Ten degrees this morning, our coldest so far this season, and the cat is disgusted. But the house is plenty warm, which is more than I could ever say for the Harmony house at 5 a.m. in January. Plus, yesterday I was still picking a few salad leaves from the garden. In Harmony, the deer would have long since eaten them. All this is to say: I'm feeling a little homesick this morning, so thought I'd fork up some complaints to distract myself from the memory of the fir trees at first cold light.

This morning I'll be editing, and this afternoon I'll be zooming with my Telling Room poet, and this evening I'll be roasting a chicken for dinner. That sums up the three big notches of my day.

I received another blurb for my new collection yesterday. It arrived as I was standing in the checkout line at Hannaford with a shopping cart full of cat litter and shampoo and allergy medicine and olive oil. It was a funny moment to be absorbing book praise, sort of an out-of-body experience, really, as I stood there lumped up in my mask and my winter coat, surrounded by other women in their same lumpy outfits, a trail of hunter-gatherers in the anthropocene, except that I wasn't also reading People magazine headlines but the news that someone thought my poems were "a serious delight, virtuosic and welcoming at once."