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Call: A hermit thrush flies into the glass picture window.

Action: My husband picks it up. Sees its neck is broken, but it is still breathing. He strokes it, then places it on the mantle nestled in a rabbit fur winter hat that belongs to one of the kids.

Result: The bird dies anyway, of course.

What our youngest does when she gets home: Holds the bird, wonders at how soft the feathers are on the top of its head.

What the husband says: I felt so bad for it, dying on such a nice sunny day, and him being such a cute little bird that I put him on the mantle for a while.

What I cook for dinner: Burritos filled with flounder sautéed with butter and garlic and paprika and basil.

What the children eat before dinner is ready: Chocolate chip cookies, hunks of brie cheese, bite-size carrots, and strawberry greek yogurt.

What my husband and I both say to them: Stop, stop eating so much before dinner!

What the children do at dinner: Talk over each other, telling us about school. One has a locker that she has not learned to open, and so everyone else in school knows her combination because others have had to help her, one says he's calculated that he's drunk three gallons of bottled water that's been set out by the school because the running water, due to the destruction of the flooding, is still not safe to drink. One never gets to tell what she did at school, because it becomes a game to the others to interrupt her every time she starts to talk.

What we do after dinner: Walk to the back field with the kids and the Toulouse goose and our two Newfoundland dogs and the raccoon following behind us. We stop at the pond to see if the beaver is swimming back and forth and slapping his tail on the surface. We stop to watch the butterflies flying over the milkweed my husband refused to mow down so that the butterflies could have it. In the pool of water in the stream in the back field, the goose dives down and swims fast, and the raccoon paddles around and swims and the kids hold her like she's a motorboat and toddle her around while making sputtering sounds. The Newfoundlands stand in the water and bark, and then they lie down in the water, their fur floating up above them. When we are done, we head back to the house, the kids stopping to race each other on the flat parts of the field, and then climbing on our backs for rides that are short. They have grown and are heavy now to hold. "You ain't no buttercup anymore," my husband says to them as they climb his back, my girl's hair falling over his shoulders and shining in the light from the sunset that is pink and gold.

What the house says at night: Close your eyes, go to sleep, I'll keep the sound down of my beams creaking so that all of you can rest well

Call: A lump in the throat of a young Japanese man coming to life in the book I'm working on.

Action: Resist temptation to Google everything there is about lumps in the throat, like causes, appearances, and symptoms.

Result: Continue writing as if it doesn't matter so much, as if what really matters is how he sits up in bed to be fed shark fin soup in a black lacquer bowl.

Thoughts on drive home from market: Is the flood water really rising again?

What the husband says: The waters are trying to tell us something. They're saying move your roads over and your houses over we're coming through, because the way you're trying to move back the rocks and boulders into the stream bed is just going to make our current run faster the next time a hurricane hits.

What our daughter says when she gets home: There's a new girl in school whose name backwards spells "heaven".

What the husband says: That's so she recognizes the sign for it when she gets there and the sign's been turned upside down.

What everyone does: Figures out what their name is spelled backwards.

What raccoon is spelled backwards: Nooccar.

What we do for about five minutes: Call the raccoon "Nooccar".

What we're watching at night: A campy sci-fi movie called The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.

The kids favorite line from the movie: "I must make the skeleton meatier by using a crowbar covered in lettuce."

What the kids keep reciting throughout the day: "I must make the skeleton meatier by using a crowbar covered in lettuce."

What the house does at night when we are all in our beds: Creaks and moans.

What the house is probably saying: I'll get a head start on moving over to make room for the waters of the streams and the river

Call: A cut on my son's knee from the rooster's talon who went after my son while he was taking out the compost tray.

Action: Told son to put some Betadine ointment on the cut and a Band-Aid.

Result: Compost tray is still on the porch and no one has taken it to the compost pile, and the chickens and the rooster are now eating it. The rooster is very polite, he lets the hens get their fill first, and then he steps in.

What my son does to me while we're jogging up our dirt road: Takes his Band-Aid off and sticks it to the back of my shirt.

