e AM on our last night in our apartment in Cambridge. Tomorrow night and the next, we'll stay with friends nearby; Tuesday night, we're at a hotel at the airport. I always thought airport hotels were for the tired and the pathetic, the bad travelers, and now I still do: it's just that I have become all those things.

Packing up makes me ask myself questions. Like, why did you buy three bottles of hairspray, when you sprayed your hair less than three times over the past ten months? Why so many dull flannel baby blankets? And brown rice!

**

I'm picking up this post 24 hours later. Now we're staying with our friends Jonathan and Lib, around the corner. It's almost odd to be in such a peaceful lovely place, when our apartment feels stark and chaotic, mostly packed up with the inevitable baby socks swept up into corners, and all of the weird hardware of domestic life that stymies me when I move: picture hangers, clothes hangers, pushpins.

The movers come tomorrow to put our stuff into storage, where it will stay till January when we move it to Texas. A moving crate for Iowa comes Tuesday. Then the important luggage--that is, us--gets on a plane for England for the summer early Wednesday morning.