For a little while, Portland was feeling like a small island of semi-normalcy, but public life is returning to ugly again. No cozy Thursday-night writing salon for the foreseeable future: we can't cram into a little apartment and eat and sigh together while so many of us spend our days with sick students or co-workers.  Tom's photo opening will still happen at Speedwell Gallery tomorrow night, but that is easy enough to do masked and distant. Cozy writing is harder.

Ah, well.

Welcome to January 6, 2022, the anniversary of the putsch attempt at the Capitol, the anniversary of my Accident Sonnets. This time last year Paul was sitting in the back room watching Coriolanus and I was frantically writing at history.

A year later, I feel less blank terror, but the foreboding and weariness remain, a skim of ice on every daily action. I don't write a lot about that ice--on this blog, anyway--but we all know it's there. You have it too. As Paul said to me recently, "Ugh. I hate having to live in a historical moment."

Yesterday, James called me just before 8 a.m. to say that his TV show had been shut down for a week because 40 people had tested positive for Covid. Later in the day, Paul texted excitedly to tell me he'd seen a Cooper's hawk at Greenwood Cemetery. This is the world. At least my sons make sure I'm part of it.

And thus, on a Thursday morning in early January, in the little northern city by the sea, I am girding to face my army of small things. Words and water and soap and fire.