There was a gentleness to this snake. She didn’t mind it being around, despite the fact that she wanted nothing to do with it. She could understand the whole hypnotization thing.

The dogs regularly trampled through the garden beds, breaking One-Eyed Susan stalks and flattening Hostas.

There were several oranges to choose from in the bowl, but several of them were bruised.

She found comfort when she realized that he existed, essentially, like a dog. He woke, ate, napped, ate, napped, ate, slept. Occasionally she could cajole him into a walk, in which he would thrive and exhibit a mild hyperness.

He walked out with his coffee and sat on the deck, overlooking 200m of cleanly manicured lawn sloping down to the shack and the chuff of the Atlantic beyond.

As a show that yes, he could be spontaneous, he bought a pair of concert tickets on the other side of the world. The show was a year away, and he knew he would begin the arrangements to get there no sooner than two weeks beforehand.

He was the kind of guy who would row a skull full speed into the dock.

He pulled the last cam and pieced out the last easy moves to the anchor, where he was surprised to see a mess of rope and no belayer. He tamped a momentary flash of anger with some mindfulness mojo, and thought, “Where in the world is she?”

As he walked up the front steps he could see her through the glass door, massaging kale in a large metal bowl on the kitchen island.

As he pulled through the gate and carefully attempted to roll across the series of potholes, he felt (and heard) the familiar bump and release. Another flat.

It was his turn at the head of the line. He grabbed the apple from the teacher’s extended hand and threw it as hard as he could against the brick wall.

He was in a stage where he didn’t want to write anymore. He moved through the house, removing notepads and notebooks from all of the bathrooms, sitting chairs and bedside tables. He threw out all of the pens. There was only one pen that worked anyhows, but he threw that out too.

In his head was the weavil that had crawled in during the night. He imagined it curled up to sleep. Had it made it through the ear drum? What would it have for supper?

In his head he would be happily writing away in paradise, recreating the scene from The Net where Sandra Bullock sits on the beach with her laptop, the best of both worlds. In reality, even with two-decades later OLED brightness he couldn’t see a thing on his screen. Yet another way Hollywood had skewed his dreams.

They were standing at the foot of the driveway, examining the pallet of bricks that was blocking their car. “Let’s get this out of the way”, he said.

The grass was certainly green all over, but it was more green in spots. More saturated. More vibrant. Those were the spots where this new dog had peed, and as the end of summer approached, and the dog continued to pee a couple of times a day, the areas of vibrancy morphed and increased in area across the lawn. This was counter to his previous experience of dog pee instantly killing any grass it soaked into.

At lunch time he sat in a mindful meditation, eyes closed, for 20 minutes. If he dozed off, he wasn’t sleeping enough. If he was alert the whole time, A+.

This nature therapy was a mixed bag. For example, at the present moment there was a disgusting looking caterpillar dangling from a thread just behind his head. It was distracting her from this particularly bland story about his ex-wife, but she felt he was on a role and wanted to be encouraging. Later he would turn and walk right into it, but he didn’t notice so she said nothing.

Worried that he’d lost his marbles, the boy threw on his helmet and biked back to the sand pit.

It was four o’clock on a Saturday and he had been driving kids around since nine.