I know this is obvious, but I'm still always amazed at how restorative a full night's sleep can be. I went out to write last night, came home to visit a bit with Tom, then sank into a deep, unbroken slumber, filled with dreams about slowly riding a rusty tandem bike by myself through what appeared to be a giant cornfield. These were singularly un-anxious dreams: just me, poking along on a barely held-together bike, without any particular goal or intent. Possibly this could be a metaphor for writing poems. Possibly it could be a metaphor for me. Either way, I'll take it over those dreadful guilt-shame-worry dreams.

This morning: recycling to the curb, sheets in the washer, exercise class on the floor of my study. I'll edit, mow grass, pull carrots and leeks, cook a French-style pork roast. And I'd really, really like to dig some first drafts out of my notebook. I haven't worked on a poem since the before-Covid times, and I wonder if I still know how.

This weekend will be extremely busy: I'll be overseeing a Frost Place zoom class on Saturday afternoon (a teachers' session on using the Poetry Out Loud program creatively in the classroom, led by Holly Smith). On Sunday I'll be driving upstate for a reading in Wayne. So I feel okay about stealing some of today for myself.

Outside, it's 39 degrees, our coldest morning yet. Summer is fading fast.

I admit to being exhausted: yesterday's teaching gig was my first full day in public since I'd gotten sick, and it was sandwiched by two long drives. But it was also buttered by friends who babied me, and my students were a pure delight. This was day 1, when most of them were meeting for the first time, when the program and I were still suspicious unknowns. And yet from the get-go they leaped into the work. They chattered intently about poems, they wrote searching first drafts, they bubbled over with excitement about each other's poems, about just being in the room. Talk, talk, talk! Delight abounded; they were so happy to be there.

In other words, the magic continues. I am relieved and I am excited.

* * *

Today I'll pull myself back into regular life. I've got a massive stack of laundry to deal with, various desk errands to do, plus the eternal editing lying in wait. My hope is to feel rested and focused enough to go out to write this evening, though I slept badly last night, so we'll see. I really did think I had mostly recovered from Covid, but my friends up north thought differently, and maybe they are right. I'm not quite sure what regular me is anymore.

While I was away, I got notice that the Maine Arts Journal has published a collection of poems, curated by Betsy Sholl, written by several members of our Thursday salon. Betsy's essay explains how how our writing group has evolved, and the poems are illustrated by a few of Tom's photos. Maybe you'd like to take a look.

This afternoon, after working and getting a haircut, I'll head up north for tomorrow's opening day at Monson Arts. I'm excited, also a little nerved up. A new class is always an unknown. But it will be good to be back in the room.

The leaves are barely starting to turn in Portland, but I expect they're further along up north. Tomorrow morning, on my way to class, I'll drive down the gravel road, past Kingsbury Pond, under its shimmer of morning mist, and I'll feel my heart clutch, as it always does, at the beauty, at the loss I'll never get over . . . oh, the days when this place used to be my place.

But at least I have a seat at my friends' table, a bed under the eaves. At least I can come back.

And now, once again, I have a classroom without restrictions. I teach what I want to teach, and how I want to teach. It is hard to explain what a gift this is at the high school level. High school is not only controlled by curriculum but also driven by test expectations, and this is true in both public and private settings. A private school might have more scope for college-like seminars, but it is also under extreme success pressure, that external goal-oriented hammer that is anathema to art. The kids I'll be working with won't be dealing with such professional-class demands but with the endemic political and cultural issues of rural isolation. School is a hard road. And meanwhile, all students, wherever they find themselves, are a pressure cooker of feelings.

I woke up this morning to learn that I've got a poem up at Vox Populi: "The Unicorn Is in Captivity and No Longer Dead." This is a piece that arose from one of the communal writing prompts at my Thursday-night salon. Now I can't recall exactly what the prompt was, but I do know that it forced me to push together a number of unlike things, and, voila, the unicorn story surfaced.

It's a treat to wake up on a workaday Monday and remember that once I wrote poems. I've got a lot of things to get done today, and few of them concern poetry. Instead, I need to do housework and get the groceries in and finish editing a chapter and otherwise prep myself for heading north tomorrow afternoon. It's going to take some time for me to get back into the swing of these northern trips. Plus, shed construction is not conducive to weekend housework, though I did get the bathrooms cleaned and the air conditioner stowed and various harvest things accomplished. Ergo, here I am, on messy Monday, trying to snatch together all of the frayed ends.

