Day 5. Always goodbye and hello . . . the conference ends at noon, the Writing Intensive begins at 2. We've been writing hard all week, but suddenly Teresa drops us into another universe, where everything is linked and vibrating and waiting for our attention; where time becomes the structure of thought and our inner and exterior lives are brought into conversation. I am exhausted but also I am writing and writing and writing.

Day 4 is behind us. Stunning participant readings, complex conversations about teaching and poetic engagement. Sorry you couldn't see actually see my reading on FB Live last night: a Zoom glitch keeps locking our executive director out of her account, so she hasn't been able to make the link. However, we've recorded my reading and Patricia Smith's, and I'll let you know when those are posted . . . I hope later today.

This morning I'll be leading a lesson on Andrew Marvell's poem "The Garden." Then the conference will shift and change and some people will say goodbye and some will arrive . . . and the Writing Intensive will begin, and I will step back from teaching and return to being a writer.

Day 3. Patricia Smith. A force and a whirlwind: so generous, so intensely focused on pushing us not to turn away from deep pain and horror. Her presentation and her reading were stunning. I do not know another poet who can write of a baby's drowning and make both the terror and beauty so stark. Her presence at the conference was, as my co-director Kerrin texted me afterward, "deeply complex as well as uber practical. Master class." My response was "Exactly! And scary in a way that I find very exciting."

I'm reading tonight. It supposedly will be available to anyone via Facebook Live, whether or not you have a Facebook account. Here's the link. Starts at 7 p.m. ET.

Day 2 is behind us. We had a terrific presentation from the poet Julia Bouwsma, who had the brilliant idea  of speaking to us as a student rather than as a teacher. What did we learn as a student that hindered our growth into the art? Was there a poem in particular that a teacher damaged for us? What could we have learned instead from that poem?

I myself had a terrible experience with Frost's "Birches" in tenth grade. When I look at it now, it is a poem about childhood solitude, the pleasures of earth and air, of becoming acquainted with the wild . . . all things that have mattered to me intensely in my life. Did we ever talk about these matters in tenth grade? No. We had to scan the poem to death. It was designed, as far as I knew, to be torn to pieces.

I think this is why I refuse to memorize the names of metrical rhythms. I can hear a dactyl, but I can't spout off the definition of a dactyl. The brutal academicizing of poetry was poison to me. I hated it. I still hate it.

The first day of the conference is now behind me, and all went remarkably smoothly. No Zoom catastrophes, no participant emergencies, and the curveball I tossed in my opening lesson was hit out of the park. That curveball was my complete switch-up in the way I introduced the year's featured Frost poem, "The Last Mowing." After dictating it aloud, I have generally stepped us straight into discussion questions, modeling how teachers can guide students into conversation around the materials of a poem rather than its meaning. Yesterday, however, I followed up the dictation by immediately giving participants a writing prompt triggered by a phrase in the poem. In other words, dictation and creation before analysis. My surprise move went really well: participants jumped directly into the emotional tenor of Frost's original, beginning to explore ideas, language, and sound that linked back to his, all without being told "We're now going to explore ideas, language, and sound as they relate to a Robert Frost poem." So I was pretty happy.

After yesterday's expected but terrible SCOTUS decision to strike down Roe v. Wade, my place in the world feels much dimmer. It's notable how hard this hits, even for those of us who are no longer of child-bearing age. Roe v. Wade became law in 1973, when I was nine years old. It vanished when I was fifty-seven. So I grew up into adolescence, into young adulthood, with that right enshrined: I had the power to decide. Given how powerless I felt in so many other ways, given the confusions of sexual and gender politics, of the fears and indignities that women have always had to take for granted, the knowledge that I had the right to decide about childbearing was an oak tree. As it happened, I did not have an accidental pregnancy, but I could have. Like most women of my age, I had scares. I longed for children; and even at the wrong times and with the wrong person, I probably would not have opted for an abortion. But that would have been my choice. 

The history of women is, in large part, the history of living under the control of men. And thus choice is no small thing. To choose. To be in charge of deciding. 

