Drizzle and fog all day yesterday, but today will be drier. We're getting a load of firewood dumped in the driveway first thing this morning, and this afternoon I'll begin moving and stacking. I need to clear out the driveway wood quickly, because next week a truckload of garden soil is arriving to take its place. I guess it's wheelbarrow season. Good thing I have a new sidewalk.

Fortunately (I guess), my desk work has slowed to a trickle. Yesterday I wrote a few rough essay paragraphs, and this morning I'll try to chisel out a few more. I know how I want to shape the piece, but for some reason my progress is slow. Distractions, I suppose: conversations, fretful and infuriated, but also funny and hopeful, spanning the petty and the tragic . . .  With my poet sister Teresa, shaking our disbelieving heads over Byron the unreliable narrator. With my neighbor Valerie, confabulating with me about how to increase our shared quince crop. With my honorary niece Lucy, cutting kale in the rain and laughing about kittens. With my faraway mother and father and sister and son, desultory chat about baseball and laundry and birthdays and recipes and weird rashes and and and.

Well, I should stop fiddling with this letter to you and go find money to pay the firewood guy. And then I should make fresh coffee for Tom to take to work, and run a load of laundry so that Paul has a clean mask for work. And then I should sit down and write about what it felt like to meet a particular poem for the first time, at a moment when I was not quite a poet myself but wondering if I could become one.