Mark's father came over; he examined all my plants carefully, prodding their soil, and advised me to give each of them two ice cubes every day. Mr. Mirsky was especially knowledgeable because his father had been a florist, in fact head of the large and famous Boston flower market when it was in its heyday, housed in a round glass building in the heart of the city.

We were all generally excited, by the readings, by the weather, by being together in one place. During this high, Mark encouraged me to put all the pictures I was snapping into a housebook, telling me in his grand historical way that in the nineteenth century everyone kept a housebook. In terms of my work, this was really quite early. Before I was given a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute, before I took my supermarket wagon to Harvard Square to hawk my photographs at Christmas. Before Mildred Beckwith found me the couch and I was able to bring my red daybed upstairs. So the pictures of Bly, Waldman, Duncan, Creeley are really the first Housebook pictures, taken at the birth.

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