And now we've slid back into the maw.

* * *

Today the conference begins, so my time with you may be quick and scattered . . . or I may be writing reams: who knows? My study is tidy and organized. I vacuumed all of the crumbs out of my new poet chair, and picked a big Zoom bouquet of sweet peas and yarrow and peony buds. I am ready with lessons and prompts and ice tea, and am hoping that my internet connection won't let me down. We've got a beautiful group of participants, familiar faces and new ones, and I am ready to sink down into the world of words and emotion.

We live in a nation in torment. We are a cadre of poets. There will be tears. But it's good to have people who can cry together.

As you know, I was a dedicated forager and scavenger long before those avocations were hip. I have filled blog posts with lists of things I have found on the street, and I am proud to say that I can now add: "new chair for my study" to those achievements. T and I were walking home from buying beer last night, and there, sitting on the curb of our very own street, was this nice blue chair: not ripped up by cats or covered in stains, not smelling of mildew or terrible fluids, all of the legs securely fastened, comfortable yet small enough to move around the room for Zoom purposes. So we lugged it home and up the stairs, and there it sits, waiting to make its conference debut tomorrow.

The first thing I did was send a photo of it to my older son, because J is the king of scavenging. We brought him up well, apparently, as he has managed to furnish a large portion of his apartment with things he's found in alleys. He also scavenged this pink-nosed kitten in a subway stop . . . or rather, he was accosted by a man with a bag of kittens and ended up with an unweaned little screecher who, as you can see, is now feeling quite at home with his less than thrilled new big sister.

Yesterday's faculty meeting went well, our attendance list is growing, I'll be busy today with bits and pieces of conference prep, and I'll try to get some household stuff out of the way as well. This is the hard thing about running a Zoom conference: I have all of the home pressures and all of the work pressures at the same time. But now the fridge is full of quickish dinner options that T and I can pull together as needed, and if I can get the grass mowed and some mild housework done, then I'll feel a bit better about shutting my door for five days.

 It's a dark green morning. Heavy leaves bow over grass. On the trellis, a flurry of roses, crimson and velvet, tremble in a faint breeze. 

I dreamed that my backyard was full of starving goats, new babies, a dead baby, no hay, no fence, no gates. This sort of dream always signals nerves--what I need to get done, what I've forgotten to get done--but I wish it would not consistently arrive in the form of animal neglect. I wake up feeling like the worst person on earth.

Anyway, it's over now. The odd thing is that, awake, I don't feel particularly overwhelmed. I'm in fairly good shape for the conference . . . a faculty meeting today, some materials to post on the website, but mostly I'm relaxed and ready. I guess my brain thinks I should worry more.

I finished up the last bits and pieces of two editing projects yesterday, and thus I am slowly, steadily shifting my gears into a one-track conference state of mind. Today will be print-out-paperwork-and-organize-my-Zoom-workspace day, in preparation for tomorrow's faculty meeting and the ensuing onslaught of materials that I'll need to post and disseminate. But I'm also hoping to catch up on some reading: I've got several poetry collections by friends, all of which arrived when I was in my Vermont emergency mode and which I have yet to open. I need to rectify that rudeness, now that I've returned to my life.

It will be another chilly day in Portland. I wore a sweater for most of yesterday, and I daresay I'll do the same today. But the weather is pleasant too. I ate a bowl of fish chowder for lunch, sitting al fresco  in a bright spot in the Lane, reading a sad novel and listening to a mockingbird sing. The warm soup and the warm sun, the roses and the singing bird and the melancholy tale and the cool shadows . . . 

Another cool morning in the 40s . . . Perhaps installing A/C in the house was a complete waste of time. For here I am, in late June, still wrapped in my fuzzy bathrobe, very happy to drink hot coffee and own a wood stove.

Outside, the roses are blooming. Golden lilies nod along the sidewalk. Peavines groan under the weight of the pods. The groundhog has trashed my lettuce. The scene looks like summer, despite the chill air.

