Thank you all for your sweet and generous responses to yesterday's post.

I also noticed new comments on the Rilke's letters; so if you're keeping up with that conversation, you might want to check in.

Today I'll be prepping for a workshop I'm team-teaching tomorrow afternoon: a writing session with a local domestic-violence support group. I'll be working with a social worker who is is also one of my dearest friends in the world; but we've never taught together before, so everything will be new. I'm excited, though, to get my visiting-writer shtick out of the English classroom, and anyone who's followed this blog for a few years knows I myself been grappling with the fallout of a particularly loathsome household murder that destroyed the family of an old friend . .  the very friend whom I am meeting this morning: to walk together up a dirt road in the humid fog; to watch woodchucks and partridges scuttle ditch to ditch; to listen to the distant rumble of logging machinery in the forest; to talk in circles around what remains of her ragged, damaged heart.