On the bright side, two weeks out from Covid, I am feeling pretty good. Brain fog has lifted, energy is back, sinuses are recovering, and I am basically a regular person again. And on Wednesday I'll be back in the classroom, with a new batch of kids and a mandate to do whatever I want. We'll be looking at poems by Dorianne Laux and Vera Pavlova, we'll be talking about what the students want to learn, we'll be discovering how a studio classroom differs from an academic one, we'll be figuring out how to trust and leap. It will be thrilling.

Another cool morning . . . I think they will all be cool from now on. But we haven't yet needed to turn on the furnace, and the bedroom window still stays open all night. And last night I didn't even start a fire in the wood stove: the day had been so sunny that the house stayed warm well into the evening. Plus, I was baking bread, roasting green tomatoes, roasting eggplant, making red beans and rice, so there was a lot of ambient coziness.

Slowly I am whittling away the summer garden. Yesterday I tore out the peppers and the basil and harvested what will probably be the last eggplants and cucumbers, though I'll leave those plants up for a few more days and see what happens. I've got a few more pickings of beans, but by next weekend they'll likely be done. The groundhog has decimated my fall crops--kale, chard, lettuce, cilantro, and parsley are alive but terrible, and the bitten-up fennel is weedy and tough. But I've still got handsome leeks and green onions, a second sowing of carrots to harvest, and a good-looking batch of arugula in the cold frame. And the marigolds, my favorite garnish flower, are blooming bravely. Things could be worse.

It wasn't a great harvest year, thanks to drought and that greedy woodchuck and my father's illness, but in the freezer I've got red tomato sauce, green tomato sauce, green beans, peas, corn (from the farmers' market), blueberries (picked up north), peppers, kale, and pesto. I've got freshly dried cooking herbs--dill, thyme, tarragon, sage, oregano. I've got flowers and grasses drying for winter vases. That's not a bad haul for a teeny-tiny city garden.

Yesterday, before dinner, I sat outside breaking up kindling while Tom finished cutting notches into the boards he'll be siding with today. The boards are cedar, and cedar is ideal fire-starter, so we are saving every sawed scrap for the stove. As I filled bucket after bucket with slips of wood, I thought again about how many years we've been at this: the two of us, squirreling away in tandem, hustling against winter.

It's a cold morning, 45 degrees, and the winds from Hurricane Fiona are rippling along the coast. All night long the air rushed and sighed, and this morning the dog walkers clutch caps and and coffee cups, as the dogs lift their muzzles into the breeze.

I had a restless night, then slept a bit late, and am now trying to tamp down a headache but mostly feeling pretty much okay. I've got to work this morning, doing a zoom session for the Maine Poets Society, but I'm hoping to get outside eventually and tear down another patch of worn-out garden.

I did my exercise class yesterday, went for a walk with my neighbor, mowed grass, and did not take a nap; it seems that my energy is climbing back to its pre-Covid level, despite lingering fog, taste, and sinus issues. And even they are better than they were. At my desk I prepped for the Monson class, whittled down the editing stack, worked on Frost Place scheduling; and today I'll be talking poems all morning. I'd say I'm 90 percent myself again.

Of course there's the sad news about Hilary Mantel. Those Cromwell novels are among the best historical fiction ever written, and I feel very lucky to have stumbled into them, and to have learned so much from Mantel about the subtleties of setting and dialogue, and how to use them as portals.

In a couple of weeks I'll turn 58, creeping closer and closer toward my next decade. At 70 Mantel was not so much older than I am: with a body of work, and I have a body of work, and she died in the midst of writing, and likely that's how I will die too. And I think, Godspeed, that's not such a bad way to go.

I made my first foray into the social whirl last night, with an evening among my poet friends. I was very glad to see them, though it was harder than I expected: my poor brain struggled to switch back and forth among conversation threads, and responding to prompts was also difficult . . . not unproductive, but tiring. Anyway, I did it, and then slept well last night, and am now feeling relatively peppy--ready to haul recycling to the curb and wash sheets and such.

