Woke up to drizzle, streetlight reflections, and our doughty little Christmas tree, shining sweetly in its corner. It is Wednesday, the last day of November, in the little northern city by the sea, and I am tucked into a cat-scratched couch corner in a shabby postwar budgeteer cape thinking about Dante and the arugula that is still thriving in my cold frame. 

It will be a rainy-cloudy day, but not cold. I've got to prep for tonight's reading, and do my exercise class, and catch up on a few teaching tasks, but otherwise the day is mine. I want to work on poems and maybe take a first look at how the finished pieces might gather together into an embryo manuscript. It's way too early to be really thinking about order, but I'm interested in starting to notice what I've got.

I'm expecting a new editing project to arrive by the end of the week, and I'll be teaching on the next three Sundays, not to mention hitting the road again on Monday, so I'm very much enjoying these few quiet days. Yesterday I went for a long walk by myself, then rattled around the empty rooms, just pacing and pausing. I feel as if my mind may be preparing itself for a burst of something new, but I don't know what that will be, or how I will wrestle with it. All I can do is wander and wait.

Yesterday was housecleaning and giant laundry day, but I also managed to work on a poem, plus do my exercise class and go for a walk and even drive to South Portland to accomplish a small amount of Christmas shopping. This morning I'll focus on class plans, and some writing also, and undertake a bit more Christmas shopping, which as of now is almost done. It's been a low-key year, not one thing purchased online, not one thing costing more than $40. I'm feeling quite pleased with myself, given how much I hate shopping.

The poem I started over Thanksgiving has found its shape, and now I am paring it down, sliver by sliver.

Decorating for Christmas is not the event it was in Harmony. No trudging out into the back forty to choose a spindly funny-looker for the living room, no loud boys working to cram every single available ornament onto every single sagging bough. No, these days, it's just me at the grocery store, picking out a little guy and paying too much money for him; then setting him in a corner and dolling him up with a few sentimental ornaments while T eats lunch and lets me have my way.

As a result: voila: the traditional tree, topped with the paper Elvis Santa that Tom made for our very first tree together in 1986, scattered with early-1960s styrofoam gingerbread men from my parents' first tree, featuring famous ornaments such as Tin Foil Man (made by a co-worker's little boy in the early 1990s) and a rubber King Kong (T purchased it for me at the top of the Empire State Building in his courting days).

And on the mantle, the festive Holiday Rodents, and their pal, Wobbly Reindeer.

Across the street, the neighbors have strung lights along their fence and into their crabapple tree. And beyond, dangling from a giant maple, hangs the Orb, a ball of red and gold lights, which from the vantage of our front window, glows like a UFO against the the Congregational church's steeple. It's fine and silly display, and I am very fond of it.

And thus the Christmas season commences in the little northern city by the sea . . . a long rainy night, a shimmering Orb, and Elvis.

 

We got home just after sunset: unpacked, lit a fire, opened some beers, sat down to play cards, talked about what to make for dinner . . . we had a passel of leftovers from Tom's mother that we decided to turn into hash; we gobbled down our hash, we did dishes, we watched a couple of episodes of Peter Gunn, we fell asleep hard . . . This is all to say that the two of us, and the cat, were glad to be puttering around in our little house again--though the holiday was cheerful and talkative and sweet, and the family was a delight, and nothing could have gone better except to have even more of us on the spot.

Today I think Tom's going to work on the barn before the rain starts, and I'm going to try to catch up on laundry and groceries, but for now we are still lolling around in a post-holiday torpor, enjoying the fruits of the brand-new coffee grinder. The furnace is growling, the lamps are gleaming: Alcott House is cozy and shabby and friendly: a little island on a lake, a painted door into a tree trunk, a badger's burrow in a snowy forest.

Yesterday morning, after I finished my post to you, I opened my notebook and began transcribing a few scribbles. And suddenly I was down the rabbit hole . . .

An hour later I surfaced to discover that I was putting together shards from multiple scribblings into a longish piece about poetic craft and concern. At the moment the poem as a whole is called "Desk Work," and each section is a metaphorical response to an abstraction: "Conscience," "Ruthlessness," "Accident," and so on. I had no idea of writing such a poem, no plan to combine these scraps into new form, and yet here I am, with a project bubbling into life. The brain is such a crazy, amazing beast.

