This is a hectic week. Even as I pull things together after my long ramble with my son, I'm prepping for a weekend with Tom up at Acadia. It will be a social whirl of Frost Place friends, Maine writer friends, and old family friends, plus the pleasures of mountains and sea in the springtime. I'm excited but I'm also kind of exhausted, and I hope I can manage to do everything that needs to be done.

My plan is to devote most of today to outdoor chores. The weather will be beautiful, and I have seedlings to plant and garden beds to weed and maple saplings to murder. I've begun rereading Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd and thus I am feeling sentimental about lambing season, which in real life is hardly a sentimental subject but a long exhausting round of blood, dirt, pain, and often death. Hardy doesn't overlook those actualities, but for whatever reason my nostalgia is.

I spent yesterday afternoon working with my high school students on the final revisions of their poems and, as always, was overwhelmed by the richness of their imaginations and their experiences. Every single student in the class produced tremendous work. All of them took the task seriously. And afterwards, I walked home along the violet-edged streets, under the blooming dogwoods, alongside the fading tulips and the budding lilacs.

I live here now. And that notion is still so strange to me.