Tom forgot to set his alarm last night, so we overslept, and now everything is running late. But I did make the coffee, and if everything else in my morning gets pushed back an hour, so be it. Once he gets himself to work, there's nothing urgent on my end. My day will mostly be odds and ends of travel prep: shopping, mending, washing clothes, digging out the suitcases, and so on. We don't leave the house tomorrow till after lunch, so we can be pretty relaxed about packing.

I had a remarkably productive writing day yesterday, which doesn't always happen when I decide to take one. I transcribed a number of scrawled first drafts out of my notebook; and as I was humming over them, I realized that several of the scraps, written at different times and under different circumstances, might cohere into a larger, more surprising piece. Mucking around with that notion absorbed a few hours, and then I turned to Dante and began copying out Canto XIII, translated by Charles Wright, with passages like this: "We were men once, and now we are underbrush: / surely your hand would have been more merciful / even if we had been the souls of snakes." Golly.

I even managed to submit work to a couple of journals, and got an instant acceptance from one of them, sweet repayment for my wincing dislike of the process. I could not have asked for a better writing day: new work, old work, published work, punctuated by a long cold walk with my neighbor and homemade macaroni-and-cheese for dinner.

So, today: A bit of Frost Place stuff. A phone call with Donna about our Mouse and His Child reading project. And then cat-litter shopping and clothes folding and as much more writing time as I can steal. Yesterday's cobbled-together draft might actually be something very interesting, but it needs work.