Monday morning and the humidity is back. At least the temperatures aren't supposed to be obscene, as they were last week, though the air does feel nervy and unsettled. 

Yesterday was so beautiful and cool, and I got a lot done outside: grass mowing and tomato pruning and hole digging for four more shrubs: an Arctic Fire dogwood along the backyard fence, which will be a spot of brilliant red in the snow; a black-lace elderberry and a Czechmark Trilogy weigela in the Shed Patch garden, both of which will bloom pink in the spring; and a Winemark smoke bush in the grassy Hill Country zone by the road--fluffy midsummer purple blooms and round purple leaves that will blush brilliant orange in the fall. As you can see, I've got my mind on seasonal color.

Mostly today I'll be working on Frost Place stuff, with some housework and sauce making thrown in around the edges. I've still got an unfinished poem draft niggling at me, and I want to do some reading as well. And I've got to call the garage and mea culpa about missing my car-inspection appointment. Blah.

The book I've been reading, Homesickness, is drier than I would like, but I'll persevere with it, in hopes of finding first-person remarks that can guide me more directly into the state of mind. I've already found a few; for instance: "An attempt in 1607 to colonize along the Kennebec River in Maine lasted for just a year. A seventeenth-century report explained, "They[,] after a winter stay dreaming to themselves of new hopes at home[,] returned back with the first occasion." I wasn't even particularly looking for Maine references, but there it was.

Otherwise, I'm reading Richard Wright's poems, the Alexander translation of the Iliad, and I need a novel for filling around the edges because I'm fresh out of Tessa Hadley's. I guess this is what I do when the children move out of the house: I start grief-reading everything in sight. Some mothers eat chips to survive. Some get drunk on the idea of acquiring a copy of Gilgamesh.