The rest of the day was fairly quiet--a small venture out to the stores, reading, some games of cribbage, lots of conversation, and then dinner out with the family. And meanwhile the new poem clattered around in my head, pitching and rolling like a baby in a basket.

I write to you from a quiet kitchen in western Massachusetts. Outside, a flat sky is just beginning to lighten. Nothing looks like itself. The pine grove is a cluster of silhouettes against pale paper, the house is a tidy construction of matchsticks, the kitchen is a rowboat in a still lake.

As usual, I am the only one awake. The refrigerator hums and bring me back to myself. The rowboat dissolves into fog. The matchsticks wriggle and disappear. Only the sky-paper remains, curling over a bowl of earth.

Yesterday was a flurry--hours upon hours of juggling one complicated recipe against another. My mother-in-law took charge of the turkey, but between and 1 and 7 p.m. I made potato, cauliflower, and fontina gratin; wild rice and cranberry stuffing; giblet gravy; the innards of the apple galette; herb butter for green beans; and probably something else I have forgotten. Always I show up with no idea of her menu. It's like the Thanksgiving version of the British Bake Off's technical challenge: six hours to make a holiday meal for eight people, without knowing what I'm getting into.

But we did it, without significant mishap. The meal was enjoyed, card games were played, and I collapsed into bed afterward feeling like I'd run a marathon.

Today will be much more sedate. I hope to get outside for a walk up to the reservoir, though rain is forecast, so that idea may not work out so well. I do need to venture out to the stores to buy a coffee grinder, to replace the one that self-destructed yesterday morning as I was making breakfast in Portland. [You may be interested to know that I just mistyped Portland as Poetland.]

I brought along Alice Munro's short stories to read; also Betsy Sholl's new poetry collection. I brought along my notebook of draft-blurts, in case I have a chance to tinker with any of them. We'll see. Possibly all I'll do is make more coffee and stare out the window. That will be okay too.

Recently a bookstore opened in my neighborhood, the first I've seen in this part of town. I, of course, was thrilled: a bookstore within walking distance of my house! Being from up north, of course, I immediately began to worry that it would limp along till Christmas and then close because of lack of interest. That is the pattern in the northcountry towns: open a [bookstore/organic grocery/restaurant that serves vegetables], and wait for it to fold. But yesterday, when I walked into Back Cove Books, the place was hopping. People browsing among the shelves, readers filling the chairs, little children bouncing on the front steps, customers in line to buy books. I had been there once before, and now the owner called out to me, "We have your collection in stock now!" and I felt all pleased and blushy. Women were standing around chatting about "my favorite Alexander Chee novel" and "I studied under so-and-so in grad school" and "have you met my friend the agent?" and I was like, what is this world? Have I accidentally teleported to Brooklyn?

Anyway, I did my neighborly/authorly duty and bought a stack of books for Christmas gifts, and I took the car to a car wash and removed Tuesday's Wellington snow-dirt, and I vacuumed out the interior and wiped down the dust and generally made the car look decent again, and I drove to the fish market and bought smoked fish for Thanksgiving appetizers and salmon for our dinner, and thus passed my Wednesday at home.

This morning we'll slowly pull ourselves together and then we'll head south for family time in a nice clean car with new tires. I hope all of you are looking forward to a good day and a manageable load of dirty dishes. I hope the Bills beat the Lions in a game I will not have a chance to watch. I hope my sons are enjoying some sort of strange Thanksgiving food they've never been served before. I hope no pets get sick on turkey and throw up on the rug.

I drove in my first snow of the season yesterday morning, and I will now stop grousing about my expensive new tires as they did their job perfectly. Only two students came to Monson (because of crazy Thanksgiving-week school schedules), but the class went well, snow was a delight, we got a chance to see what some of the resident artists were up to in their studios, and then I motored home cheerfully, ordered pizza for dinner, and watched an odd Japanese comedy from the 80s about the adventures of a woman tax inspector.

Today, laundry to do, errands to run, but on the whole it should be a low-key day. We're not leaving till tomorrow, so there'll be no panic about slamming out of here after work and driving into the night. Thank goodness. In my current state of over-traveling and perpetual work-weekending, I am dedicated to every little pocket of ease I can find.

By the way, next Wednesday, November 30, I'll be zoom-reading with the fabulous Meg Kearney and Cat Parnell. If you'd like a link, please email the host, Gloria Mindock of Cervena Barva Press, and she will send you one: editor@cervenabarvapress.com.

