The week began on Monday, June 22, 2026, at a small wood-frame house on East University Street in Bloomington, Indiana. The family was the Akinses: Kerris, a research administrator at IU; Marcus, a high-school music teacher; and their three children, Etta, ten; Linus, eight; and Solomon, five.
Kerris had announced on the previous Friday that the week ahead would have nothing scheduled. No camps. No swimming lessons. No play dates booked in advance. No screens before 5 p.m.
She had not expected the children to receive the news well. They did not.
Etta cried. Linus argued for two and a half hours. Solomon, who did not entirely understand the proposal, asked whether Tuesday meant Tuesday morning or after lunch.
By the time Jude Eaton arrived to spend the week with the family — Jude was a friend of Kerris's from a graduate program in Edinburgh, visiting the U.S. for the first time in five years — the household had reached an uneasy truce.
Jude is the books editor at The Cradle Press. She was not visiting as a reporter. She had come for a wedding the following weekend. The notebook she kept that week was, at first, personal.
Monday went badly.
Etta read in her room for most of the morning. Linus disassembled an old radio he had been allowed to keep. Solomon followed Kerris around the kitchen and asked, every eleven minutes by Jude's count, when something would happen.
By lunch on Monday, Kerris was reconsidering. She told Jude she had been ready, that afternoon, to cave. She did not.
Tuesday was different.
Etta, having exhausted her reading appetite, came outside around 10 a.m. and started a project that occupied her for three days: a map of every tree in their yard, with measurements, sketches, and an attempt at species identification using a Peterson guide her grandfather had given her.
The yard had eleven trees. The map became elaborate. By Wednesday Etta had recruited Solomon as her assistant, which mostly meant Solomon held the end of a tape measure and asked, intermittently, when something would happen.
Linus had moved on from the radio to a wooden ramp he was building from scrap lumber in the garage. The ramp's purpose was not stated. By Wednesday the ramp had a parallel ramp, and a small wooden ball was being tested on them.
Wednesday afternoon brought the inevitable fight. Etta needed the tape measure that Linus had appropriated for the ramps. There were tears. Marcus, home early from a department meeting, did not intervene. He sat on the porch and read.
The fight resolved itself in about twenty minutes. Etta got the tape measure. Linus traded for a yardstick. Solomon was bored.
Solomon's boredom is what Jude wrote most about.
He was five. He had less practice at filling his own time than his older siblings. On Wednesday afternoon he sat on the porch step for almost an hour, kicking the leg of the railing, asking no one in particular what to do.
Kerris did not answer. Marcus did not answer. Jude, who had been about to suggest something, watched Kerris's face and did not.
By Thursday Solomon had built, out of materials he had gathered from the garage and the yard, a small structure he called a trap. It was not clear what the trap was for. He spent most of Thursday and all of Friday morning maintaining it, repositioning sticks, adding leaves, defending it from a neighborhood cat.
Jude watched him work. He was unhurried in a way he had not been on Monday.
By Friday afternoon all three children were outside. Etta was finishing her tree map. Linus had a working ramp system that ran from the porch down to a flowerbed. Solomon had abandoned the trap and was now digging a hole near the back fence for reasons he declined to explain.
Kerris told Jude, that evening on the porch, that the hardest part had not been the children's boredom. It had been her own discomfort at watching them be bored.
I kept reaching for a solution, she said. I had to keep putting my hand back in my pocket.
Jude wrote, in the small Moleskine she carried, that Kerris had used the phrase three times across the week. By Friday it had become a kind of household joke. Marcus said it once at dinner about a fork.
On Sunday morning, the day before camps and lessons would resume, Etta asked her mother whether they could do another week like that later in the summer.
Kerris said yes, but only one. She did not, Jude noticed, sound certain.
On the drive to the airport Monday morning, Jude thought about what she had seen, and decided that what had happened in that house was not a triumph. It was just a week. The children would go back to camps. The calendar would fill again.
But the trap was still in the yard, and the ramps were still on the porch, and Etta's map was on the refrigerator, and the week had happened. That, Jude thought, was probably enough to write down.