I think I'll go for a bike ride this morning, before I climb back into my desk hole. I think I'll eat fresh strawberries for breakfast. I'll read a novel about Ireland and I'll read a poem about Eden and I'll check the baseball scores . . . and, yes, the scene feels like summer, despite the chill air.

* * *

FYI, I've long been scheduled to teach a two-session, in-person generative poetry class for the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, August 6 and 13, but the organization has decided to revert to Zoom . . . so if you're far-flung and interested, well, now you can join me. The theme is "Sheltering in Place: Writing from Where You Are," and the cost is $60 (maybe slightly more if you're not a member; I'm not sure how that's working) . . . in any case: it's cheap, as these things go, and you are welcome to join us no matter your experience level. 

 It's 47 degrees this morning--very cold for late June, even in Maine. I did end up lighting a fire in the stove last night, and we were grateful for the comfort. T and his cat spent much of the evening dozing under the couch blanket, and I stood in front of the blaze and scorched the backs of my legs, as I am fond of doing all winter long.

Now that I think of it, this is classic Frost Place conference weather: a miasma of damp chill in the barn, punctuated by screaming heat and thunderstorms over the Notch. Packing for a June week in the White Mountains is a giant challenge. All clothes are wrong.

But none of that is my problem this year, as I'll be nailed to my chair for five days in the "comfort" of my study.

Today I'll be working on conference prep, and cleaning floors, and grocery-shopping, and possibly editing, if the author returns files. I slept pretty badly last night, so probably I'll be crashing at some point. It was one of those nights when all of my dreams floated on the surface between waking and sleeping and I never sank into true rest. But on the bright side, when I called my dad for Father's Day, he sounded very chipper. He's had, among other things, terrible trouble speaking because the tube for the ventilator damaged his throat and his vocal chords. Yesterday his voice was notably stronger and more resonant, and he sounded far more energetic. I think he really is on the mend.

It's a gray and very cool Sunday morning in the little northern city by the sea. The temperature is 56 degrees, which is supposed to be our high for the day, and showers are forecast for the afternoon. Perhaps I will regret having shut down the wood stove for the season.

I spent most of yesterday applying for a grant and working in the yard; and though I am unlikely to get the grant, the yard, at least, was worth the work. I made a quick trip to the nursery to buy a replacement hot-pepper plant, as mine seemed to have some sort of wasting disease, and I also bought a sweet fern for the shady backyard corner and a tall yellow yarrow for the sunny Parlor Bed. It was a good day for native plants, I guess. The sweet fern made me especially happy as this is a shrub I always look for in the woods. It has a beautiful leaf and a particular sweet odor when crushed; and when I was at Audubon day camp in middle school, our counselors told us that it was a natural insect repellent, so I would rub the leaves on my arms and neck and smell of sweet fern all day long, which made being 13 years old better than it usually was. (The mosquitoes were indifferent either way.) It was good to discover yesterday that sweet fern does fine in dry, poor soil, is extremely hardy in low temperatures, and spreads into clumps, all of which sounds perfect for my raggle-taggle backyard. Now I can be sentimental and sensible at the same time.

I suppose I'll do some housework this morning. You can see I'm not full of enthusiasm, but c'est la vie. However, T and I had some thought of having a Washington Avenue afternoon, which translates into (1) sharing a dozen raw oysters at The Shop and then (2) walking down the street to order poutine from the Duckfat Frites Shack and (3) eating said poutine at a table at Oxbow Brewing, where we are also drinking beer and playing cribbage and finally (4) going home and taking a late-afternoon nap. Frequently it also leads to (5) leftovers for dinner and (6) eating those leftovers on the couch while watching an old movie. 

It's been nice to have a semi-long weekend with T, though both of us have been working at our desks throughout. I've been messing around with poem revisions, which feels good; and I'm mostly ready for the conference, though finicky administrative stuff will continue to clog up my week: meetings with faculty, class website creation, posting materials, finalizing participant lists, that sort of thing. And then I'll be down the rabbit hole for five days.

