What a day to be outside . . . high 50s, a springlike wind, the streets running with snowmelt, windows open, and me squinting into the sunshine with a book and cat on the front stoop. But that was yesterday. Today we're back to winter, with freezing rain on the docket for tonight.

The essay I assigned my class for this week was James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son." If you have not read it lately, you need to go back to it. I think it may be one of the most extraordinary pieces of prose of the twentieth century. I'm no scholar, but this essay is on fire.

So that's how I spent my hours yesterday: reading Baldwin, reading student drafts, reading a writer friend's wonderfully strange verse-fiction manuscript, splashing in puddles in the spring air, working on a poem draft, planning my love-poem workshop, folding laundry, talking to my mother, roasting a chicken. It was a day from heaven.