Well, the front stoop is gone, but what a job. Tom spent the entire day beating at bricks and concrete with hammers and pry bars. It was a beast of a chore, and now the driveway is stacked with rubble and the rotted sill glares out in full hideous evidence.

There wasn't much I could do to help, other than make lunch, tote rubble, and offer good cheer. So I caught up with herb processing: getting dried ones into jars, getting fresh ones into the freezer. I picked a final batch of Serrano peppers and strung them up to dry. I cleaned and prepped another batch of wild mushrooms. The freezer is pretty much at capacity now: I really ought to stop looking for mushrooms, but it's so hard to ignore the riches when I spot them.

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be heading north for an overnight before my Tuesday high school class. So today I'll deal with groceries and get a start on the weekly housework, though there's no point in trying to clean floors during an active construction project. I want to bake a pear and cranberry pie. I want to work on a poem draft. I want to help Tom in whatever way I can, though mostly I can't do anything except be friendly.

Still, when it comes to construction projects, good cheer and friendliness aren't nothing. The default is complain about the mess, complain about the noise, complain about boot dirt, not to mention complain about the cost. Carpenters take a lot of shit on the job. Meanwhile, what I am is thrilled that we're getting a new solid home improvement. Also, I really like this guy. I'll make a hot lunch for him anytime he wants one.

Our odd burst of summer has receded. This morning is chilly, and temperatures aren't forecast to get out of the low 60s. Good weather for working outside, which is exactly what Tom and I will be doing today. This morning he'll drive to the lumberyard pick up the new front door he ordered. And then he'll start tearing apart our front stoop, with me as his clumsy assistant. This will involve more than simply yanking apart old boards because the house's previous "handyman" made the idiot decision to cram a set of badly constructed plank stairs over a patched and crumbling set of brick ones. So T has two busted-up stoops to remove, and the condition of the brick one is as yet unknown. Will the bricks easily loosen and be salvageable? Or will he be beating at chunks of concrete with a big hammer? Stay tuned for the next thrilling installment of Stoop Wars.

Given these demolition issues, there's little chance of actually getting the new door installed this weekend, though T might find time to paint it. Still, I'm looking forward to the bustle. I love home repairs, despite the mess. Tom is such an extremely good carpenter: he is a pleasure to watch at work. And because he rarely has time to put his skills to use on our own place, every little project is very exciting. Our current front-door situation is terrible. The casing is warped and crooked and rotten. The storm door leaks rain. And the door itself is ugly and windowless. I can't wait for a fine tight new door that lets in daylight, not to mention having a stoop with evenly spaced steps and a functional railing. What luxury.

It's 65 degrees this morning, so strangely summery after a few evenings of wood fires and couch blankets. Out to dinner last night with a friend, we sat at a sidewalk table in the gloaming, marveling at the soft air. And now crickets are singing in the darkness and Chuckie perches happily beside the open screen door and I wonder if I might go back to wearing the sandals I thought I had put away for the season.

Yesterday I beetled among class plans and workshops plans, and then suddenly, after lunch, I had had enough. No more. My brain was done. I did a few house chores, I read my book, but desk work could take a hike. So it will be interesting to see what my brain decides to allow today. To be fair, it's gotten me quite far this week: all of that editing swept away, all of those classes prepped. Maybe it will soften and allow me to mess around with a few poems or my chapbook. Or maybe it will march me outside to work in the garden. Or maybe it will require me to drive to Mall Land and buy some sheets without holes in them. I await my orders.

I'm happy to report that yesterday I shoved the last of those three editing projects off my to-do list. I know another big job will show up shortly in my inbox, but that one will be far less time-sensitive: I can spoon it in around the edges of everything else, and there will be a lot of everything else in October. Two Monson, Maine, USA performances, long days of rehearsal at Bowdoin, the Belfast Poetry Festival, the Word Literary Festival, my Monson classes, a morning with Bates students . . . It's a packed month, and I feel squinty and overwhelmed just thinking about it.

But at least I am gradually getting my planning under control. The other big thing I accomplished yesterday was to finish the syllabus for the November Poetry Kitchen class on Grimms' fairy tales. So that is out of my hair, and today I can turn my thoughts to prepping for Tuesday's Monson session and pulling together the workshop I'll be leading in Belfast.

On top of everything else, I'm turning 62 next Wednesday, which also happens to be the first anniversary of Baron's death. I've always been emotional about my birthdays, those formal markers of waning time.  I love life, and I'm never gloomy about adding another year to my ticket. But loss does thicken, and autumn is always elegiac. It can't help itself. And so there's a poignancy to my looming birthday . . . a celebration and a sigh.

One more small editing project to finish today, and then I am out from under, at least for the moment. There are so many other tasks wailing at me and tugging at my skirt. I need to get ready for next week's Monson class, I need to finish prepping for my November Poetry Kitchen class, I need to return to planning the chapbook I'll be doing with the printer David Wolfe, I need to start reading the Berryman collection, I need to actually write poems again . . . 

But at least that giant editing project is off my desk. And I did get the housework done, and I did catch up on thinking-ahead grocery shopping so that the freezer is now stocked with protein basics that I can plan around as I'm coming and going. We don't have a big deep-freeze, just the small box freezer over the refrigerator. So my stock-up-ahead space is limited, and it's already bulging with tomato sauce, peaches, blueberries, chicken broth, sweet peppers, wild mushrooms, corn, chard, basil, parsley . . . But all of that will disappear quickly, once the garden shuts down for the season.

