New Year's Eve Meditation

And so we have arrived, once again, at the last day of the year.

In some ways, this year was easier than the previous two were. High Covid passed into chronic Covid, and vaccines and boosters made me less afraid of dying or of killing someone else. But our national crises continue to ripen and burst, the war on Ukraine has been an unspeakable cruelty, children are murdered in schools, women are raped and told they deserve it, Jews are scapegoated, people of color are crushed like garbage, families without shelter wander the frozen streets. I could keep slicing this vein, but you already know the bloody tale.

Meanwhile, we shrink into our private lives. This may be right, this may be wrong, but it is how we manage to cope . . . and because of this I am shedding the pulpit we that began this meditation and reverting now to the quavery, lonesome I.

What has my year been?

I have learned, once again, how to live far away from my children. I have watched my father crawl into and out of death. Distance and parting. The present vibrates. Loss is imminent. 

Some jerk has just published a New York Times article about the death of poetry. I haven't read it because I don't have a Times subscription, but I can tell you that waxing pontifical about the death of an art form to an audience of people who have given their lives to it is a pretty bad way to end one's year. I'm not going to do that. You may not like my art, and I may not like your art, but they exist, and you and I exist in them, and they are a vision of the earth and the heavens, and I am endlessly, repeatedly, loudly grateful to have this devotional. 

Poetry is a way to shoulder pain. A way to stumble into joy. Do not denigrate your own strivings. I say this as a reminder to myself, but maybe you are glad of that reminder too.

I turned 58 this year. I am aging, and I have been aware of that--physically, culturally. I feel myself slipping into new, mysterious territory. My writing has shifted, thanks in large part to the communal work I have been doing with my Thursday salon partners and to my close conversations with Teresa Carson. These changes in my own writing have led to changes in my teaching. They've also led me to ponder my trajectory. How did I get from there to here?

Earlier this year I told you that I'd made the first cut for a major award. The final results won't be announced till next spring, and I have no expectation of winning. The knowledge of having made the first cut feels unreal enough; it feels like prize enough. Part of my application involved writing a career narrative. In other words, I had to write my own public-autobiography-as-poet. This was an odd and nerve-wracking exercise, but since then I have kept returning to it, kept rereading it. For whatever reason, my mind finds itself wanting to consider how what I did turned into what I have become. So as a New Year's Eve offering, I'll share what I wrote with you . . . but I'll also suggest that you might want to write one of your own. It may seem like a strange, even mundane, task, but it could present you with a whole new way to consider how you got from there to here. As far as my narrative goes, it's got plenty of necessary but boring parts ("I did this, I did that, blah, blah, blah"). But if you wade through them to the end, you'll see what I suddenly figured out. And that's what I want to carry forward into 2023.

* * *

I graduated from Haverford College in 1986, with a degree in English, and taught language arts for a year at Landmark School in Beverly, Massachusetts, before leaving teaching for a year-long farm internship in Andover, Vermont. In 1989 I moved to Providence, Rhode Island, and took a position as an editorial assistant at Jamestown Publishers. I stayed at the press until 1992, working my way up to assistant editor, and then went freelance. Since that time, I have continued to work as a freelance editor for a variety of academic (e.g., University of Massachusetts), educational (e.g., Merrill/Prentice Hall), and literary presses (e.g., CavanKerry).

            In the meantime my husband and I moved to deep rural Maine, to a tiny, remote town in the north country. We lived there for more than twenty years, quite isolated from any kind of writing or academic community, and I learned to be a poet. Though I have never attended any graduate program, I worked intensely, via mail and occasional meetups, for a number of years with the poet Baron Wormser, and gradually my poems and essays began appearing in top-line literary journals such as the Sewanee Review, the Threepenny Review, and the Beloit Poetry Journal.

            In the meantime, I was teaching music part time in the 90-student local school and working as a visiting artist throughout central Maine. This is a conservative area of the state, one that does not, on the whole, privilege art or education, so I learned a great deal about ways to work in community with people whose experiences, expectations, and beliefs are not my own. This skill set gradually became a linchpin in my broader teaching and outreach work.

            In 2009, Baron Wormser invited me to work as his assistant at the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, the nationally renowned teaching program he founded at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. In 2012, on his retirement, I took over that program as director. In 2021, Maudelle Driskell, the executive director of the Frost Place, invited me to help her launch the Frost Place Studio Sessions, through which we now offer year-round online poetry programs for writers and teachers. I serve as creative director of these sessions, designing and often leading programs for a wide variety of participants, at all levels of experience, who come to us from around the United States and beyond.

            Meanwhile, in 2019, the poet Stuart Kestenbaum, the former director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, asked me to help him design a pilot program for high school students at Monson Arts, a newly founded artists’ center in rural Maine. By this time I was living downstate in Portland, but Stuart believed that my years of work in the region could help us effectively reach the underserved students in the area. Covid took a bite out of our sails, of course, but we still managed to create an intense, school-year-long studio experience for eager students from six far-flung rural high schools. That program will start again in earnest in the fall of 2022.