 

Dinner preparations: above, freshly washed marigolds, mint, basil, and parsley; and below, garlic scapes, pea shells, and shelled peas.

We are entering my favorite cooking time of year, when I can wander into the garden in the late afternoon and come back with a handful of any kind of herb, with bowls filled with lettuce, and now with peas.  I dislike the fat starchy ones; my goal is pure sweetness, so I pick my peas very young. That means my haul is always labor-intensive without much bulk to show for it. Still, there's much to be said for sitting on a back stoop in the gloaming, the wind trickling at the edges of my summer skirt, and shelling peas for dinner. The action of shelling is itself a harvest pleasure . . . the steady of rhythm of my fingers, the bowl filling with its tiny green beads, and, as I watch quietly, a mockingbird alighting on the rose arbor and pouring out its comic medley.

For a salad, I sautéed small portobello mushrooms in olive oil, tossed them with balsamic vinegar, and then poured the peas into the warm mixture so that they slightly cooked as the mushrooms cooled. Then I heaped the mixture onto lettuce and topped it with scissored mint and marigold petals. It was so delicious, and beautiful also, with the contrast of the dark mushrooms and the gemlike peas and the golden marigolds . . . a complete pleasure.

The rain has passed, so today I'll hang towels on the line, do some weeding, mow grass, maybe replace a sickly pepper plant. I've started rereading Woolf's final novel, Between the Acts, which for some reason I haven't gone back to for years. I worked on a revision yesterday, and maybe I'll tinker a little more today.  Next weekend the conference begins, and I'll be dropping everything else for five days of poetry and Zoom. I need to love the peas while I can. 

I went out last night to the salon, and wrote some stuff that probably won't become anything other than blurt, but it was still a good night--camaraderie and entertaining tangents and an atmosphere of fizz and commitment . . . all of which, even with bad poem drafts, was revivifying.

T is home today, thanks to a gift holiday from his employer, so we sort of have a three-day weekend together. I do have some desk stuff to deal with, but I got up late and he is still in bed, and there's a Saturday-morning languor in the heavy, humid air.

I've gone back to reading Woolf's biography, and I found an Edna O'Brien novel on the street last week that I might start looking at today. Probably I should plan on plenty of reading, as I don't think I'll be doing much outside. We're supposed to have thunderstorms by midday, and already the atmosphere is ominous. The sky is thick and dim, and a walk in the garden feels like pushing my way through invisible draperies.

It is tomato weather: how the young plants love these hot and sodden dawns. And I think I'll celebrate my first real pea picking this afternoon, if I can find a moment between storms. The peonies and iris are nearly done, but the roses and lilies are opening. Always, there's something to seduce my eyes.

I spent a chunk of yesterday's desk time on poem revision, and now, after weeks without writing a poem, I have two dense new drafts to preoccupy me. Neither is a "nice" poem; both are difficult and ambiguous. But they interest me: in their ugliness; in how they lurch down the page, and quick-switch their focus, and stretch their tentacles into fury and comic madness and loss of control.

Today I'll go back to editing, but the drafts are waiting for me: they exist. And tonight I'll go out to the salon to write, and maybe more poem-chicks will start tapping at their shells.

It's looking as if our street construction may finally be finished. The pavers have come and gone. The gravel piles and orange cones have disappeared. Only the port-a-potty lingers. I said to my neighbor  yesterday that I feel we should have had an end-of-project party: a chance to hang out on the street and drink beers with the construction guys and the neighbors and the water-district supervisor and admire the work and re-live the big moments ("Remember when you nicked the sewer line? Oh, that was an afternoon!). But, alas, we've lost our chance.

Still, there's much to be said for bird song, and no dust, and usable driveways, and no irrigation pipes running through my garden, so I will not regret the might-have-beens.

This is the yellow rosebush that P and I picked out together during High Covid, when every little sweetness felt so extremely vital. Now, this week, it is blooming in the Hill Country, alongside the white rugosa and the crimson climber, the shattering peonies, the swelling peas, the carrots that used to stand ferny and brave, before the groundhog bit off their fronds. The beauty of June can be almost too much to bear.

