Today is Tom's birthday and he is celebrating it (of course) by trying to track down a Covid test because yet another person has tested positive at his work site. Sigh.

Oh, well. These are our lives and times.

Already the streets and walks are icy from yesterday's sleety rainstorm, and now today and tomorrow are forecast to be Maine's coldest days of the season. Temps in Portland will drop close to zero by tonight and hover in single digits tomorrow. I am very, very glad to have this wood stove.

Today I'll be back to editing, with hopes of getting the rest of this batch off my desk. I've also got class planning and other teaching stuff to deal with, plus groceries, laundry, firewood moving, etc., etc., which is to say, the regular winter round.

Here's a poem from the new collection. It sort of sums up how I'm feeling today, dealing with the same old same old, nearly a year after it was written--

Pandemic Yard Work

Dawn Potter

 

It’s the first day of March in Maine and I’m pretending

that spring has arrived, even though my garden

 

is sludged with graying snow and an east wind is keening

through the leafless maples; and it’s not hard to tell

 

that the neighborhood children racing up and down

the frost-heaved sidewalk and waving for some reason

 

an open umbrella and a hula hoop

feel obliged to avert their eyes from my silly doings,

 

from this wheelbarrow load of old kale stalks that I’m trying

to shove through the slush, wasting my Saturday

 

on mud and rotting collards, not like their own sensible

parents who are probably listening to true-crime podcasts

 

and panting on a treadmill in the basement, or trying to sell

boring junk on Craigslist, or, best-case scenario,

 

“taking a nap”—this last option once being a favorite of mine, 

though lately it’s become much harder to pull off, now that

 

a giant adult son is snort-laughing at SNL skits two feet

from the head of the conjugal bed; and maybe that’s why,

 

today, my nap partner is sorting through a collection of yard-sale 78s

and I am ice farming, my pockets stuffed with wet gloves,

 

my hands clammy as carp; why I’m down on my knees, begging every

dead fruit to ripen on the vine.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, 2022)]