 Snow in the homeland. Can you wonder why I was heartsick about leaving?

Nineteen degrees this morning, after snow flurries yesterday. As soon as the snow started, Tom threw up his hands, tossed his tools into the truck, and said Enough. No painting in the snow. But at least much of the barn trim is installed, even if unpainted, and next weekend is forecast to be milder. 

Notice how I am attempting to use the word barn. My neighbor has been hilarious. She is researching more impressive names than shed and has so far come up with bothy as her favorite. My opinion is that, if we keep using shed, it at least needs to be capitalized as a nod to the dignity of the new structure. 

This morning I'll endure my exercise class and then turn my attention to housework before heading north this afternoon. The floors are littered with two days' worth of carpenter detritus, and I don't want to come home to that.

But black cakes are baked and are curing in the fridge. The Bills managed to win a game, probably because I didn't watch it. I am reading a sad story by Alice Munro and am thinking hard about cadence in free verse. I went for a long, fast, windy walk around the cove with my borrow-a-daughter, Lucy. November satisfactions. I hope your skies are bright and your mittens are warm.

Well, I now own four new extremely expensive tires. Ugh, but also a relief, as the car already feels and sounds so much better on the road. To be honest, I haven't, till this point, put much money into tires for this car . . . although my previous car used to eat tires, so you could say that I have preexisting tire angst. Anyway, the deed was done, the painful bill was paid, and then I went to the grocery store and tracked down the varied and expansive ingredients for black cake. Thus, today, at long last, I am ready to bake.

Tom worked all day yesterday on the shed, which I am now going to refer to as the barn. It is really much too nice to be called a shed. He installed the sliding door over the woodshed addition, he built door and window casings, he painted trim. Every step is beautiful, but that sliding door is particularly satisfying to look at. It's made from the same cedar boards he planed and notched for the rest of the siding. Stained a pale transparent grey, it is austere and elegant and every bit a fine barn door.

I assume he'll be out there again today. Winter is crawling closer and closer, and soon snow will stop him in his tracks.

Sunday morning, late November. Up in the homeland deer hunting has paused for the day, as state law requires, though everyone who has not gotten a deer yet is becoming anxious about their empty freezer. Tomorrow I'll be heading there, eager for wood fires and venison and chatter with friends--lamplight, the radio playing low, the sound of water diverted from a spring, trickling through an open kitchen faucet so that it doesn't freeze up overnight.

I have been holding on to today and tomorrow as a precious respite--the first and last weekend for many weeks when I won't be teaching or traveling. But the fates informed me, "Guess what? You must sit in the Tire Warehouse waiting room all Saturday morning, even though you tried to escape that doom by making an appointment for yesterday." So instead of puttering around my kitchen gathering together the ingredients for Emily Dickinson's black cake, I'll be ensconced in a plastic chair, attempting to read Alice Munro's short stories as ten torque wrenches whizz and shriek around me. I guess I'll be baking that cake tomorrow.

For the moment, thankfully, there are no torque wrenches in my life. Just the cat crunching chow in the dining room. Just Tom sleepily bonking a cup into a saucer. I suppose he'll be working on the shed today, but I wish he had the leisure to take the weekend off: he is very tired. I am drinking a second cup of coffee and thinking about the student manuscript I need to read; thinking about an essay I might undertake about writing into cadence instead of logic; thinking about watering houseplants and roasting Brussel sprouts and plucking a poem draft out of a notebook.

Did I tell you yesterday that my Monson kids are going to make found poems out of the 27 grievances in the Declaration of Independence? I am kind of pleased with myself for inventing this idea.

This place feels like November. On a windy walk with my neighbor yesterday I wore a hat and gloves, though last week I hadn't even gotten them out of storage yet. The trees are mostly bare, and the neighborhood skyline has transformed from a leafy extravaganza into a clutter of austere chimneys and steeples.

I spent the morning working on my Monson plans: we're going to focus on accidents . . . found poems, blackouts, borrowings. (Among other things, I'm going to show them a poem I wrote using a motel's Yelp reviews.) And then in the evening I went out to the salon and wrote three ridiculous surreal romps that don't feel like they'll ever amount to anything poem-wise but were cathartic in their own way. The relief of absurdity, you might call it. Anyway, I came home feeling better about myself, writing-wise. I haven't been producing much lately, and silly is better than nothing at all.