All day yesterday the rain poured down. I think we got two inches, after another inch earlier in the week. It is a relief to see the drought begin to lift, even so late in the season, and I am hoping to walk out this morning in search of mushrooms.

In the meantime, I am sitting here with my cup of coffee and noticing that, finally, it doesn't taste terrible. Maybe my Covid-damaged taste buds are beginning to return to normal.

And just knowing that I have a couple of scrawls in my notebook is making me feel good. They're likely irredeemable as poems, but they're a new beginning, and that's worth a lot to me.

Congratulate me on testing negative! The symptoms have not disappeared, but the active virus apparently has, so hurray. This means that I should be able to go out to the salon this evening, and I do hope I'll be feeling up to it because I very much want to write. It has been weeks since I've made any sort of poem.

Otherwise, the bouncing ball of lethargy continues to bounce. One day peppy, one day not so peppy. On the whole, though, I'm better, Tom's better, we're getting through our days, doing our jobs, managing, and that's good enough for now.

Today I'll finish up an editing chapter, work on some Frost Place scheduling, and do some class planning for Monson. It's supposed to rain all day, but I hope to walk as well. I've been slowly getting back into my exercise regimen, but I haven't yet had the urge to take a very long walk or to ride my bike. I need to remind my body it can do those things because my brain would just as soon lie on the couch and watch this very long slow German-made documentary that Tom and I have been lingering through, hours and hours of it, set in the lands along the Bering Strait. We lounge on the couch with our dinner plates watching the Chukchi people spend 45 minutes slowly cutting up seals or drying fish on lines strung between rusty barrels, as the sound of the sea slaps against the stones and guillemots cry in the cliffs. I wouldn't have thought that watching other people do their chores would make such relaxing watching, but I have now learned differently.

Yesterday I actually managed to do all of the things I hoped to do: phone meeting, groceries, editing, contest reading, plus some basic house stuff. I did lie down a few times in the midst, just to un-fuzz my brain, but basically it was a regular day.

Next week will be my first return to the Monson classroom, and I'm hoping I'll be ready for all of those hours on my feet, plus the long drive home. I think I will. I do feel as if I'm making progress, and I'm sure you're sick to death of my maundering. But the fact is that Covid convalescence is currently the subject of my life, and it is shadowing everything else. I still can't tell when the shadow will fully dissipate.

So today I'll do my exercise class. I'll finish working on contest poems, and I'll think about my syllabus for next week, and I'll attack another chunk of editing. Undoubtedly I'll also stand around stupidly and probably I'll lie down and stare at my phone.

I've been reading Javier Marias's novel Thus Bad Begins, which is gorgeous and ominous, though I feel slightly too dumb for it right now. I finished Eliot's Four Quartets, and I also felt too dumb for them, but Eliot evokes that sensation on purpose.

Reminder to self: do not act like Eliot.

It rained all evening and all night . . . a slow cold rain outside, but inside there were lamps and blankets and a wood fire and a cat. O the charms of an autumn night: I was very, very happy to be home and healthy-ish, with a new book in hand and tuna casserole in the oven.

Today will stay cool and cloudy, and I daresay I'll be lighting the stove again this afternoon, once I muddle through my first public appearances post-Covid. I've got a Frost Place meeting this morning, and after that I will venture out to the grocery store. I'm hoping to be able to keep my mind on my tasks: the persistent brain fuzziness is abating but continues to annoy, and it makes me a little nervous about driving and decision making.

However, I am certainly better, and one of these days I might even write a poem again. You never know.

Yesterday I backslid a bit, which was disappointing but normal, I guess. I did still manage to function okay, but was slower and fuzzier than I'd been on Saturday. Still I made a batch of green-tomato pickles and some baguettes, and I roasted vegetables for salsa verde, and I tore out the dying sunflowers, so that's better than nothing.

This morning I'm going to try my exercise class, which will be hard, but I think I can do at least some of it. I didn't sleep well last night--the norm lately, and I'm hoping a return to exercising might help with that.

And then back to my desk. This week: editing, Frost Place stuff, reading mss for a contest. Maybe testing negative for Covid. That would be exciting.

And look at the progress Tom made on the shed!

