Two feet of snow forecast for tonight; but now the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and the soil is thawing in my greenhouse. Spring is Maine's weirdest season.

I managed to write two lines of my poem this morning, in between loads of laundry and firewood, so perhaps Babbitt and my Footnote Week are wearing off. And I've started reading Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, already an excellent remedy for Sinclair Lewis. Plus, it has one of the sweetest opening paragraphs ever written:

To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and that house there was a room, and in that room there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl; wide awake and longing to get up, but not daring to do so for fear of the unseen power in the next room; a certain Betty, whose slumbers must not be disturbed until six o'clock struck, when she wakened of herself "as sure as clockwork," and left the household very little peace afterwards. It was a June morning, and early as it was, the room was full of sunny warmth and light.

Dinner tonight: porkchops and sauerkraut, garlic mashed potatoes, tomato salad.