.

R. can hear the loons. He was on the dock at dusk the first evening when the pair began to call back and forth across the bay, and he turned his head toward each in turn.

I am reading "A Grief Observed," which Connie pressed on me. It is sixty pages long and written by a man in a rage.

Forty-six years. Ephraim, room 6, two nights. R. walked the whole shore trail on the new knee and timed himself.

I read "Tom Lake" on the porch swing in an afternoon, in cherry country, with a slice of pie. I would have telephoned Lorraine before I had finished the last page.

I keep both starters going. R. has labeled the jars: S, and S Sr.

Dr. Raghavan has taken me off the bone pill after five years. She calls it a holiday. My spine is, she says, slightly better than it was.

Christmas in Portland, six days. Rain on every one of them. Theo will be six next month and has a loose tooth. June is two and a half and says "No thank you" to everything, including the things she wants.

Samir's parents had us all on Christmas Eve. Nabil and R. went off into a corner and talked about culverts for an hour and a quarter. Leila sent me home with a tin.

This was the first Christmas I did not send a card to Lorraine. I had addressed the envelope before I thought.

I finished "The Covenant of Water" on the flight home: seven hundred pages of one family in India across seventy years, with a drowning in every generation.

Christmas in Denver, a week, at 5,300 feet, with R. winded on the stairs and denying it. Lucas is eleven and took his grandfather ice fishing on a reservoir an hour away, with David to drive, and they came back with two trout and a great deal of opinion about Colorado ice. Maeve is eight and has read everything I have sent her, and wanted to know why the girl in last month's book had to give the dog back. I said I did not know either.

Julia's mother asked me for the lefse proportions. I gave her Mom's.

Three books worth keeping from this year. "North Woods" is one house in Massachusetts over three hundred years. "James" is Huckleberry Finn told by Jim, and is angrier and funnier than I was ready for. And "Tell Me Everything," in which Olive Kitteridge is ninety and in a home and has not softened in the least.

Eleven below this morning, and the furnace has not shut off since Friday. The feeders were empty by nine: juncos, a red-bellied woodpecker, and twenty-odd house finches behaving like a mob.

R. is in the shop with the space heater, building a bookcase for Maeve, who has run out of shelf.

I am reading "The Frozen River," about a midwife in Maine in 1789 who keeps a diary of every birth and death in the town.

Fourteen years in here this month.

The house emptied on Tuesday, and it is the three of us again and the dog. Hannah stays in the bunkhouse by choice; she says it is the first room she has ever had that nobody walks through.

We sit on the porch after supper. She asks me things. What her mother was like at sixteen (exactly as she is now, with worse hair). Whether I minded being called Peg. What Great-Grandma Dorothy thought of Grandpa. Why I stopped working. I answer as truly as I can.

Last night she asked whether I believe in God. I said that I go to church, that I set the altar, that I have sat with people I loved while they died, and that I still do not know how to answer in one word. She said, "That's sort of what I thought you'd say."

She is reading my copy of "The Correspondent."

Christmas here, all fourteen, in this house, for three days, and nobody quarreled about anything larger than the last of the kringle.

Hannah is seventeen and has applied to Madison, for nursing, and will hear next month. She would be twelve minutes from this kitchen. I have said nothing to her about that. I said it to R., who said, "She'll come for the laundry."

Maeve, nine, has read every one of the books I have sent her, four years of them, and keeps them in the order they came. June, four, sat in my lap through the whole Christmas Eve service and asked in a carrying whisper, during the silence, whether the baby was a real baby or a pretend one. Pastor Kristin heard, and used it on Christmas morning.

I read "Raising Hare" the day after, in the back bedroom with the door shut.

The association met yesterday: forty-one members present, the dues unchanged, and the treasurer's report accepted without a question for the seventh year, which the treasurer regards as either a compliment or a sign that nobody listens.

Two loon chicks, hatched last week. Jack Niemi has put the floating signs out.

Arnie walked over this morning by himself, with the cane, across both yards, to bring the rhubarb, because Bev was at church. It took him some time. I watched him come the whole way from the kitchen window and did not go out to meet him, and when he got to the door he was out of breath and extremely pleased.

Jam tomorrow. I am reading "A Sand County Almanac" again, a month at a time.