I got my hair cut yesterday, bought salmon and haddock at the fish market, finished editing an academic journal, did some Frost Place stuff, worked on a poem, weeded the Shed Patch, made lime-scented ice cream, listened to the Red Sox pound the A's. It was one of those days when I felt how much I love to be home: when home itself becomes the scaffolding for figuring out how to live. The place absorbs me into tasks, and the tasks bring me into concert with my frayed selves. Because I weed and wash clothes and tidy the kitchen and cut lettuce, I also read the biography of Virginia Woolf and revise a poem.

Today I'll hang sheets on the line and I'll plan a class on Marvell, and both of these jobs are important to me. One is not better than the other. The sheets sing wind; the poem is green, is dense with sap and blossom.

This morning I am finally getting a haircut, which might not sound like a big-enough deal to mention, but two months ago the stylist had to cancel our original date because she had Covid, and then two weeks ago I had to cancel her replacement appointment because I was in Vermont, and thus, as you can imagine, my hair is in a dense and crazy state. I cannot wait to get rid of it.

Yesterday I worked and grocery-shopped and washed floors, and then in the evening walked to a poetry workshop, and meanwhile the street construction sprang back to life: irrigation guys removing our temporary pipes, backhoes shoveling gravel out of our driveways, and then the paving getting underway. There's a lot more of that to get done, and I expect today will be yet another day of noise and dust.

I brought a very raw draft to last night's poetry workshop, and people were helpful about it. I'd like to spend some time on revisions today, if I can dribble in a bit of writing amid the editing. That editing pile is high, which makes me nervous, given the looming Frost Place conference. I think I can get it done, but then again, given how weird my life has been lately, who knows.

The rain is pouring and clattering and clanking in a new kind of way on the new A/C which took Tom all kinds of time to install because our windowsills are inimicable. The box does not say "Required tools include person who can renovate." Fortunately for me I had one, but this explains why my neighbor's machine is held up by a stick.

The day was productive, though, despite the air conditioner's recalcitrance. I washed windows and dusted, and also cultivated and weeded all of the front gardens. The Red Sox won, and I made red beans and rice for dinner, with fresh guacamole and lots of cilantro and garlic scapes and heaps of tender lettuce. Now rain is tumbling into the raked earth, and pea pods are swelling and peonies are swaying their heavy heads. It is a lovely dark wet morning for growing things.

Today I'll be back at my desk, editing, working on Frost Place tasks; also beginning my morning with poem revision, as I have decided that this is the most important item on my desk list today. Eventually I'll go to my exercise class and the grocery store, call my mother, clean floors, and such. For now, though, my thoughts are with rain and poems, rain and poems. 

Last night was our first baseball evening of the season, and it was a beauty (though our home team lost, and deserved to).  Late in the afternoon we walked down to the barbecue place near Hadlock Field and filled up on deliciousness, then toddled across the street to our seats and sat in the third-base gloaming among cheerful families and hoarse little boys, watching foul balls sail into the crowd, watching seagulls cruise for hotdogs, puzzling over why Irish Night at the ballpark seemed to involve bagpipes and kilts . . . There is nothing to match the sweetness of minor-league baseball on a summer Saturday night. And then afterward, the walk home in the almost-dark--fragrance of roses and peonies, murmur of other walkers, windows glowing gold, the last streaks of day smudging the sky.

And now I am full of rest and vigor. I slept till 6 a.m., waking only when daylight was pouring through the shade. I'm not sure what the day will hold: some combination of housework and garden work, maybe grocery shopping, or maybe I'll shuffle that off till tomorrow. I did get bathrooms and mowing and a chunk of weeding done yesterday, and always there's more to do. But I don't feel too pressed. I might give myself some time to work up one of those poem blurts I wrote on Thursday night. I might talk Tom into helping me install the air conditioner in my study window.

Today will be hot, and more rain is coming in tonight, and the garden is vibrating and alive. The summer, the eloquent summer, so brief and glorious.  

