This will be - I promise! - a short posting. A few fragmentary thoughts, tags from a morning walk: I've decided that getting OUT in the morning will help my energy level. (Maybe I should qualify that "morning": I don't leave the apartment till 10:00; it's hard to get up earlier than 8:00 these days - it's only getting light around 8:30, and the light is a filtered gray.)

So two mornings in a row I've put on sneakers and my slicker (rather than the fancy yellow coat) and headed down Zagorodnyi to the park, where I do a few laps around the theater, along the paths and by the playgrounds and flower beds. This morning there was a crew of women planting bulbs, using a nifty shovel with a circular head to make just the right depth hole. There were five of them, wearing brown jackets and orange vests, working busily with shovels and rakes and piles of bulbs. They talked animatedly and seemed to be making good progress.

It's a pleasantly populated park, filled with trees that are starting to change color.

Busloads of school children arrive for the matinee at the Teatr iunykh zritelei (Theatre for Young Spectators), and some come on foot, in double-breasted lines with teachers trying to keep a semblance of order.

The park - both this one and one across the street, with a neat circular walkway and star-like pattern of paths extending from it - is filled with dogs and their owners, out for an 11:00 stroll. One of them, a young german shepherd, comes up to me and wants to play catch . When I finally get him to release his rather firm tooth-hold on my umbrella, he goes for my shoelaces; the grip is playful, but still I can feel his teeth on my toes. He doesn't respond to either Russian or English. Finally a woman comes around the corner and when I asks if he's her dog she seems to say yes, but protests that he's "just a puppy."

Some of the trees are yellow: larch and birch and some of the chestnuts. There are oaks and something that looks like linden, but they haven't started turning at all.

This park is vastly cleaner than when we lived in Petersburg in 2000: that fall I tried to go running here, but found the amount of trash too depressing. The air then was dirtier, too, and discouraged me from expending any more energy than I had to. And now the park is spotless - if muddy - and those women keep raking the star-shaped beds, and planting bulbs for spring.