I have written many letters this week. Two were long ones to old acquaintances that I haven't seen for years, so they were autobiographical in a "let me tell you what I've been doing for the past 20 years" kind of way, though I found myself scrupulously avoiding all mention of writing. Why is that, I wonder? Both of these old acquaintances knew me in high school, when all I did was read books, play the violin, and moon over boys and animals. Thirty years later, that's still all I do. I've led a very consistent life. But in my letters to these friends, I found myself focusing on my children, how Tom and I ended up in Harmony, how I'm looking for a job but am, of course, unhireable. I make myself sound like an undereducated hausfrau, and I know it's because both of these friends have relatively high-powered, well-paying, prestigious-sounding "real" careers. It's so stupid of me to act like this: the best I can say is that I'm well aware that it's stupid, but at least for this first round of reconnection, I'm not able to override it.

But I also wrote a different sort of letter. This correspondence was with another old friend, not a high school acquaintance but a woman whom I'd met when I was looking for a place to board my goat while Tom and I were living in an apartment in Providence and he was going to RISD. She was older than me, a grown-up when I was still a callow youth, but we really liked each other. I spent a lot of time on her farm, and we were both frantic consumers of books. We began sharing volumes back and forth: all of Trollope's novels, contemporary novels and histories, books and books and books. I was at an age when I read anything that anyone would hand to me, and she introduced me to many books, good and bad, that I would never have otherwise met. After I moved to Maine, she moved out west and we gradually lost touch. But recently her house burned down in a wildfire, and she lost all of her possessions, so she wrote to us, asking if Tom had negatives of any of the photos he'd taken of her Massachusetts farm. He printed a stack of new pictures for her; and then the other day I got an email from her in which she said she was re-buying all my books. It was news to me that she'd ever owned any of my books, but it turns out that she had, that she'd been reading what I was writing. You are so lucky to be living your dream, she told me, which was also news to me. Have I been living my dream? I suppose I have. Truly, I never fantasized about having a job that paid the bills. I did fantasize about books and books and books, with a little bit of music thrown in, and a great deal of romance cementing the whole. And while the entire structure of this fantasy has turned out to be more like a slapdash and unsteady Lego parking garage than a Frank Gehry museum, still, here it is, not quite toppling over.

Finally, I wrote a third sort of letter--to another poet, whom I have never met, never corresponded with before this week; about whom I have few preconceived notions . . . but our letters have been whirlwinds of "oh, my God, this is what I see, and this is what I did, and this is what the past was like, and this is how I walk down the street, and this is what the words don't say, and this is what I understand just barely how I might rethink, and. . . ." In other words, I have had an epiphanic mind-meld conversation with a complete stranger and I'm fairly sure that she feels the same way that I do, and the sensation is a 50-year-old poet version of a teen crush. Who knows if it will last? Very likely not. But golly.