Five a.m. on a Sunday morning, and the alarm is shrilling because Tom is catching an early ferry to Peaks Island. Despite the early hour, it's still kind of a vacation for me because he's making the coffee. He'll be out there all day taking photos, and I'll be here all day messing around with my stuff: making bread, planting bulbs, washing floors, reading manuscripts, raking leaves, talking about Nancy Drew, and such.

Five a.m. is a ridiculously early time to be up and about on a Sunday morning, but it's actually sort of relaxing to watch someone else rushing around to catch a boat while I'm not even beginning to think about doing anything constructive. After he leaves I'll tidy up the kitchen and take a shower, and throw some laundry into the machine, all at putter-speed instead of weekday get-cracking-speed. Good news: the shower drain is no longer plugged!

I've got poetry stuff to deal with too: choose a draft to bring to tomorrow night's zoom poetry group meeting; look over the first page proofs of the new collection, which is coming out from Deerbrook at some point next year. This will be a busy week, filled with work and appointments, and I don't feel as if I'm going to have much of a chance to think about my own writing in the midst of the bustle. I want to try to reserve a little space for it today, just in case it slips away from me. For instance, on Friday I scrawled a couple of drafts with the kids that I want to examine: sloppy impulse writing, but maybe there's a tiny bit of something to salvage. I was modeling poet-crazy-brain-in-action for them, and now I need to model dig-out-the-tree-roots for myself.