Yesterday was my first day back. I worked in the garden, I worked in the house, I even had a little dance party while frying green tomatoes. It felt so good to be fizzy again.

I'm still not completely well: lots of residual sinus crap, and my taste buds are still screwed up, and I'm very slow in the mornings, which is an odd lingering symptom, because I am usually what my friend Teresa calls "an extreme lark"--up very early, and instantly fluttering.

But despite yesterday's slow morning, I rousted myself to pick all of the green tomatoes. I cleaned floors and made overnight bread starter; I cut grasses and flowers for drying; I tore out tomato vines and cut down dead annuals and picked what might be the last of the green beans. I put away window fans and washed the mantelpiece and filled the vases with zinnias and dried wheat.

I got so much done yesterday that I'll be happy to sit around and think about it today, if that's what my body requires. But I expect I'll still be puttering. I've got bread to bake, and I'll roast green tomatoes for salsa verde, and maybe I'll make a few green tomato pickles. I'll tear out some more fading annuals in the garden . . . the sunflowers are making a sad show, and I should take pity on them.

For now, though, it is so pleasant just to be sitting upright, drinking coffee, caring about the world.

It's 44 degrees in the little northern city by the sea, and I am sitting in my couch corner, in my red bathrobe, with my white cup and saucer, just like a regular healthy poet might. So far, so good: I slept well, and late, woke up without a fever and now I'm even feeling sort of lively. Yesterday was an aggravating mix of energy and sudden crashes, and maybe today will be that way too. But it's off to a good start. 

Also, my typing has improved. I didn't know that Covid messed with small-motor skills, but it seems to have messed with mine. I'm still making a million typos but at least my fingers are now going in the generally correct direction.

I'm sitting here with a broad awareness of how many tasks have lapsed, but I'm also glad to say that I'm not too worried about any of this. I hope, at some point, to clean floors. I hope, at some point, to work in the garden. But I really don't know when I'll be able to do any of that, and none of it truly matters. The garden is already drought-shabby and groundhog-ridden. And the house is still pretty tidy, despite the extra layer of cat fur.

I was thinking about the comments some of you left on the post (was it yesterday's?) when I took a stab at describing the bodily indifference I felt during the height of my illness. Both my sister and Tom have talked to me about the strangeness of the experience, the breath of danger that hung over it, even as none of us actually felt imperiled. Childbirth, as Angela reminded me in her comment, did feel like an active battle with death, and my body grappled hard to win. There was no indifference. I've never had cancer, so I can't speak to that comparison, which, in any case, I imagine is different for each person. All I know is that, in the throes of Covid, my body did not care about itself. 

I don't know how else to describe the lethargy, which was not fatigue but something more insidious. If I had been sicker, my body would not have struggled to stay alive. It would not have helped itself.

I keep going back to the phrase "medieval stench"; it's the metaphor I find myself reaching for when I try to think this out. Because this illness is powerful. It reaches back into the dark annals, the before-times, when medicine was a dried toad tied to the belly or a bundle of nettles under the bed. Nothing of what I've said is rational or scientific; none of it has anything to do with what the illness means to doctors or researchers. But the truth is that illness bleeds body into mind, fractures body from mind, mixes and combines and ferments and throws away, and all I can say is that you should read what Virginia Woolf has to say about that in "On Being Ill":

Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as greed or desire, is null, negligible, and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night, the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February.

Last night I had my first deep night's sleep in days, and this morning I woke without a fever. Though I'm still congested and slightly sore-throaty, I feel like the blanket of illness is finally lifting. What a bizarre ordeal this has been. Yet while it's been unpleasant, it's also been interesting. Maybe this is just the writer talking, but I always like to learn new things, and now I have.

An illness powerful enough to create a pandemic is by definition a brutal one, and with Covid I have been sick enough to smell that medieval stench. But because I was vaccinated I was not in fear. So I was aware of both sides: what was actually happening as opposed to what could have been happening. I'm not writing very well yet (like, actually, physically, not typing very well yet), so I don't have the wherewithal to talk fully about this. But specifics--the peculiar placement of the sore throat, a sensation of bodily indifference as opposed to bodily fatigue--were cues to what, without vaccination, could have gone very wrong.