It's funny: for some people I know, the homestead urge--to save, store, squirrel away--doesn't intersect with any interest in actually cooking. Despite a freezer stuffed with produce, they're still mostly opening canned soup for dinner. The freezer boxes sit in perpetuity, with next summer's produce tossed on top of them. This is an odd disconnect, a weird version of hoarding, maybe. I've seen the same thing happen with firewood: the restless fear of running out of wood, so that every tiny branch is cut and stacked in every corner of the yard, where they slowly rot away under snow and time.

So often, the desire to save overshadows the desire to use. When we bought our house in Harmony, we found box after box stuffed into the crawl space over the shop, all filled with neatly cut strips of foam-based acoustic tiles of the sort that were popular in ugly schools in the 1970s--each strip maybe 10 inches long and 2 inches wide . . . completely useless for anything, but how long did it take to cut those scraps to size, to neatly fill those boxes, to lug them up a ladder and stack them tidily for "the future"?

It's still raining, lightly, lightly. What a gorgeous storm this has been--so long and slow. The grass has greened again, the plants have relaxed . . . and yesterday morning on my walk I found exactly what I had hoped to find: a huge gift of maitake mushrooms nestled among the roots of an oak tree.

Those are dishpans you're looking at, each one loaded with dripping-wet mushrooms--probably ten or fifteen pounds. And needless to say, with this many mushrooms to process, my plans for the day changed suddenly. I did finish the editing project, but I pushed all of the housework aside because dealing with this amount of treasure requires hours of slow washing, trimming, and then cooking. In the end four quarts went into the freezer, I roasted a bowlful for dinner, and we are in mushroom Eden around here. Maitakes are, as they say in the biz, choice. 

Yesterday a couple of my poems appeared in the new issue of the Maine Arts Journal, along with an introduction by my dear Betsy Sholl. Anything Betsy writes about my work makes me cry; her affection and approbation are among the sweetest things I know. As an apprentice poet in the woods I admired her so much from afar. Sometimes it is hard for me to believe that we really are friends now.

Today I'll catch up on the housework I shoved to the side yesterday and then turn my thoughts to finishing a second editing assignment. I ought to make appointments for Covid and flu shots, and I certainly should take a trip to the fish market to restock the freezer. Now that I'm on school time again, I need to reconfigure my meal planning accordingly. No more idle forays: when I come home late, the materials for dinner must be waiting for me.

But of course there's always the possibility I might find another giant cache of mushrooms on my walk . . .

It's been raining for close to 24 hours now and will likely continue for most of another 24. It's been a long time since we've had this much rain, and it's been perfect: no gale-force downpours and the rain falling slow enough so that the ground has a chance to absorb it.

I kept a little fire going all day yesterday, just for the pleasure of idling beside it. I did accomplish a few useful things, but mostly I nursed my cold, and this morning I do feel like I'm on the mend. It was never a very large cold, just a small first-day-of-school reminder, but still it left me slow-bodied and slow-witted. A rainy Sunday at home was a convalescent's dream.

This morning I'll be back to work: first, a walk and mushroom hunt in the rain; then weekly housework, a zoom meeting, and with luck I'll also manage to finish my editing project. Pan-roasted spicy chicken is on the docket for dinner, alongside fresh salsa and guacamole and buttered Swiss chard. I need to run a couple of errands. I'd like to work on a poem but likely won't have time. I'm finishing up Niall Williams's This Is Happiness and then I'll start on John Berryman's Dream Songs (my next reading project with Teresa) and Ruth Moore's A Walk down Main Street, about high school basketball in 1950s-era Maine.

***

One thing I did accomplish on my convalescent day was to send out the first fundraising letter for the Baron Wormser Scholarship for Teachers. Baron died last October--on my birthday--so now seemed like a good time to announce this initiative and to think again about how much he gave to the world. Here's the letter I sent out. If you can donate to the fund, I would be so grateful--

Announcing the Baron Wormser Scholarship for Teachers

Last October we lost our friend and mentor Baron Wormser to brain cancer. As the first anniversary of that loss approaches, I have been thinking again about the hole his absence has left. So many of us were changed by his writings, his teaching, his comradeship. He built a space for many people who might not otherwise have known we belonged to the poetry world. He helped us to find one another, and to find ourselves.

Perhaps Baron’s greatest public service was his devotion to teachers and to young people. When he founded the Conference on Poetry and Teaching at the Frost Place more than two decades ago, he threw out a lifeline to teachers who had been struggling to balance their own creative longings with their responsibility to their students as well as with the burdens of institutional requirements and increasing political pressure. The conference quickly attracted participants from around the United States and beyond. Though it began by focusing on K–12 educators, it was soon welcoming community college and university professors, MFA candidates, teaching artists, people working in social service and government positions, even poets with no institutional affiliation who were simply drawn to the collegial, democratic nature of the conference.

After Baron retired as director of the conference in 2012, I was honored to shoulder the work he’d begun. Now, after nearly a quarter-century at the Frost Place, it is thriving today as the Conference on Poetry and Learning, held each July at Monson Arts in central Maine.

In honor of Baron, I am announcing the establishment of the Baron Wormser Scholarship for Teachers, a full scholarship to the conference that will be awarded annually to a K–12 inservice teacher who could not otherwise afford to attend.

If you would like to honor Baron with a donation to this scholarship fund, I would be immensely grateful. Simply follow this link and scroll through the donation options until you find “Conference on Poetry and Learning (Baron Wormser Donation).”

Your support of the conference helps us continue the work that Baron began. He believed that poetry opened a window into the best of humanity. Our teachers and our young people are the future we must cherish.