The car mechanic says I need new tires, so this morning I'll be sitting in a waiting room at the Tire Warehouse, reading other people's manuscripts and looking forward to a new and improved ride. Then this afternoon I'm getting a haircut. Thus are the excitements of Friday: spending money, American-style.

Cold smacked me in the face when I opened the back door to let the cat out. But the rain has stopped, I think, and the day is supposed to turn sunny, though not warm. First thing this morning I'll need to bring my car to the garage so the guys can solve the why-is-it-loud question. Then I'll walk home and start working on my class plans for next week's Monson trek. I'll go up on Monday, teach on Tuesday, and then Thanksgiving will be upon us. T and I will spend it in Massachusetts with his parents, though neither boy will be with us. It seems we are at the time of life when our children branch out into other families' doings. I'll miss them, of course, but I'm happy that their circles of affection keep getting wider.

For me, this will be yet another week on the road, when I'm barely over the last one. All I seem to do these days is travel. So I should remind myself to stay in the present. I'm home now, and I don't have to teach this weekend, so that's something. Tonight I hope to go out to the salon to write. Maybe my car won't cost the earth to repair. I've got beautiful leeks in the refrigerator and heaps of arugula in the garden. The cat is in love with me. I need to find another book to read. Yikes, Christmas shopping.

Rain is clattering down--a cold, cold rain that is somehow not sleet or snow. It's supposed to rain like this for much of the day, and I am glad I got my grocery and yard chores done yesterday because this weather is not charming. Thank goodness for heat and lamplight and large cups of tea.

I'll be at my desk again today, grinding my way through the editing stack, maybe finishing it, if all goes well. I'm figuring on soup for dinner tonight, corn chowder possibly. I need to plan for next week's high school session. I'd like to fidget into my notebooks and see if any poems are hiding there. 

Meanwhile, the rain, the rain. 

Yesterday was considerably less productive, desk-wise, than I'd hoped, thanks to file-transmission issues and other such out-of-my-control technical snafus. But I think things have been ironed out, so today will be Deal with Editing Stack, Round 2. In the meantime, I worked on a blurb for a class I'll be teaching in the spring and mucked around with some Frost Place stuff.

[Sidebar: There's still room in Carlene Gadapee's Poets' Table class, coming up this Saturday afternoon. These are fun, welcoming, inexpensive writing sessions for people working at any level. And Carlene is a terrific teacher. You should check it out.]

[Other sidebar: I've got two openings in my December chapbook class. If you have at least 10 finished poems and are interested in beginning to experiment with how they might work together as a collection, this class is for you. We've had both published and unpublished poets in these sessions. Everyone is a colleague. Everyone is welcome.]

I also got out into the garden . . . dug up the last dahlia roots, tore out the frosted marigolds and bachelors' buttons, harvested leeks, harvested arugula. The groundhog seems to have vanished, so my fall greens have suddenly exploded, which is exciting. On the whole, we're pretty well ready for winter (barring the shed, which is still in process), and that's good, because winter seems to have suddenly arrived. The temperature is 24 degrees this morning, and this time last week it was 60 degrees. But the house is snug, the gardens are winter-ready, garlic and bulbs are planted, and I know where the snow shovels and hats are hiding.

Monday morning. 30 degrees. Home.

Yesterday I slowly stepped into the traces, buckled up the harness, took my first steps back into routine--laundry, cooking, dishes--but I also spent the afternoon on the couch watching an aggravating Bills game, so it was certainly not a work day. Today, though, will be a real one: the editing stack is back; I've got a ton of emails to answer; I need to grocery-shop and address the housework (though Tom did keep up while I was gone, which was a huge help). Also my exercise teacher has returned from vacation, so I'll restart my abs class, no doubt painfully. It's a good thing my class hiatus included alternate workouts such as climbing Cadillac Mountain and trudging up New York City subway-station stairs with a suitcase full of books.

Finally the neighborhood got a frost, and my marigolds have been zapped. Now the garden bounty is down to arugula, leeks, and tough herbs, with sprigs of spinach and lettuce poking out from among the leaf mulch. It rained all day yesterday, a cold rain, but there's been no sign of anything wintry in Portland. Still, my trips up north for teaching will start to feel dicier.

I think it will be a quiet week. T will be out a lot, and I will go back to rattling around in my own box . . . a big shift after a voyage among so many people and places. I want to plumb my notebooks. I want to read. I want to walk along familiar streets. I want to reacquaint myself with myself.

