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I have to admit that I did not see this coming. There I was at the gym, at Teresa's Body Pump, aching (and I mean aching) between the shoulder rotation and abs, wondering how in the world that Teresa can sing—sing!—while we're all lifting that bar again and again, while we are all shaking and trembling, when I saw my phone blinking. It was a note from my friend Lynn Levin, congratulating me for a review of Nothing but Ghosts, in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.

I pretty much figured that the work-out had gotten to me, that I was seeing things.

But no. In fact, Katie Haegele, who writes such tremendous reviews of young adult books, had included Ghosts in her fall YA round up, along with titles like I Can't Keep My Own Secrets, Murder at Midnight, and Pop.

This is what she says. This is why I am so happy right now, while I type up this post. I can't help it. Ghosts, which like all my books celebrates this community in which I live, has been noticed in my own hometown. It has been seen.

Nothing But Ghosts
By Beth Kephart

Harper Teen. 288 pp. $17.99

Well, this is a treat. Beth Kephart, whose memoir A Slant of Sun was a National Book Award finalist, has written another one of her beautiful YA novels - this one set locally, with references to the Devon Horse Show and little kids in Phillies T-shirts. And ghosts. Katie lives with her father, an eccentric art restorer, in a big and otherwise empty house; her mother has just died, and Katie, only 16, throws herself into busyness to cope. She takes a summer job working with the grounds crew on an unusual building project at the estate of a reclusive heiress whom no one in town has laid eyes on for years, and soon finds herself preoccupied with the woman's secrets. The lovely things in these characters' lives - pebble gardens and groves of apple trees, an old painting of "a metropolis" that her father restores (or, as he says, "resolves") late at night in his studio-shed, an honest-to-goodness riddle-filled mystery - are like something from a dream, but Kephart's writing isn't what you'd call dreamy, poetic as it is. It's solid and serviceable, beautiful in its well-madeness like an antique chair.

Today: Awakened at 1:35 AM, I come downstairs and do not sleep. A few lines make their way to a blank page; I do not know if the lines are good.

Morning, then, and at the gym, I find Ann, an old friend, long lost; I'd once thought forever. In the large group room Theresa, leading the Body Pump class, has chosen the music of men. She turns her barbell into a guitar and sings her Aerosmith loud; the rest of us abide her antics, need her antics, love them. We don't scream the pain we feel. Many times a week Theresa leads this class and yet on Saturday it is as if we are her only students, her passion just for us.

Mid-morning and in my in-box I find the first official review of The Heart is Not a Size. I am overcome. The reader has found within my work just precisely what I hoped a reader would. A faster plot. The smell of dust. The have-everythings who learn from those who possess little.

Noon, and while shopping for the small dinner party that I'm throwing Sunday, I find my father at the Farmer's Market, sit with him while he eats his lunch. Then there is the frenzy of deciding and shopping. Yes, the serrano ham and the lavash, the strange apples from the Lancaster trees, the fatter berries and the insanely rotund scallions, and why not those tomatoes, which cannot decide what size they wish to be.

Mid afternoon, and I sit with the work of my fantastic Penn students, who move me to tears with the way that they think; I sit with Patricia Hampl. And then time alone with the Horace Kephart segments of the Ken Burns film, "America's Best Idea" (go to episode four, plays segments five and eleven). I don't care what you want to say about my great-grandfather. He did this country good. He saved what remained of the Great Smoky Mountains from the avaricious loggers, all the while knowing that once the park was made, it would not be his homeland anymore.

Later, a conversation with Andra. An email exchange with my friend Buzz. A note from Alyson Hagy, perhaps the grandest writing teacher of all.

Later, dinner.

Later, now.

Myself.

It's been about five weeks now since I left my house in the dark one morning and drove to the gym down the road. It wasn't that exercise was new to me; it was that I was used to doing it alone in my house. Dance and ball exercises in the morning. A walk in the afternoon. Enough cleaning each day to count for something.

But at the gym I have, as I have said before, encountered community—women and men who come together for the purpose of pressing up against their own limitations. Together we struggle, together we overcome, and when we can't—when we cannot go round three of the bicep curls, when we can't adapt to the new samba step, when we have to relinquish our eight-pound weights for the five-pound weights mid-way through the tricep thunder, we are not in the business of judging the other. There's something so brilliantly non-verbal about all of this. Stories that don't require words.

I wanted, this morning, to say something about the women who lead these classes—women for whom I have enormous respect. I wanted to talk about how it is to wake up to radiant energy—to borrow another's until it settles in as one's own. I find, today, that I don't have the words. Maybe there aren't words for this body thing. Maybe there's only thank you.