Yesterday evening, this was the sight on Concord Plain: cat best friends taking their ease in the grassy shade . . . though 30 seconds later they were pouncing on each other and chasing each other into the iris patch. This pair is the amusement of the neighborhood: Jack and Ruckus don't live together, but they spend much of their waking time hanging out, prowling, sneaking up on each other, and staring into each other's back doors--a cat version of the local kid-crowd activity that's often happening at the same time. They are a very funny pair: Jack is standoffish with humans, while Ruckus is extremely social with them. Jack picks fights with strange cats, but Ruckus prefers to stay out of the fray. Jack trots around the street in all weathers, like a mayor checking up on his town, but Ruckus hates to be cold and wet. Jack is strangely compelled by garden hoses, whereas Ruckus is offended by them. And yet, with so many differences, they enjoy each other's company, go looking for one another, drape themselves over car hoods together, visit with the groundhog together, investigate open garages together . . . Jack, who generally hates the wandering cats who occasionally appear, attached himself to Ruckus at first sight. And Ruckus, who likes to be the center of all attention, will happily follow Jack over a fence or under a rosebush.

Yesterday was a good day for me as well as the cats. I felt as if I'd finally gotten my groove back, at least as far as my poetry-brain went. Maybe my Thursday-night salon outing helped, because when I went back to my Frost Place prep on Friday morning, my mind starting sparking and jumping. There's a special fizz I feel when my teaching ideas are falling into place, and there was no fizz earlier in the week, when I was slogging my way into my syllabus. On Wednesday morning I was convinced that I'd made a giant mistake in thinking I could teach a Marvell session. On Friday morning my Marvell-poem plans were dancing around the room, my Frost-poem ideas were shimmying alongside them, I'd figured out patterns and goals that linked the pair of sessions, and I knew that these lessons would be intense and surprising.

So this morning I am feeling pretty relaxed: a bit of extra sleep, work stuff under control, sunshine after rain.

Well, I went out to write last night, and felt like a social imposter, but did somehow manage to produce two dense scribbled pre-poem blurts that Betsy insists are real work, though I am not feeling at all confident in my ability to sort useful from tripe. Still, I filled pages, and that is more than I've done for weeks. Really my only steady writing has been these notes to you, and some of them have been barely longer than a sentence or two.

Today: Lug trash to curb. Hang laundry. Endure exercise class. Call my mother. Then immerse myself in Frost and Marvell and try to carve out activities for my conference sessions. Then edit an academic essay. Then do a little gardening. Then figure out something for dinner.

I'm trying to catch up on obligations. My friend Donna and I are reading Brian Doyle's novel Chicago together, and I am woefully behind. While I was in Vermont I finished Tessa Hadley's excellent new novel Free Love and then reread A. S. Byatt's Possession because it's a comfort book and I needed one. Now I've got Diana Goetsch's new memoir, This Body I Wore, sitting on the coffee table waiting for me. Diana taught at the conference a few years ago, and I'm excited about her book, but I'm slow and pokey about everything right now.

Yet after two days of rain, we will have sun and warmth, and I will open the windows, and my garden will explode with happiness and weeds. It's Friday, and I am home, and  I have the ingredients to make chocolate pudding, and there's nothing wrong with any of those things except for possibly the weeds.

Today, hard as it is to believe, I am a person with a car that has a working air conditioner. My parents gave it to me as a gift, the garage was able to do the work quickly, and voila: cold! 

I don't think I'll be playing with the A/C much today, however. We've got another rainy day looming, and I've got nowhere hot to go. Maybe this afternoon I'll do some wet transplanting--cutting back the encroaching phlox and moving chunks of it into the rock wall--but mostly I'll be at my desk, or phoning my family, or getting phone calls from my family, or texting madly with my sister, or gnashing my teeth. Yesterday I finally got a start on my conference prep, but I still have a lot of work to do in that regard. Kerrin and I talked in the afternoon and sussed out who would handle what. No surprise: she'll take the lead with contemporary work, I'll take the lead with the old. So I'm immersed in Frost and Marvell and thinking hard about strategies for leading participants into creative/analytical collision with that work. And I've got a big editing project to finish and a bunch of emails/queries/administrative stuff to deal with . . . but I've also decided that tonight I'm going to the salon to write. It's been weeks since I've drafted anything new, and I'm in need.

