Yesterday--hurray!--I finished and shipped one of my editing projects, so today I'll turn my attention to a Brazilian novel translation I'm checking and to the giant stack of residency applications teetering on my desktop.

Midday yesterday I walked to the University of New England campus to talk to the archivist about officially beginning to transfer materials to the Maine Women Writers Collection, and now, oddly, or maybe not oddly, I feel light and almost free. It is such a relief to think: okay, here is a place that cares about my muddle. Even if nobody other than a librarian ever looks at my files or papers, there they'll be, in the company of a thousand other striving, private, secretive, urgent, awkward Maine women.

One of our concerns is this very blog. It's pretty much the first thing I'm going to sign over to the archive for safekeeping. Given that I've been writing an almost daily note since 2008, and that it's already public, we see no reason to hold off. If the Blogger platform were to crash and disappear at any moment, this blog would evaporate into the crevices of the Internet. It's really the closest thing I have to a regular diary or correspondence, so MWWC will be looking into the best way to capture and preserve it on its secure servers. I feel happy about that, for no particular reason . . . except that I wrote it, and it's my history, and it's an intangible document that I cannot physically hold or protect.

Meanwhile, the Senate trial. The disappearing birds. The terrified children. The graft and the lies.

I think of you, my friends. I hold out my hands.