And so here I am, wrapped in my old red bathrobe, snugged into my corner of the grey couch, drinking black coffee from a white cup and saucer, as if I've never left home. I last sat here nine days ago, and I'm very glad to be back, and to have no place to go.

Outside the weather has shifted, the strange warmness of the past week replaced by a cold wind. Most of the leaves are down now. The windows are shut tight and the furnace grumbles and the color of the sky whispers November, November, November. Compared to Brooklyn, the neighborhood is bucolic. Compared to Monson and West Tremont, it is an urban cluster. I feel disoriented, having leaped back and forth amid so much geographic disparity. Still everywhere I was, I thought, How amazing this is. I kept being surprised by place, and then the people in the place. The only arty thing I did was my own reading and teaching. Everything else was people--many of them friends I've known for decades, others met only recently, but all the ballast of my trip. Some are writers; some don't write at all. Some share the mixed-up romantic-dramatic history of people who meet when they are young; some have led entirely separate physical lives from me. I saw my son continue to intertwine with many of these friends, both as he is now and as he was in their memories of his childhood. These relationships are complicated and rich and elegiac and comical, and they remind me that getting older is not only loss. It is also a kind of glorious party.

I caught a 7:45 bus out of New Jersey yesterday morning, and stared idly out the window as the landscape rapidly shifted from suburban to industrial, all under a blanket of mist. As the cars on the turnpike growled toward the city, cranes and other machinery loomed like dinosaurs from the rail and factory yards. And then we were sucked into the tunnels and spat out on 42nd Street.

The rest of the day was fairly quiet. I got back to Brooklyn by 9:30, unloaded my stuff, and then lounged around watching The British Baking Show until midday, when I went back into Manhattan to meet P during his lunch break. It was raining and humid, and I spent half an hour under an awning in Chelsea, watching the wet and the people and the buildings, until P could escape from work.

Then after lunch I came back to Brooklyn and read and took a nap until my friend Ray (who works nights) got up, and then we went out to his bar, and visited with friends, and met up with his husband, and eventually made our way to a local Italian restaurant.

This morning P and his partner will stop by for breakfast, and then be off into their days, and I will wend my way back into Manhattan and wait for the bus to carry me north toward home.

This week has been crazy and I will be very glad to return to my routine, but the week has also been rich and varied and filled with so many people and places that I love. Not to mention those doughty Democratic voters.

I am lying on my back in a king-sized hotel bed in northwestern New Jersey. Features of the room: oddly high ceilings, a kitchenette with a teeny-tiny dishwasher, a bedside drawer containing both a Gideon Bible and the Book of Mormon.

I got into town around 3:30, which gave me time for a bath before dinner. I love baths and live in a house without a working tub, so I'd been looking forward to this hotel treat. Then I dolled myself up and went outside to meet BJ for dinner. He took me to a really nice local inn, where I ate salmon and we chattered intently about books, discovering, to our delight, a shared devotion to Brian Doyle, author of the novel Chicago that I've emoted about on this blog.

And then we drove to the college, where BJ pointed out my picture flashing on the highway marquee. That was a first: I have never had my photo on a marquee before. What a peculiar feeling.

Everyone at the school was incredibly friendly, from the security guard, to the faculty, to the students. There was a good-sized audience, people asked questions and listened hard, they bought books . . . It would have been a perfect miracle night if I hadn't had a choking fit while reading a poem, but I guess that is the sort of thing that keeps me earthbound.

So, this morning, back to New York, with a lighter suitcase.

It's 6:30 a.m. in Gowanus, Brooklyn, and somewhere close by a mockingbird is singing wildly. Otherwise, it is surprisingly quiet outside--just the occasional car shushing past; noisier inside, where downstairs my friend sleeps in front of a muttering TV.

I got into Manhattan yesterday at midday, met P for lunch at a Ukrainian restaurant (pierogis and hot cider, a surprisingly excellent combination), and then we lugged my book-laden bags to Brooklyn. Beer at the family bar, dinner at a Chinese restaurant, up late with complicated loving talk. A darling son, some of my oldest pals, the election results: it would have been a good day all around if I hadn't also gotten news that a close poet friend has been severely injured in a car accident. So that is a weight and a worry.