Of course you were all correct, and I did nothing even resembling physical work yesterday. But I think, maybe, by the evening, I was beginning to feel more human.

This morning I am again running a fever, and have retreated to bed as Tom gets ready to go to work for the first time in a week. I hope he manages okay. It feels strange not to be up making his coffee, washing breakfast dishes, throwing laundry into the machine--my typical weekday flurry into tidiness before exercising and showering and shoehorning myself into desk work. Instead I am lolling in bed, listening to jays squawk in the gloaming, listening to Tom make his lunch, listening to the cat yowl at him about some disgruntlement.

I'll be washing those breakfast dishes soon, but slow is the word du jour. 

I thought maybe this would be the morning I woke without a fever, but apparently not. I have so rarely run temperatures in my life, and that has been the strangest thing about Covid: the cycle of recurring fevers, tamping them down with Tylenol, then feeling them spike again. They've also contributed to notably strange dreams--one in which I was trying to figure out how much to charge people for my coughs, another in which I was organizing my headache into pigeonholes on a desk.

Everything is exhausting, but doing nothing is so dull. I've been able to work for a few hours each morning, but then my attention fractures, and all I can do is languidly watch movies, which itself has become exhausting. I've made dinner every night, I picked beans yesterday, I even did a little watering, but each chore requires significant preparation: timing the fever medicine, resting beforehand, making sure I don't put too much pressure on myself. I'd like to think I could clean the bathrooms today, following that pattern, though I don't yet feel strong enough to drag the vacuum cleaner around.

Tom, however, is much better and is hoping to finally test negative today.

Tom is better, I am worse, but we are okay. I managed to work half a day, and even mowed grass, before my energy drained away. I went to bed at 7:30 last night and mostly slept through the night, but with strange dreams. Headache and coughing and weariness. I expect to have a slow day today, but I bet things will improve by tomorrow.

 This morning I woke with a 100-degree fever. Still testing negative but clearly I'm sick. I'll keep you posted, as I can.

5:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning, and, unusually, I am writing to you from my bedroom. The fan is humming; the window is a dim rectangle in the dark. Outside, in the lilac, a bluejay is screeching.

Under normal circumstances I would already be downstairs and T would be here, but for the duration we are sleeping in separate rooms, so I am trying out how it feels to write from here. I am still not sick, and he is still not well, though yesterday his symptoms seemed to be shifting from flu-like to cold-like. He's continues to be exhausted, napping for hours each day, but he did manage to wash the dinner dishes last night, so that's a small sign of returning energy. Maybe today will be the turning point. It's sad to see him so ill.

But I am relieved to have (thus far) dodged the bullet. I'll be zoom-teaching this afternoon, baking bread this morning, maybe working in the garden a little. If I have time, I'd like to weed the strawberry patch.

Yesterday I tore out the paste tomatoes, which were almost completely dried up, and planted spinach and arugula for the fall. The groundhog, in the meantime, has vanished again, maybe because I blocked up his local hole. Let's hope this keeps working because he has a taste for late-season crops: fennel, kale, lettuce. The only things he avoids are leeks.

We're hanging in okay at the Alcott House sanitarium. T slept or sagged for much of yesterday, though he did take a short masked walk, just to feel his muscles move. He is in good spirits, eating fine, not getting worse, but apparently trapped on a plateau of lethargy. Meanwhile, I still show no signs of illness.

Maybe today his energy will start to kick back in, or maybe this will be another day on the couch. My plan is to muddle around with some garden chores, simmer chicken stock for a zucchini risotto, prep for tomorrow's class, and baby him. As sick people go, he's pretty easy to care for: he accepts tending graciously but doesn't wallow or make a scene. In my experience this is a rare talent and is well worth the interminable German silent films.

Well, best-laid plans . . .

Yesterday morning Tom tested positive for Covid, so our workaday schedules have come to a grinding halt. He'd gotten the news that someone on his crew was positive, so he tested just as a precaution and was shocked to see the double lines pop up instantly. Quickly, however, he moved on from zero symptoms to moderate ones: coughing, sore throat, small fever. When I checked on him this morning, he said he thinks he might be feeling better, but we'll see.