I look back at that paragraph and see that it's a big messy knot, which just about sums up my head, and I'm not going to edit it into prettiness. Paragraph = state of mind.

* * *

. . . and just now I've learned that my dear friend, the great poet Betsy Sholl, has written about my poem "Mr. Kowalski." I'm overwhelmed and tearful and very, very grateful.

I woke up around 3 a.m. to the sound of rain; slept again, fitfully, against the tap of drops, the rush of wind. Now, at 5, I watch dawn open in a slate sky. The heavy-armed trees swirl. Rain rattles on paving stones; it hushes the dust-torn street.

We have two days of off-and-on storm ahead, and the garden will be happy. Yesterday I tore out the bolted spinach and radishes, sowed dill and cilantro and a second crop of carrots. I thinned the first crop of carrots, transplanted chard, replanted the bug-eaten beans.

The early June flowers are glorious . . . this weigela, for instance, which blooms in three colors outside my back door.

The first white rugosas are unfolding . . .

. . . and nearby, velvet Siberian iris consort with the first golden lily.

Then there are the peas, pride of the garden, loaded with blossoms.

All of them will bask in these rainy days, and I will put on my raincoat and wander among them. Mostly, though, I'll be at my desk: editing academic essays, working on a class session for the conference, catching up with emails. First thing, I've got to take my car to the garage and get an estimate for a new air conditioner, which my father is presenting to me as a gift . . . a very, very kind gift, after my Vermont trips over hot roads. It will certainly take the edge off of the travel angst.

I didn't take a nap yesterday, so I guess that's progress. Of course I also discovered I had a dentist appointment scheduled at naptime, so the decision to nap or not nap was taken out of my hands. Other than the dentist surprise, though, it was a decent day: I worked at my desk, did a lot of laundry, mowed the tall grass, went for a walk with my neighbor. I still felt blinky and dull-brained, but I could cook a meal and edit an academic article and scour a sink, even roll out piecrust.

Today, more of the same, with less dentist. I'm teaching tonight, so I'll have to prep for that as well. It's our last session, and then my teaching mind will turn entirely toward the conference.

I'd like to think I could get back to writing poems. It's been weeks since I've worked on a new draft. My friend Kerrin gave me a prompt yesterday, and maybe I'll try it. Still, the idea of actually trying to write feels like shoving rocks into mud.

Good morning from glorious Portland, Maine, where the beds are welcoming, the lupines are stunning, the men make dinner, and nobody unpacks until morning.

I am extremely glad to be home.

Also, I seem to have been overcome by sleeping sickness. I took an afternoon nap, fell asleep on the couch after dinner, then went to bed and slept like the dead until the cat woke me, then slept some more until the alarm woke me.

At the moment I still appear to be awake but we'll see how long that lasts.

I think things in Vermont are stable. It was difficult to leave, and I cried, but my mother assured me that this was the right thing to do, and I know she meant it. They have worked out a way to keep going. My sister is close by. They want their house back to themselves, and they want me to get back to work and to my household. Everything is so hard for them right now. It felt wrong to leave them, though I know it was not wrong.

Anyway, right or wrong, here I am, full of sleep. I hope to make it through my exercise class this morning, but I'm out of practice and may collapse halfway in. I hope to unpack and do some laundry. I hope to reacquaint myself with my desk. I hope to mow grass. Tom, that prince, cleaned bathrooms and floors yesterday before I got home, and also did the grocery shopping, so those are two big chores off my list.

I'll get done what I can get done. I am bone-tired, and I have been working like a mule for the past week on very little sleep and with considerable panic.

These are my lupines. Maybe you can see why I love them so.