But I did manage to sleep for a few hours, and now I am drinking coffee, thinking about a shower, getting ready to pull out my poems and make a final reading plan for tonight. Later this morning I'll meet a writer friend for a walk. If time allows, I'll have lunch with my son. And by mid-afternoon I'll catch a bus to New Jersey and the event will unroll into whatever it will be.

I write to you from Route 95, snaking somewhere through York County, Maine, and heading south toward the New Hampshire line. I woke this morning filled with nervousness about yesterday's election, and the results are so much better than I feared. Maine reelected our poet-governor, Janet Mills, as well as our district 1 rep, Chellie Pingree, and right now the district 2 results are leaning toward Democrat Jared Golden. The results in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were excellent, and I am holding onto some hope for Georgia. Join me in heaving a huge sigh of relief as we witness the vexing of the Scoundrel Party.

My election anxiety has diminished, but I remain nervous about this leg of my travels. I am struggling with imposter syndrome around my Thursday-night reading. I mean, the next two readers in the series are Terrance Hayes and Robert Pinsky! However did I get into this lineup? Ugh. I'll stop palavering, as that's boring for all concerned, but still.

I'll switch to another subject. The wifi on this bus is egregious and I have no idea if you'll actually see this post, but I'll tell you about my class yesterday, which per usual was intense and charming. They lapped up the Margaret Atwood exemplars, they visited with a songwriter in residence at Monson Arts and asked beautiful and loving questions about her work, they giggled over off-color Doctor Seuss jokes, they wrote pieces about hunting and about hating hunting and they respected each other's opinions. I could go on and on but you get the idea.

Anyway: I think I'll end this post while the wifi is still sort of working. Talk to you soon.

Greetings from central Maine, where it is windy and cold and leafless exactly like the November morning one would expect. We left Mount Desert late yesterday afternoon and drove through the twilight across Route 15, through the Bangor strip of giant evangelical churches and used car emporia and then into the open fields and copses that spread into the highlands, past the Charleston prison, past the high school where my sons went, over the Piscataquis River and then, turning away from the Harmony road, we climbed the Greenville road into Monson.

We spent the night in Monson Arts guest housing, where we fried lamb burgers and potatoes and fresh kale and broccolini from the Tremont garden and watched a Veronica Lake noir on my computer before falling into bed early and solidly . . . though we did get up a few times in the wee hours to check blearily on the lunar eclipse. Meanwhile, the log trucks rumbled past, wind whipped and rattled at the building, and now the sunrise peers over the bare maples, the clutter of houses, the general store, the lake.

In a couple of hours I'll be down the street at Tenney House, greeting the school bus, falling into my teaching day. Tom will be doing whatever it is he'll be doing--taking pictures or reading or driving around or talking to people. At 1, he'll pick me up and we'll head home.

And by tomorrow morning at this time, I'll be on a bus to New York. Lordy.

Another windy, 60-degree November morning on Goose Cove. But today is the last day. Tonight the weather will change, and tomorrow we'll wake up in a different bed, in a different town, in a different state of mind.

It's barely light outside, but enough to see the flat tide rolling in against the rocks, the pointed trees crowding the shore, the dim twist of Swan's Island against the low clouds. Behind me the coffee pot mutters and spits; before me a cloud-sky dips like a weight over the mild sea.

Yesterday we climbed the south slope of Cadillac Mountain, not all the way to the summit but along a ridge that opened into a series of views like this one--across the valley and over misty Frenchman Bay. Then we turned downhill, clambering among granite and roots down to a twisting stream. It was about a 5-mile hike, and I worried some about my problematic feet, but with babying they did fine, and I was glad to discover that at 58 I still have the lungs and the legs to spend all afternoon scrabbling up and down a big hill.

And then, back at the cottage, I heated up minestrone, made a sautéed red pepper salad, spread parsley butter on toast, and we entertained our friends for dinner.

Today we'll do some chores for them . . . stack wood, plant garlic, whatever they need, and by mid-afternoon we'll be on the road, heading inland to Monson, and dreaming of April, when we'll be back.

Maine is ridiculously beautiful. What luck to have ended up in this place.

It's 60 degrees this morning, hazy over Goose Cove, with a stiff breeze roaring through the spruce trees behind the cottage. Shockingly I slept till nearly 8 a.m., old time, though the clock change is allowing me to pretend to be more virtuous than that.

