At 7:30 a.m. it was 28 degrees on the gravel road between Wellington and Kingsbury Plantation, and the trees and the sky were brilliant. I didn't have time to get out of the car but I was able to take these photos quickly.

This second one is looking over the dam on Kingsbury Pond, where the mist is rising softly, and the water seems to lap at the heels of the mountains, and frost coats the roadside grasses.

It was, as you can see, an intense morning in the homeland. My drive to Monson, which cut through dirt roads and logging routes, was a blast of color. And my teaching day was also a blast of color. These kids I'm working with: they are something else. Our focus yesterday was on Sappho, and they were in love. They all got to choose a card with a Sappho fragment on it as their writing trigger, and by the end of the afternoon they were clutching those fragments like talismans. I thought maybe my heart might break, to see them folding those little cards away in their notebooks so tenderly.

And then I drove home, winding my way south through the wild tree lanes. It is hard to explain how emotional I feel, listening to a young person work their way into new thoughts, new sounds, new connections. I needed all of that two-and-a-half-hour drive home to settle myself into some more manageable state of mind.

Today I'll catch up on some bits and pieces of desk work and yard work. I need to make sauce with the last of the tomatoes. I need to mow grass and I still need to plant garlic. Tom foraged some really nice drawer organizers from a kitchen demo, so I want to clean them up and then put them to use in our own kitchen. I'll do my exercise class and walk up to the market and fiddle with some poem drafts. 

I'm still kind of giddy from yesterday's class. I really don't know how I would ever manage as a day-to-day teacher. I seem to take everything too hard.