I did a big shopping on Tuesday, so we've got plenty of supplies. For the moment I'm still negative, but I expect that will change. I am supposed to zoom-teach on Sunday afternoon, which will be awkward if I get sick, but I'm not going to fret until I have to. I kept working yesterday, editing and doing Frost Place stuff and mowing grass and freezing beans and such, as poor Tom huddled under a couch blanket and watched an interminable German silent film. I guarantee you that I will never watch an interminable German silent film when I am sick, but everyone's comfort is different.

I am feeling more pulled together this morning than I was yesterday. Not making a 5:30 a.m. trip to the bus station after getting up at 5:15 (because the alarm didn't go off) helps with that.

Instead, I'm sitting cozily in my red bathrobe, drinking my one small cup of coffee, listening to sheets churn in the washer, listening to T sigh and clank his saucer and think about getting dressed, listening to the neighbor's car grumble and mutter up the street. The temperature is 52 degrees, and all of the downstairs windows are closed. Autumn is here, and little Alcott House feels tucked up, drawn in on itself.

Today I'll be back to editing, but the house is tidy now--bathrooms scrubbed, floors washed--and that always helps me feel more settled in my mind. I can't bear to work in dirt and clutter. In the afternoon I'll do some yard jobs and freeze beans, and this evening I'll go out to write. A plain and steady schedule. I'm looking forward to it.

Yesterday I spent time updating the Events tab on this blog, working on a newsletter, otherwise trying to pull myself together publicity-wise. Let me know if you've got other proposals. I'm especially interested in ideas about NYC gigs around the date of the NJ reading. It would be nice to tag-team that stuff into the same bus trip.

A flurry of goodbyes, a rush to the bus station, and now the boy is heading back into his world and I am sitting blearily on the couch attempting to prepare myself for some semblance of productivity. I've got editing to do, and a work call at noon, and so much piled-up housework and laundry, and the sodden bean patch to deal with, and and and. It was a lovely week with P, but also the last hurrah of summer. Now all of the autumn pressures suddenly loom large . . . so much teaching and traveling. I hope I can manage to keep myself together.

First, though, T and I are going into town for pizza and a jazz show tonight. A small comfortable date, just us, nobody else to worry over, and sleeping in our own bed afterward. I am jangled right now, as you can tell . . . work fret, yes, but also why does it continue to be so hard to watch a child go away? This always happens, it always will happen, I am accustomed to it, I am glad my sons have competent and satisfying adult lives, I like living alone with T. But the moment of separation is always like picking a scab and watching it start to bleed.

It rained all day yesterday, and all night, and now it is still raining--a slow, steady, inexorable rain, of the sort we haven't had since last spring. As a result, our family collapsed into a thorough holiday: naps and games and reading and idle chat, punctuated by a trip into town for oysters and poutine, and then the season's first fire in the wood stove. No shed building, the bare minimum of housework . . . it was an excellent day for underachievers.

Today T will go back to work, and I'll gird my loins for groceries and some actual housework, but P and I will probably still loll around together a fair amount. He departs at dawn tomorrow, and after that I'll really get back to business. I've got to pull together a syllabus for a Sunday-afternoon class, and dig into a new editing stack, and catch up with emails, and so on and so on. The usual looming stuff.

But here's some news: over the weekend I received an invitation to read in November at Warren Community College in northwestern New Jersey. The series is run by the poet BJ Ward, and it's got a long history of big-name features . . . Joyce Carol Oates, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Mary Karr, Stephen Dunn, Paul Muldoon . . . that sort of luminary. Needless to say, I'm thrilled. Transportation and timing will be a challenge, but I think I can overcome them. The event is a significantly big deal for me--I mean, an ample honorarium, a hotel room! Golly! I am so unaccustomed to this sort of thing.

We got home mid-afternoon, released the cat, picked beans, flopped on couches, took showers. I made an enormous vegetable and macaroni salad (tomatoes, cucumbers, roasted eggplant and zucchini, fried onions and peppers, a soupçon of leftover ribeye steak, bowtie macaroni, and lots of basil and mint) and a big bowl of blueberries and raspberries and whipped cream. We listened to baseball and played some games. Everyone was tired: it was an emotional visit, but also the hot dust of the fair was wearying. Yesterday we watched horse pulls and some dreadfully acted professional wrestling. We avoided the Maine Republicans tent and ate hot dogs and French fries. We visited with my dear friend Linda, who I know I've mentioned here before: her daughter and grandchildren were murdered by her son-in-law; it was a giant Harmony tragedy; as a family, our feelings about Linda are very powerful. But then again, staying with Angela in Wellington was equally powerful. She is a deep friend of my heart; our families are intertwined; her little homestead in the woods is one of my favorite places on earth. We were young mothers together and now we are aging mothers together, and we talked and talked about everything, and there were no bars, and it was glorious and it was exhausting.