No doubt the somnolence was due to our long day out on the water. In the morning we took the ferry from Bass Harbor out to Swan's Island. Here are some photos of Bass Harbor: you can see the Acadia mountains behind the moored boats, and the stalled marine construction equipment by the ferry pier. There were few visitors on the boat: mostly locals in vehicles; only a sprinkling of people outside on the upper deck. But the weather was September-like, and the ride was a joy. I love boats; all of my car-transportation fears melt away unreasonably on a ferry, and I turn my face into the wind and want to sing.

Swan's Island is six miles off the Mount Desert coast and, except for the ocean and the lobster traps and the old boats rotting in yards, might be located next door to Harmony. Guys in pickups, guys in blaze orange hunting gear, guys working up their firewood, 100-percent Republican political signs. It was homey, in an cozy/alarming sort of way. I could very easily imagine having ended up in such a place when I was 28 years old, instead of the place I did end up. I was eager for difficulty in those days, and that's what I got.

So we hiked along the quiet roads, and ate our lunch here, on a windy beach draped with green-yellow seaweed that looked like witches' hair. 

And then we caught a 3 p.m. ferry back to Bass Harbor, and wended our way back to the cottage for naps and then dinner with our friends. And then a walk to the edge to listen to the nighttime sea. And then sleep.

Good morning from the cottage. This is my view, day breaking over Goose Cove, with Swan's Island resting on the horizon.

And this is the stove I just lit, its glimmers and crackles blending with the alluring sound of a coffee maker (not pictured) gurgling out its first potful of French roast.

We were last here in late April, when the world was new green and full of sap. Now the leaves are mostly gone and the sumac along the shore twists bare hands into a quiver of wind.

The tide ripples in, and as the dark lifts I see a single lobster boat moored, a single crow flying. Silhouetted firs crowd the stony shore along points that are like parentheses around this mild bay, a quiet smugglers' hole, it might have been, during the privateer days of the War of 1812, a nest for a schooner loaded with contraband British goods to slip into, slip out of.

Rise slowly. Drink coffee. Stare at the sea. Eventually we will decide what to do with our day. Maybe visit the very island I am now looking at on the horizon. Maybe stack firewood for our friends. Maybe hike into Acadia. We will be here through Monday; there is no rush. We are on easy time.

Last night, I drove east from Bangor, up and down the long hills, onto the busy Ellsworth strip, one little car in a long line of head-lit, brake-lit vehicles, mostly not tourists at this time of year, mostly workers trying to get home for dinner. And then, once we crept through Ellsworth, the traffic magically dispersed and we drove to the edge of land, and then onto the causeway, and then onto the island, veering away from Bar Harbor, tracing the edge of Somes Sound, twisting through Southwest Harbor, and now the storefronts vanish, and we push forward into an invisible trace, a route marked only by the width of my headlights. I mark progress by counting church steeples, one, two, then a left turn onto gravel, down an alley looming with raspberry bushes, and I cut the engine and now there is only the shush of the sea.

Yesterday morning, as I was shuffling through poems, trying to prep for next week's reading, I heard my phone tick Email. When I checked the message, I discovered it was an announcement that I'd made the first cut for a very big prize. This prize is so big that I have absolutely no expectation of winning. This prize is the sort that cements a career. As a result, having made any sort of cut in the competition feels like fireworks, and I am chuffed and cheerful and disbelieving. I keep rereading the email to see if there's been some mistake.

So today, in the midst of packing, I need to mail a stack of my books to the foundation and write notes to recommenders and otherwise act as if I believe in myself. Though it's not as if I don't believe in myself. I do: just not in this context. This context is a fairy tale.

Still, a fairy tale makes any Friday morning more exciting, and so I am sitting here in my couch corner bubbling quietly to myself before I return to earth and start hauling compost and recycling to the curb and tossing towels into the washer and scrubbing breakfast dishes and otherwise enacting my accustomed role. 

Last night I went out to my friend Betsy's book launch at Mechanics' Hall, a beautiful old building downtown, built in the early 1800s as an artisans' improvement association. The place was packed: probably 100 people were there to cheer her on, including lots of friends, who waved at me and hugged me and tapped me on the shoulder and saved me a seat and chattered to me, and I said to myself, Gosh, I seem to live here now. I recall the first big public poetry event I attended in Portland, where I was so overwhelmed by shyness that I left early without talking to anyone. I felt like a disaster. And now I do not feel like a disaster. That is a welcome change.

