Another night of small snow. What melted under yesterday's sunshine has returned to rime. Which is to say, March is beginning to feel like sugaring season.

Earlier this week I thought I'd be on the road to Vermont this morning, but plans changed, so instead I'll be home with my editing stack and my syllabus and my poem drafts. I'm going to try to carve out a few hours to spend with revisions and new transcriptions. Given that I didn't expect to have this day at all, I think I can spare a bit of it for my own writing.

Otherwise: laundry, shoveling, war-worrying. The usual.

Last night I made fish cakes for dinner: poached Arctic char, chopped boiled potatoes, panko crumbs, and egg, all pressed into rough patties, sautéed, and then topped with fried onions and capers, alongside a roasted tomato and spinach salad. Afterward, butterscotch pudding. It was a pretty good meal. I am a fan of fish cakes: they are surprisingly delicate in the mouth, and the char gives them a beautiful color.

Tonight is salon night, so I won't be cooking. That's one chore off my list. But I've got so much notebook writing to sort through, and a pile of reading to do (Aeneid, Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain), plus various requests for photos and bios and poem samples and such for various readings and lectures and anthologies . . . I need one entire day that I can devote to catching up with poet business, but that is not in the cards.

Do not think I am grousing. I am very, very happy to be scheduling readings and talks and being invited to contribute to anthologies. This is just the freelance overload talking.

And Tom and I are planning ahead. He'll be leaving for his residency toward the end of the month, and I have made a pact with myself to treat my two bachelorette weeks as my own semi-residency. I won't be cooking and shopping and cleaning and socializing for two, so I will have a fair amount of unrestricted time to reconfigure into a writing nest. Then, in mid-April, I'm going to New York to see Macbeth with Paul. And then, after a Vermont trip, at the end of the month, Tom and I will spend a weekend together on Mount Desert Island, staying in our friends' cottage on Seal Cove. May will be all of the teaching all of the time, so April will be the restorative.

What I'm doing here is trying to talk the talk: stop obsessing about the terrible news, channel my fears into the vocation I care about, live in the now with this guy I like a lot, let myself laugh. If the Ukrainians can light up their skies with "Russian warship, go fuck yourself," what's my problem?