Neighborhood stories: Let's start with this young man. On Thursday morning I looked up from my book and  he was staring through the living-room window at me. I know deer frequently travel through farther-flung neighborhoods, areas closer to the city's forest trail system, but no one in our more urban setting has ever seen a deer here before. Tom glimpsed him again that evening, but since then no more sightings. Let's hope he's found his way back to the woods.

And then there's Jack, the cat who lives across the street and who is my baby-sitting charge for the next few days. In a classic cat bribery scheme, he convinced the wind to suddenly blow open the back door I'd just walked through and instantly made his escape. Jack is a hardened outdoorsman so I wasn't too worried, and in fact he did return for recapture later that morning but, jeesh, cats. Today he won't find me so soft.

Jack is a well-known local eccentric. When I asked my next-door neighbor to keep me posted if she saw him, she rolled her eyes without worry: we all know that Jack will do whatever Jack wants. There's community comfort in our mild gossip about weirdos such as Jack, the world's nosiest civil servant, always prying into everyone else's business . . . but do not try to pet him. Nothing insults him more.

Meanwhile, the weather! What a day we had yesterday--soft swirling wind, bright sunshine, perfect temperatures. I decided to do no garden work but take a day to enjoy the space: sit among the flowers, wander my small pathways, lean back and stare up into the canopy, listen to birdsong. I wrote two poem drafts; I practiced the violin. It was a perfect day.

What's more, Jack's family gets a farmshare delivery once a week, which they couldn't use this time so asked if I'd like it. You know how slow my vegetable garden has been this spring, and I was thrilled. Unpacking the box was like getting a Christmas present in June: new potatoes, beets and beet greens, chard, kale, lemon balm, dill, lettuce, even a celeriac. Last night we ate marinated flank steak with baby herbed potatoes alongside roasted greens--a big plate of summer . . . windows open, neighborhood babies cooing, and on the radio the Yankees losing to the Orioles.

Yes, yes, you know I miss Harmony; you know central Maine is my homeland; you know all about my forever woods loneliness. But gosh: there are days when I am floored by this place where I so reluctantly ended up. Deering Center, land of tiny lush gardens and tree-shaded sidewalks; its staid domestic history--rows of close-set family houses, most built between the 1890s and the 1930s (with a few 1940s interlopers such as my own). In the summer evenings the air rings with the sounds of big kids playing foursquare in the streets, toddlers cackling in the yards. Neighbors actually lean over the fences to talk to one another. It is like living in a My Three Sons episode.

The house windows were open all night, and I woke to robin song--trill, burble, and question; trill, burble, and question; again and again and again.

It is a warm and humid dawn. I suppose we will have to lug the a/c out of the basement this weekend, though I so much prefer real air. But already the upstairs is muggy, and true hot weather hasn't even kicked in yet.

Thank goodness I went out to write last night. It felt really good to be with the poets, after my two-week absence, and now my notebook is peppered with useful scratchings and, just like that, my poem-making itch has returned.

I am full of eagerness. 

The little northern city by the sea is swaddled in a warm wet blanket of fog, and the birds are singing crazily, and summer is about to blossom. Today the climbing roses, loaded with buds, will explode into crimson glory. Today I'll open all of the windows and put on sandals for my walk to the dentist. Today I'll sit on the front stoop with a glass of ice tea and watch the neighborhood babies wave bare feet as their strong mothers shove strollers up the hill.

Yesterday I posted a new Poetry Kitchen class, "The Morality of Imagination: Writing into Other Lives," a two-day generative and revision session inspired by Shelley's "Defence of Poetry." Though registration's been live for less than 24 hours, the class is already half full, so you might want to sign up quickly if you're at all interested.

Meanwhile, I've been reading a couple of Le Carre novels I plucked from free piles and musing over how deeply sorrowful they are. I know I've said this before, but does anyone write better about loneliness? I am not a spy-thriller aficionado, but his writing moves me deeply. He is to his genre what McMurtry is to the western: a novelist who manipulates routine plot and style expectations in ways that draw the reader into a complex and painful relationship with character, landscape, history, and language.