Class plans are done: a three-Atwood day on the docket for Tuesday . . . flash memoir, flash fiction, and a poem; a study of speaker's voice/time movement/character treatment in each; writing prompts that let the kids try out what they see.

So today I'll start working on my reading list for next Thursday in New Jersey. I've got to fill 40 minutes, an enormous block of time, and I'm worried about being boring. I might read a few newer pieces, not just book ones,  which means sorting through the stack and trying out poems in the air. And then, after that, I've got to start dealing with clothes. Hiking clothes, teaching clothes, city clothes, reading clothes, with not much luggage space for the city/reading outfits and very little time for laundry between stints. Perhaps this is why rock-and-rollers stick with black.

Apparently it's 32 degrees outside; I wonder if we finally got a frost. If so, that means yard work too--yanking out collapsed marigolds, digging up the last dahlia.

Tonight I'll be going to my friend Betsy Sholl's book launch, which I'm sure will be a crowded event as she is much loved. So altogether it will be a busy day, though in an odd way. I'll be packing food for our cottage stay this weekend, so that means a cooler and baskets of bread and vegetables and olive oil and coffee and such. In contrast, I really, really need to keep my NYC packing basic as I'll be lugging books to sell and it's tiring to toil up and down those subway stairs with extra weight. All of this necessitous confusion makes me sure I'm going to forget something vital, like salt, or pants.

But at least the class plans are finished, and printed, and stowed in my teaching bag. That's one big done to check off the list. I am not quick at syllabus making. The big slowdown is tracking down the right materials to teach from. Once I do that, the conversation starters and writing prompts come quickly. But it can take me hours to choose models that will lead to focused but natural discussions and experiments.

The firewood chore is done: logs stacked snugly, bark and chips raked up, wheelbarrow tucked away in its new woodshed berth. It's a good thing I decided to work steadily because an unforecast rainstorm floated through mid-afternoon, just after I'd finished cleaning up, and that would have made handling logs much more unpleasant. There's nothing like wet work gloves to wreck a stacking party . . . though snowy wet work gloves take the prize for the worst firewood-stacking accessory. Ugh.

Anyway, job over, and now I'll go back to my desk and figure out next week's teaching plan. I've got to have everything in hand before leaving on Friday, and I ought to start organizing myself for NYC as well since I'll be leaving for the city almost as soon as I get home from Monson.

What a ridiculous schedule. I'm so glad not to be a rock star.

Today, however, I'm still in household mode. I've got to get the car to the shop. I've got to work on class plans. I've got to do laundry. Otherwise, my time is my own. Yesterday I received a poem acceptance, which was nice, and reminded me that's it's not entirely terrible to submit work. So I could do more of that today. I could also do some Christmas shopping but I bet I won't.

Writing writing writing. The faucet has been just a drip lately. I wonder when the explosion will happen.

The firewood arrived on cue, so yesterday I stacked, and then Tom stacked when he got home from work, and maybe I'll be able to finish the job today. It was a lovely day to be outside--sweet-tempered and golden, with crows shouting at me from the maples--and today will be another such. A poignant day also, as P learned that a college friend had died of cancer, a loss in its own right, but he was the son of a famous actor, so weirdly the news is splashed everywhere in the entertainment press and mourners are wrestling with the bizarreness of having known someone in private circumstances who has now, after death, become a paparazzo item.

I have been reading a book I picked up off the street, Joan Aiken's 1964 children's novel Black Hearts in Battersea, which I remember taking out of the library often when I was little. It's pleasant to revisit it, and to track what it was that drew me into the tale in those days . . . I think a certain Dickensian expansiveness, combined with an odd classless society, in which dukes and kings easily consort with ladies' maids and blacksmiths, as they might in Mother Goose. 

Now, today, I need to walk up to the library to get the flash-fiction anthology I ordered, and then hop my mind into class planning for next Tuesday in Monson. I'm mulling a Margaret Atwood day, maybe mixing up poems, essay excerpts, flash fiction so that they can consider issues of genre shifting. 

But I should work on my own stuff too. Yesterday my mind resolutely blinked away from all thoughts of poetry. I respect that in a brain; I understand that it needs to simplify itself, not be constantly translating action and observation into words and metaphor, cadence and drama. Still, I should be alert. There's likely to be a portal, somewhere. Brains are tricky that way.