Early last month, when the pandemic began in the United States, the Frost Place asked staff members if they'd like to share a writing prompt to help people distract and comfort themselves. I agreed, and now I'm offering the prompt to you in case you might be looking for some quiet way to imagine and sympathize with your world, or with other worlds. You don't have to think of yourself as a writer to engage with this prompt. Your response doesn't need to be in verse. There are no obligations of any sort. I'm just offering it, in case you need it.

It's cold in Portland this morning, temperature hovering at freezing. I'm still lighting the wood stove every evening. But spring won't be squelched. Early tulips are budding, and violets are blooming along the house foundation. I can cut a fistful of chives for myself, and have plenty left to offer to my neighbor.

Yesterday was Paul's day off from class, so he made a beautiful walnut cake, and filmed me reading a poem, and did some late-day driving practice with Tom in parking lots and on cemetery roads (someday, maybe, the DMV will open again, and then he'll be ready to take the test). Meanwhile, I wrote answers to interview questions, and gritted my teeth and got filmed, and served as a cake-making consultant, and edited a book about a communist spy, and roasted a chicken, and mashed potatoes, and won a card game.

And last night I got some good news: I've been awarded a $500 grant from the Maine Artist Relief Fund--a welcome speck of compensation for the gig work I've lost and am continuing to lose. It will buy groceries or pay the oil bill. I'm grateful for the aid, and for the Maine Arts Commission, which so quickly organized this emergency program.

Our family economy is an amalgam of art making and physical labor. So when I listen to people talk about the privilege of self-quarantining, I want to point out that class lines are not solid and that notions about professionalism can be poisonous. I may be skilled at advising young writers and composing elegant sentences, but without a functioning gig system those high-toned skills are financially worthless. Tom may be a RISD-educated artist, but his daily job in construction requires him, even at the best of times, to take enormous physical risks. Art collides with essential services. We are fragile, terrified, expendable. No wonder we have nightmares.