Tonight, after a two-week hiatus, I hope to finally get back to my writing group. In the meantime, I've got the house to clean, and some desk work to handle, and that aforementioned dentist appointment to endure. And a summer day to love.

 It's drizzly outside, and much warmer than it has typically been in the early mornings--already in the low 60s instead of our usual mid-40s or low 50s. I expect the plants are very, very happy.

Yesterday I finished another full round of weeding, and now every bed is in good shape. I've caught up on pruning and deadheading, and for the moment the place looks as good as it can look, given the ugliness of the house siding and the various gaps and snaggles in the yard infrastructure.

I finished Proulx's Barkskins yesterday. For such a massive book (700 pages or so), it was a surprisingly quick read, and quite interesting as well--a giant novel about the lumber industry may not sound scintillating, but it actually was, though the ending dropped into environmental preachiness . . . morally admirable, of course, but novelistically annoying.

This afternoon I'll have my monthly zoom confab with Teresa and Jeannie. This morning I'm not sure what I'll be doing with myself: going for a walk in the rain; maybe washing the upstairs windows; ideally, writing a poem, but who knows? Right now I am in an intense reading state; I am awash in other people's words . . . poems, novels, meditations. If that's what my heart desires, why should I argue?

Still, it's been an odd week so far . . . spacious, lonesome . . . books and books and garden and garden . . . I'm curious to see what happens next.

Another cool and cloudy day on the horizon--though, believe it or not, we actually could use some rain. Things have dried out a lot since our last round of downpours. A little rain today and tonight would set the garden up nicely for the hot weather that's forecast to roll in later this week.

I've been waiting for another editing project to appear, so my work responsibilities have been scatty so far this week. Mostly I've been catching up on various reading projects--working my way through Patricia Smith's Unshuttered, starting Cecile Wajsbrot's Nevermore, finishing Maria Zoccala's Helen of Troy, 1993, and plowing into Annie Proulx's Barkskins. The stack on the coffee table is high.

Today will be more of the same, plus errands, plus weeding, mowing, and pruning, if the rain allows. I always feel sheepish about these blips of off-time, as if I should be doing "real" work rather than my own work, and I wish I didn't have to constantly wrestle with my own clear awareness that I am not wasting time. But such is the power of the past. At least I'm not giving in to those lies.

I woke this morning to learn that I've got a new poem up on Vox Populi . . . yet another elegy to 1970s western Pennsylvania. I don't know when I'll ever be done with that topic. It surfaces and resurfaces. It gives me no choice.

Another Monday. With school out, my walk will be quiet this morning. Deering Center features an elementary school, a middle school, a high school, and a college campus, all lined up, one after the other, on Stevens Avenue. It is the most educational of neighborhoods, and on school mornings and afternoons the streets are afloat with hand-holding parents and kindergartners, gaggles of lurching sixth graders, high schoolers clutching giant sugar drinks, jogging college students encased in headphones.

So in the summer the sidewalks are notably empty--just middle-aged trudgers, and dog servants, and strung-out parents with babies, and self-flagellating exercisers, and the occasional grouchy teenager muttering into a phone.

Speaking of self-flagellating exercisers, I did finally roll my bike out of the shed yesterday, dusted it off, pumped up the tires, and then T and I went for a spin--a delightful ride; I don't know why I took so long to get around to riding season. It was nothing but fun, and I'm not at all sore today, so why was I so slow?

Possibly because I was too busy writing the same poem for the twentieth time. 

No surprise: attendance at yesterday's reading was tiny. Poets love demonstrating, and I'm glad so many of them were out on the streets where they needed to be. But it was a pleasant reading despite the minuscule crowd, and a bit of a distraction from family stuff: my elderly father has come down with Covid, so my sister and I have been in a constant state of text-triage.

Other than that continuing saga, I've got nothing on the docket for today. I hope to mow grass, and I need to do the grocery shopping, and I'd like to finally get my bike out of the shed and prep it for riding season.

And I'm longing to turn on the poem faucet again. I've been so roiled up with travel and obligation that I've barely touched my own real work. I keep going into the world and reading poems, and then feeling the tug of emptiness because I am not writing any poems at the moment. The loneliness of not making: it is as real a sorrow as any other.