I dreamed last night that my in-laws' house was filled with swimming pools and fancy floating couches, and I was lying on a couch and floating slowly from one pool to the next, alongside big windows and enormous white pines . . . and then the dream morphed into driving into an ominous back alley with my sister and getting the car trapped in a veiled woman's "for sale" stand, which appeared to feature nothing but large, wet, semi-rotten clumps of coarse fabric. 

Such a bumptious transition, soothing and unhinged in equal proportion. I keep thinking that noting down this stuff is going to help my writing, but maybe it will just make my writing crazy.

I'm hoping to finish editing a chapter today, and I need to get started on setting up the class website for my next Studio Session class, which starts in early December. Our Chicago adventure is looming, and I want to get as much done as I can before Thanksgiving.

So work work work today, and maybe some afternoon leaf raking, and probably the writing salon in the evening. I've finished Cheever's The Wapshot Chronicle, and now I'm beginning Russell Hoban's The Mouse and His Child and waiting for Cheever's short stories and Milosz's anthology Postwar Polish Poetry to show up at my library branch. This week I've been going for midday walks up into the cemetery,  with the purported purpose of breaking in my new boots before I go to Chicago. [Advertising sidebar: I love my new boots. They are cute and warm and waterproof and comfortable. You can tell how I feel because I am using italics.] But also I adore this late-autumn weather: chilly but not icy, the last golden leaves clinging to blue sky, the sturdy clomp of my feet on the pavement, my brain ticking and fluttering through its Rolodex . . . poems, lists, flashes of memory, crammed in against the now: the dogs and their babies, man mysteriously trying to throw a rope into a tree, skinny boy staring at a phone, old-lady running club, gossiping as they pant, aging punk rocker listening to an early-days-of-hiphop mix tape as he walks, then looking up at me and smiling and saying, "Sometimes you just have to spend time with the old stuff."