What the streams are doing alongside the dirt road: Running high. More rains have come. Orange newts cross slowly in front of us, looking for higher ground.

What the dog does: Chases grouse far out ahead, where they rise up from the brush with a loud beating of their wings.

What my husband does: Helps a newt, the length of his thumb, cross the road before a car or ATV runs over it.

What we've been having more of lately: Cars and ATVs up our road. People want to see our washed-out flooded road. They like looking down over the side of the road to where the stream churns and is the color of slate from all the silt that was stirred up.

What the girls like doing: Playing in mud that was never there before, on sandbars that were never there before, beneath waterfalls that were never there before.

What we find in the stream: A seatless twisted bike, a shoe, a giant rusted saw blade, (to fit the kind of saw Dudley Do-Right had to save the damsel in distress from at the mill.)

What the husband says when we get home after jogging up the road, and then playing in the stream with the kids: That was like wading in the Mekong.

What the raccoon does: Jumps into the shower with me and plays with the stopper on the faucet.

What's left in the tub when I get out: Little raccoon paw prints and a line of silt that looks like magnet filings heading for the drain.

What the children say when they get home from school: We are sick of teachers asking us if we were traumatized by the flood. Can't we talk about something else?

What the husband says: Like what?

What our girl says: Like why do raisins float in

Call: Pet raccoon has eaten mice poison we set out years ago.

Action: Wagged finger at pet raccoon, told her not to die.

Result: Pet raccoon proved to me she wasn't going to die in the least. Pet raccoon stayed up all night playing with Legos in the kids' loft. I could hear her batting the pieces around on the floor.

What the kids said to her: Scout, you stop playing now and get to sleep!

How I woke up in the morning: With Scout making a trilling sound and licking my eyelids and curling her tongue into my ear. She moved on to "seeing" my face with her paws. Like a blind person would, she gently and thoroughly explored the dips and hollows of my features as if she were molding me out of clay.

Why I got out of bed: Scout, sitting on my face, started biting my nose for fun.

What I cooked for breakfast: Wheatena with butter and maple syrup.

What Scout ate for breakfast: Wheatena without butter and maple syrup at first because I thought it would be better for her, but then I added it to bowl later because Wheatena is really awful by itself and no one, least of all a creature who can see with her paws, should be subjected to it.

What fell down on the husband's head while he was standing under the stairs: Half torso of a small Lego man.

What the husband did: Turned and said to our son, Did you do that?

What our son said: Nothing, then he pointed up to the landing above the husband's head where Scout was perched over the side, her beady black eyes shining, and a Lego piece in her paw, ready to make another

Call: Powells.com asks me if I'd like to write blog entries for a week.

Action: Bite nails. Wonder what I'll write about.

Result: Start writing entries as if they were written with the same structure that I wrote The Call, as diary entries, only I won't write them from my husband's POV, the way The Call is. Instead, I'll write them from my POV.

Call: A draft horse with a sarcoid on his neck.

Action: Drove to farm with my husband over damaged roads that were so torn up by the flood it seemed as if we were really driving over rocks and boulders in a dried out stream bed.

Result: Watched husband tranq the draft horse, then inject it with carbocaine while the owner pointed out to us her new herd of 10 white propane tanks that had migrated to her field. They were from a heating company miles up the road and had floated down in swirling brown flood waters. They were close together, huddled by her barn wall. The shape of the incision made it look like the draft horse now had a third eye on its neck.

What the draft horse did after my husband sewed her up with six stitches: walked out in the field and joined the 10 propane tanks, standing by them, some blood dripping from between his sutures.

What the owner said about the draft horse and the 10 propane tanks: He won't leave their sides ever since they've come.

What we see on the drive home: A roadside vegetable stand with the sign "Home Groan Vegetables."

Thoughts on drive home: Our flood damaged torn up black top road looks like the jagged end of a key.

What the children say when we get home: Some men came to the door. They said they were from the Government and they wanted to know if we needed any help.

What the husband says: Those are the scariest words you'll ever