She texted later about feeling a little downcast after we left, and we, too, felt a little downcast. That burst of feelings . . . joy or sorrow, a complex olio of both: it requires convalescence, I guess. Our life in Harmony was so intense. Maybe when you live in that sort of place--remote and difficult, on both a geographic and a human scale--every drop of love feels like a lake.

* * *

Today I'll slowly get myself back into town life. It's supposed to rain all day, though it hasn't started yet. I might go out to borrow a groundhog trap. I might take my exercise class, or I might skip it. (I am pretty tired, though that's no excuse.) I might do some housework. We might go out to eat. Who knows?

In all of my flurry about going north, I never mentioned another lovely thing that happened: my friend Carlene Gadapee published an essay about my collection Accidental Hymn in the online journal Vox Populi. It's more than just a review; it's a close reading of the book, and I am so enormously moved and grateful for her loving words. 

 Fifty-four degrees. A sky whitening among the trees . . . chestnuts, apples, and then the forest trees--so many trees, small and tall, planted and wild, clustering around the house, opening down the hill into the garden spot, shouldering together at the edge of the clearing. The land of trees, the great north woods. Which means, of course, that somewhere close by, the roar of chainsaw and skidder also rises into the morning.

This visit has been perfect. Family sweetness in Wellington, comic sociability on the fairgrounds. P and I had an excellent time judging produce; T had fun judging art; we were entertained by suddenly being called together to sample fruit cordials and mead at 10 a.m. with a motley crew of whoever happened to be hanging around. A former student won best in show for a fantastic watermelon. Another former student won the demolition derby. I got huge hugs from old friends. In the afternoon, a drive up into Kingsbury to walk the barrens, pick blueberries, dip our feet into the pond . . . all the while, talking and talking about everything on earth. In the evening, T cooking over a fire, dinner in the dark on the screen porch, music and wine and an owl. What complete and utter delight. We are sated.

Wild blueberry barren, Kingsbury, Maine

 Quick, quick post, as I slept late and people are getting up, and then I must rush to my fair gig.

But stars, and cold air, the cry of a pileated woodpecker, beloveds, and red wine!

More anon--

I slept really badly last night, which is a drag, since I have a ton of things to do today and then will be driving north this evening. Maybe I'll be able to grab a nap at some point; I sure hope so.

Plus, the day will be starting off with a bang, with the furnace-cleaning guys arriving bright and early at 8 a.m. No procrastination for the weary. Blah.

I expect, when I go outside, I'll find half the garden razed to the ground. Groundhog hunger has resurfaced with a fury, which is part of why I slept so badly. I couldn't stop fretting about him. Useless at 1 a.m., but there you have it.

Here's hoping that a bit of coffee will brighten my jaded outlook. I think it might be working already. The temperature is every cool outside, down to 48 degrees--such a physical jolt after so many warm months. In a minute or so, I'll need to drag the trash to the curb, and I'm looking forward to a new scent of autumn in the shadowy morning air. 

We did end up getting real rain yesterday morning, an unexpected boon, and now the weather has shifted and I've woken to a much cooler world. Outside, in the dark, a passing train slowly hoots; car tires swish past; then silence falls again, a silence that is not silence, the creak of cicadas, the rustle of leaves, the far-off mutter of interstate traffic.

Yesterday I worked and panted and worked and panted, and I did manage to finish the bulk of that hard editing project. There are a few loose ends to tie, but it should be off my desk today. What a relief. In the meantime, the boy arrived last night, the groundhog decimated my kale, the neighbor's cat got lost and then reappeared, the Red Sox hit a grand slam, Trump's lawyers were idiots, and I made chocolate pudding.

One of these days I might work on a poem again. You never know.