What we got yesterday was several inches of packed sleet, impenetrable by shovel. It took me half an hour to beat the mountain of ice off the front stoop: that's as much "shoveling" as I could manage. The pack is so hard that trucks can drive on top of it without sinking in. I'd take 20 inches of snow over this stuff any day.

But this stuff is what we've got. I'm unclear if I'll be able to get my car out of the driveway, or if the little low-slung hatchback will be able to negotiate the shelf of ice that the city has plowed against the driveway. Maybe I'll be walking till spring.

Anyway, enough complaining. Other than the weather, yesterday was fine. I'd managed to attend every 8 a.m. exercise class this week, so by Friday my body was feeling pretty pleased with itself. I started working on a poetry-ms consultation, did a batch of editing, baked some bread, transcribed some of the scrawlings I did at Thursday's salon, finished my Aeneid homework, enjoyed phone calls from both sons, beat Tom at cribbage, concocted a seared cabbage-and-tofu-with-miso dinner, started rereading Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, yakked with Maudelle about poems, yakked with Tom about Led Zeppelin, dozed through two episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and dreamed of Tiddly-Winks.

Today I'll do some prep for tomorrow's chapbook class, and maybe some grocery shopping, if I can get out of the driveway. I might fiddle with poem drafts. I might talk with Donna about Flannery O'Connor. I might make chicken cacciatore. I hope to have nothing to do with the layer of sleet-concrete outside, but that seems unlikely.

My brain is pinging around in an interesting way, like a happy pinball machine. I feel full of fizz.

Yesterday, as I watched the neighborhood kids standing in the middle of the road in the sleet storm, clutching snowboards and sticking out their tongues to catch the ice, I suddenly remembered exactly how those moments of childhood felt: a buzzy reckless confidence, being incredibly alive, racketing around inside my own snow globe. Sometimes being a poet is not so different.