Today is a home day: reading essays, mostly, but also running errands before the snow starts to fall. My teaching partner and I are fretting a bit about tomorrow's forecast. A snow day would be fun but would also mess up our residency schedule. To think that I would ever be ambivalent about a snow day! But when you only have a brief block of time, without much stretch in it, losing class time is a problem.

I've been copying out both Dante's Inferno and Manning's Bucolics. I've got the poem drafts I scribbled in Longfellow's house to mess around with. I'm still plowing through Johnson's The Birth of the Modern. I finished Waugh's The Loved One and I may start rereading some Alice Munro stories today. I've got a Mozart violin concerto on the music stand, and an embryo apron in my sewing basket, and I ought to think about ordering garden seeds. There will be plenty to do when the essays run out.

Lately I've been feeling so bee-busy, bustling around my daily flower garden, bumping into this and that . . . reading a manuscript here, checking a proof there, planning a workshop beside the honeysuckle, editing a poem under a leaf, dipping into this book and then that book, buzzing out into the open field. It's an odd present-tense satisfaction: all of this small bumping and browsing constructs a pattern of motion . . . backward, forward, toward, away. And I'm not worrying about what it means, what I'm accomplishing. Very likely nothing. But the bee is unconcerned.