Saturday morning, 40 degrees. When I opened the door to let the cat out, the fragrance of wet earth and air rose to me, the scent of spring . . . which I know is a lie, but I am willing to go along with it for the next 24 hours, till winter clamps down again.

Yesterday my neighbor and I took a walk into the cemetery, a sea of snowmelt. I kept an ear out for hawks--this is raptor courting season--but no luck yet. Still, the south wind was in our faces and we had fun making up stories around what is currently my very favorite docket name: United States v. 26 Fat Oxen, an 1812 case involving cattle smuggling that was referenced in a book I'm editing. The smugglers were from my home territory, the Somerset County woods, and I was pleased to learn that its young men  have always been involved in hootenannies. Some things never change. During our walk Valerie and I had a good time picturing 26 oxen on the stand--blaming each other, complaining that the case should be dropped. Valerie, who is a lawyer, was especially good at this ("Your honor, I object to being called fat.").

This morning I'll make bread and do some writing and wrestle with that stupid NEA application, and in the afternoon I'll sit in on my friend Carlene's poetry class, and afterward Tom and I will go for a walk, and in the evening I'll stew lamb shanks and play cribbage and read books and fret a little about the class I'll be teaching tomorrow.

My publisher tells me that the page proofs of the new collection are almost ready for me to check, so I guess that will be another fret to add to the schedule. It's very hard to be my own copyeditor. Having copyedited for other people for so many years, I am extremely aware of the problem of author blindness when it comes to typos, extra words, missing words, and such. In a perfect world authors should never be their own copyeditors, but sadly that is not the world of small-press publishing. So, as always, I will do my best, and then three years later open the collection and discover a glaring error. Gah.