Yesterday my window views featured rosy-faced sledders and bouncing dogs and a beautiful Currier and Ives snow. Last night the snow changed over to freezing rain, and this morning there is slush and muck and flooded storm drains and gloomy people who can't get their cars unstuck.

Already Tom has vanished into the world--off to the wood shop to build closet shelves and a teeny-tiny kitchen counter. I will wash our breakfast dishes in the doll's sink and then navigate through the slush to the grocery store.

Yesterday, though, we were home together all day, except for a brief foray to the bakery for bread (another teeth-gnashing purchase: I can't bake bread if I don't have a functioning stove). The living/dining room is now mostly arranged, and here are a couple of pictures from different angles. Somehow Tom the Design King has figured out how to make a little crowded room seem almost airy . . . though the very tall ceilings do help. If I were a better photographer, you would have a better grasp of the arrangement.

In and among unpacking and arranging, I also managed to copy out a few Lucille Clifton poems. They are just right for my state of mind: tonic and often scratchy but mostly very short, so that I can harness my shifting attention into tiny bursts of concentration. Tomorrow morning I'll be talking to the program director of a local student writing collective about the possibility of working for him as a teaching artist, and I've got a couple of new editing projects waiting in the wings. My band has set a mid-January gig date, which will take me back north to the homeland, and the following week I'll be driving down to Massachusetts to teach at Smith College. So I'll be falling into new-old ways of doing my same old work. I'm trying not to agonize about the still-unresolved water issues at the Harmony house. I am trying to focus on the fact that an island in fog is floating outside my window.