Another miserable 10-below morning. When will this weather ever break? Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the Olympic ski trails are melting. Ugh.

I've started reading proofs for The Conversation, and I'll do more of that today, along with some student mentoring and some poem copying: maybe more Atwood, maybe some Justice, possibly some Akhmatova. Maybe I'll draft another western Pennsylvania poem, but I'm also feeling as if I need to stand back from that project, that I need to breathe for a day or two. I'm brain-tired, and also fidgety, and of course I'm freezing cold. My friend Linda and I walked a couple of miles yesterday at 5-below. It could have been worse. It could have been windy. Or 10-below.

But June really does come back every year: and now Frost Place conference applications are starting to appear in my inbox, and Teresa is getting all excited about this summer's featured Frost poem, and I am vaguely starting to imagine that it might be possible to sit on Bob's front porch without wearing full Antarctic regalia.

[Frost's] first summer in Franconia was memorable. [His wife] Elinor liked having a home of her own again, after so many years, and the children immersed themselves in country pleasures: blueberry picking, long walks in the woods, swimming in the Ham branch of the Gale River, which ran nearby. Frost often played baseball with the children, and he began playing sandlot ball again with local farmhands. 

As Bob also remarked:  "The whole point of farming was shirking duties."

[Both quotations are from Robert Frost: A Life, by Jay Parini.]