Last night's rain seems to have ended, and now the streetlights, reduced to a vague glow, are coiled with mist, and the neighbor's Christmas tree shines like a lighthouse in fog.

Yesterday I looked out through the kitchen door and saw Sassy, the irrepressible groundhog, calmly nibbling on a fern. Isn't she supposed to be hibernating? Will global warming bring us year-round woodchucks? As I watched, both Ruckus and his cat pal Jack showed up to hang around with her. They're quite friendly, the cats and the groundhog. I think they're going to start a band.

My pile of editing has not yet materialized, meaning that I have at least one more day off the clock. I'll work on poems, and I might make some Christmas cookies, and tonight I'll go out to write at the salon. I finished reading Drabble's The Gates of Ivory and was in need of some prose, so I plucked Louise Dickinson Rich's We Took to the Woods off the shelf. The latter is a Maine classic about homesteading in the Rangeley lakes region in the early 1940s, which I've always meant to read but never did, mostly because I've been repelled by its jaunty tone. In many ways, Rich's style is reminiscent of Erma Bombeck's: emphasis on the doughty comic anecdotes, no acknowledgment of deeper loneliness or frustration. I needed a comrade in my isolation, and Rich couldn't be that for me. I was better off with John Milton.

Now that I'm out of the situation, I find I'm able to let the wink-wink stuff roll off. I still don't like it, but I feel a world seething underneath. And Rich is actually very interesting about firewood and food, boots and snow, struggling machinery and distance--all issues that were of prime importance to me in Harmony. I may lose interest, if that coy tone gets any worse, but I do like to know how she got her wood in.