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.