The wind is blowing cold and hard. Pine needles are sifting onto the carpet. When I walk across the kitchen, James's dusty garland decorations keep snatching at the top of my head. I'm trying to parcel out the pittance I have available for donations to worthy causes, to figure out which causes are more worthy than which other causes, to find stamps, to convince the wood stove to stay lit, to remember what time to fetch Paul back from his sleepover. And so on and so on.

I'm also fretting over my anthology's table of contents, imminently due to the publisher, and concomitantly fretting over the vagaries of interlibrary loan, which is a wonderful idea transformed into an aggravating reality. Really, it should not be all that difficult for a librarian to locate the selected essays of Gary Snyder somewhere in the state of Maine. And yet she cannot. Moreover, she tells me that Garcia Lorca's essays are entirely unavailable, which can't possibly be true since it took me about 2 seconds to order them online. The entire system, at least as practiced in central Maine, seems to depend on hand-scrawled instructions sprinkled here and there in a shabby spiral notebook crammed with loose pages. Probably your library functions differently.