Overall our first Monday of the apocalypse was manageable. Though the day was poisoned by the amount of time I had to spend on the phone with insurance companies, I did finish editing a chapter. I talked with the Monson administrator about plans for our high schoolers. Members of my poetry group are cogitating about a Zoom-based meeting to share our ongoing work. Paul and I went for a long walk and ran into most of our neighbors, also out on the street, walking and running and coping. So, keeping our six-foot distance, we were even sociable. For dinner I sautéed a huge slab of Faroe Island salmon and made Yorkshire pudding and a cherry-tomato salad. The leftover salmon (not as much as I'd hoped, thanks to my giant boy) went into the freezer to round out some future meal. I soaked dry beans for tonight's dinner (spicy beans with cornmeal dumplings).

Our new mayor, whom I used to know as a friendly member of my yoga class, has suddenly become an emergency manager. The city of Portland has instituted a curfew for restaurants and bars. I expect full-bore closures are imminent. Tom is continuing to work, for the moment. Maybe he'll finish out this week; I can't imagine it will be longer.

I've been thinking about disaster reading. So far my list includes Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter and Samuel Pepys's plague diaries. I don't know that I'll actually bring myself to open either book. Right now I seem to be gravitating toward 1940s British wartime fiction and Cold War spy novels.

My son chose Fleetwood Mac's Rumors as dinner music. Everyone is looking for coziness. You may ask why a 22-year-old would find that album cozy: his explanation is that his friends play it a lot at parties because they grew up listening to it with their parents. (Of course his own parents don't even own a copy of Rumors. They made him listen to the Ramones.)

Tom's new job is requiring him to get up and out of the house a full two hours earlier than he used to. So the alarm is going off at 4:30 every morning. With the boy still asleep and Tom on the road, this will give me time alone, first thing, so I'll be trying to make use of it. Today, after I tidy up the kitchen and take a shower and get the laundry started, I'll copy out some Rilke and some Blake. I'll look at a poem draft. Then I'll get started on editing. I hope beginning the day with my own work will be strengthening. My usual pattern has been to fit it into the interstices of everything else. But all usual patterns have changed.

Thinking of you, friends.