* Tonight, Betsy Sholl and Lee Hope are reading at Common Street Arts in downtown Waterville, 7 p.m. Come down if you can. Betsy is a former poet laureate of Maine and an all-around wonderful poet and friend of poetry. Lee is a fiction writer who formerly directed the Stonecoast MFA program and is now editor-in-chief of the Solstice Literary Magazine.

* I am glumly watching local teenagers snipe at each other on Facebook. The fact that they are arguing about Syrian refugees does not make me feel any better.

* This morning, the daybreak sky was a matte lavender and the ground was a pulsating orange. The air between them was fraught but still. The overall effect was ominous, like a tornado warning. And then everything faded to drab.

* * *

Laura looked at Pa, who was greasing his boots. His mustaches and his hair and his long brown beard were silky in the lamplight, and the colors of his plaid jacket were gay. He whistled cheerfully while he worked, and then he sang:

"The birds were singing in the morning,
And the myrtle and the ivy were in bloom,
And the sun o'er the hills was a-dawning,
'Twas then that I laid her in the tomb."

It was a warm night. The fire had gone to coals on the hearth, and Pa did not build it up. All around the little house, in the Big Woods, there were little sounds of falling snow, and from the eaves there was the drip, drip of the melting icicles.

--Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods

* * *

Strong women
know the taste
of their own hatred
I must always be
building nests
in a windy place

--Audre Lorde, "Portrait"

* * *

Cher shopped for clothes to escape the pressure of our uncertain career.

--Sonny Bono, And the Beat Goes On

* * *

Great fame can be obtained
By routing an army
With oxen carrying
Burning straw on their horns.
But after all, it is
No more important than
The tracks of sandpipers.

--Lu Yu, "Autumn Thoughts," trans. Kenneth Rexroth