 Day 6. Looks like I'll be heading home. 

Day 5. Making some significant physical progress, finally figuring out pill management . . . still plenty of emotional ups and downs, but I think I really, truly might be able to go home tomorrow. My boyfriend is counting the hours, and that in itself is a high point of every day. He has been sending me photos of my flower garden in bloom, assuring me that we had rain and that everything looks beautiful, updating me about the cat, about the turtles he sees at the pond. Mash notes: that's what they called them in the 1880s.  Just spontaneously he sends these little mash-note texts several times a day. It is the sweetest thing ever.

This morning my nephew is playing in a postseason high school tennis match. He's a very good player, and my mom and I have never seen him on the court before. My dad really wants me to take my mom to see the match, so my older nephew has arranged to come over and hang out and do some jobs here, and my mom and I are going into town to watch. And tonight my dad wants to have a little party--just my sister's family, coming over for pizza and card games--but this will be the first time he's been in a gathering since he came home. So we are focused on arranging nap times, pain management, exercise times, etc., so that he can be at his best when the house is full of people. If we can get through this busy day, then I think we'll be over the hump and the two of them can take the plunge and try out being home alone together.

Day 4. Kind of a low-point day; hours spent dealing with the patient's fraught state of mind and the caregivers' sheer exhaustion. If I could sleep at night, I'd be a better nurse. But.

Anyway, today. Scrub down the house. Try to reclaim one of my mother's flower gardens. Or probably something else entirely different will intervene, and I'll clash the gears and speed off in that direction.

For the moment, I am sitting by myself with this cup of coffee. A crow is barking in a white pine. A dog is snoring behind a chair.  Small blessings.

Day 3 in Vermont. Just brought coffee and juice up to my parents. That's been the routine I've instigated: I go downstairs and deal with dogs and make the coffee, and then bring up a tray to them so they can sit together first thing and spend a little time alone. I've been trying to make a few little circles of privacy for them.

Yesterday the home health nurse visited, and she was wonderful, and we all felt some of our tensions begin to slip from our shoulders. She directly said what I'd only been subconsciously aware of: that we all felt as if the hospital had discharged dad onto the side of the road and left us to figure out what to do with him. This is metaphoric, of course, but part of the stress has been linked to the intensity of reading his spikes and dips and trying to figure out how to respond to them. Triage convalescence, I guess you could call it: but even though the three of us are in lockstep with his care, none of us is a nurse, and we feel as if we are inventing the wheel. So now we have this excellent new support, with lovely easy manner, to help us coordinate and move forward. Today, I hope, the physical therapist will be in touch, and we can start getting my dad making his first steps toward getting back into his garden.

So, on the whole, yesterday was a good day. Today we are considering another first: having me run a few errands and leaving the two of them in the house alone for an hour or so, as a trial to finding out how that feels for them. Dad says he had his best night's sleep in weeks, and Mom seems calm, so here's hoping that the day unfolds well.

Day 2 in Vermont. Things are up and down here, but probably the weight is tilted to the up side. Still, I feel as if most of my hours are spent in some version of triage: jumping on problems, making stabs at solutions, staying hawk-eyed for danger, texting with my sister 50 times a day. We've acquired a recliner, moved furniture to accommodate a walker; we're managing precipitous blood-sugar drops, the remnants of hospital delirium, and, as problematic as anything else, pipe-dream suggestions such as "let's walk out to the garden" and "time to plant the corn."

At night I wander up and down the mosquito-ridden driveway, whispering to Tom on my phone so I don't wake my parents, wondering how they'll ever manage when I leave.

But a week ago he was in the ICU, and now he is home. Maybe things will improve more rapidly than I can imagine them improving now.

I did manage to steal an hour and half to teach my class last night. I am reading a Tessa Hadley novel and Marvell's poems. I am trying to stay calm and cheerful. But there's no getting around the fact that this ordeal is not close to being over.

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What with all of the uproar in my life, I keep forgetting to mention I have three new poems out in the journal Live Encounters.