Sunday was an autumn day--cool, bright, blue-skied--so naturally my thoughts turned to firewood. I spent the morning awkwardly counting stairs and watching my feet as I negotiated armload after armload down into the basement. It was a pain, but now we have at least half of our dry wood down there for easy access on snow days. Someday, when we can afford an efficient fireplace insert, I'll have to carve out a bigger space for more wood, but the tiny little stove we've currently got makes no pretensions to being anything other than a space heater. Still, a space heater can be a joy and a comfort on a rainy evening, and that's what tonight is supposed to be. So I wanted to be ready.

We spent the rest of the day wandering around the neighborhood listening to the bands playing at Deering Center's annual Porchfest. They were very entertaining, with my favorite being the Fletcher Brothers, who appeared to be about 14 years old but who knew how to play their instruments and had clearly spent much time listening to their parents' Ramones records. At another venue Senator Angus King showed up and gave a brisk speech to a small crowd that mostly didn't expect him to be there. But we were willing to be friendly, and he was willing to be humane, so even the politicking was tolerable.

Today I'll clean house, grocery shop, wash clothes, try to mow grass and pick vegetables before rain, and otherwise do stuff I ought to have done over the weekend. I'm also going to write. I'm expecting an editing project to arrive at any moment, and I've got two full days of teacher training later in the week, so word space will become increasingly precious. Still, I've got a harvest to mull, even if I run out of time to make new poems. The sheaf is large enough for me to start wondering how the pieces connect and what I'll need to imagine next.

This week I also plan to move forward on the Richard III schedule . . . maybe by tomorrow or Wednesday. I'll see how my time shakes out.