Rain is coming in tonight, then sleet, then snow. It's hard to get excited about a storm like this one. The best I can say for it is that the melting snowpack might give the snowdrops I planted last fall their first chance to bloom. On the other hand, the 3rd of February is probably not when things should be blooming in Maine.

Anyway, Thursday. This week is crawling by. Two days ago I thought Friday must have arrived by now. Apparently not.

I spent yesterday with the new editing project, and doing a load of Frost Place stuff, and going for a walk, and making lamb stock for the freezer and lamb soup for the table and chocolate pudding for beside the fire. Today, more editing, and probably I'll start looking at the poetry manuscript I'm consulting on, and I've got a phone meeting with my publisher, and maybe tonight is the night when I'll finally venture back to the poetry salon.

It's funny: despite the trouble and trauma of this past year, I've somehow managed to step into fully living the life of a poet. I mean, of course I was writing and teaching and reading and publishing before that. But I still felt as if I were squeezing my vocation into "real" life. Now, suddenly, the vocation is "real" life. All week long, I think about words. Other people ask me to talk to them about words. Every day: words, words, words.

I write every day, I read perpetually, I teach and consult, I am slowly developing a social world around words . . . This astonishes me. I am what I have longed to become, what I have longed for ever since I was a little child. I am the storyteller.

I'm afraid this letter to you sounds boastful and self-satisfied. I apologize for that. But ambition isn't wrong, though we Puritans have been raised to hide our flames. I could care less about being featured on the cover of Poets & Writers or giving a keynote speech at an AWP conference or getting hired to teach at Princeton. What I want is to write the best poems I can write. What I want is to have other people know that I'm doing that work.