            As you can see, my trajectory in the world of art is not traditional. Much of my work, especially early on, was unpaid or underpaid. In Harmony, I was raising children and homesteading; my husband is a carpenter, and there just wasn’t the money for me to consider grad school. So I became an autodidact: I wrote and read and learned, and eventually book publishers began accepting my work. As of 2022, I have published five collections of poetry, two memoirs, and two teaching texts. To be honest, I don’t apply for many grants and prizes because I can’t afford the application fees. But in 2009 I received a $20,000 grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. I have also received smaller grants from the Maine Arts Commission and the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. In 2010 I won the Maine Literary Award in Nonfiction, and in 2020 I was a finalist for the National Poetry Series.

I am not an academic, nor do I have deep institutional ties. Instead, I am a poet on the ground. I am fervent about poetry as public conversation . . . as an opening, a bridge, a revelation. This has been my life’s work.

Yesterday was fairly productive: I made a big dent in my editing project, had a long, useful work call, went for a walk with my neighbor, then came home and finished up the editing stack. I made tofu and bok choy for dinner, I dreamed I bought a house with drafty windows and concrete floors, and I slept hard. And now it is the next day, and I am awake in a shadowy house.

I'll be working on poem stuff today . . . mostly planning for next week's Monson class, but also reading proofs for a long piece that's supposed to appear on Sunday and maybe, I hope, messing around with some new thoughts. Teresa and I are starting up our reading program again, this time with an anthology of 17th-century English poetry, so I'd like to dip into that today, if I can get the class plans done. I suppose I ought to start taking down Christmas decorations, but maybe I'll wait till the weekend for that. I need to haul trash to the curb and wash sheets and fill the woodbox and scrape out the ashes. I need to think about tomorrow's blog post--my annual retrospective of what it's felt like to be me. (As if I don't do that everyday anyhow.)

I'm still feeling some residual melancholy, but I'm motoring onward. As always, there are decisions to make, paths to consider, situations to like-it-or-lump-it. The earth turns and the sun shines and the wind blows dead leaves into the gutters. I refuse to stop loving these things.

The house is clean, the groceries are stowed, the laundry is drying on the cellar lines, and I am feeling somewhat more pulled together mentally than I did at this time yesterday. So I will re-enter my work world today--editing, class planning, phone calls--and probably I will do fine.

Outside the temperature is 25 degrees, but it's forecast to rise into the 40s and then stay balmy into the weekend. Maybe I'll drive out to a beach one afternoon and do some walking. T is on vacation for the rest of the week, but he's immersed in a photo project and will likely be out of the house, printing at the photo co-op. So I suspect I'll be trudging alone.

That's okay. Christmas was eleven people in a small space. It's not bad to be falling back into my own company.

And I've got my own this-and-thats to keep me occupied. I'm filling my second handmade book, and I've got thoughts about designing a third. I may go out to the salon to write tonight. I'm rereading Dickens's Dombey and Son, which I haven't looked at for quite a while--a rich and moving novel that will probably be pretty useful as I plan for my upcoming narrative poetry class, though I hadn't opened it with that idea in mind.

Still, a haze of melancholy lingers . . . not a surprising state of mind at this time of year, and I am not chasing it away. "Poetry has a vested interest in sorrow," as Robert Frost always reminds me.

So I have tidied my nest, and now I will brood in it.

We got home around 5:30 yesterday evening. It was an exhausting trip--lots of joy in seeing family, but a considerable amount of ambient stress as well. Certainly we could have suffered more serious weather tragedies, as many people did, but we suffered enough. Elderly people without power for 36 hours and refusing to leave their home to warm up . . . young people fighting highway blizzards in Canada . . . No more of any of this, please.

Today I'm going to catch up on housework and get groceries into the empty refrigerator and maybe, toward the end of the day, crank out some desk work, but mostly I need a few hours in which I am not dealing with problems. I'll take my exercise class, I'll read Dombey and Son, I'll go for a long walk, and with luck my crisis-management stamina will regenerate.

Western Vermont, just before dawn. I am being importuned by a hangry tuxedo cat as I wait for the spaniels to return from their yard outing. In the living room, lanky young men sprawl in sleeping bags. At any moment they will erupt into life and this note to you will end. In a few hours we will all splinter off into our separate directions, but for the moment the shape of the world (when awake) is elbows and crazy hair and wisecracks.

I've done no reading since I've been here; the only writing has been these dabs to you. Instead, I've been washing dishes and dicing fish and unearthing leftover ham and clearing tables and so on and so on. Eleven people in a house requires constant attention to infrastructure.

Yet now, suddenly, quiet. Even the cat has vamoosed, and I am sitting at the kitchen counter, alone with myself, listening to the drip of time.

I'm calling this the Better Late Than Never Christmas. At 6 p.m., J and his friend walked through the door, after a long and harrowing drive from Toronto. They ended up spending Christmas Eve in a Ramada Inn, eating pizza and feeling extremely lucky not to be stuck in their car in a blizzard on the closed highway.

It seemed entirely possible that they'd be celebrating Christmas night in the same way, but fate smiled on them, and they made it through. So we had our full count of eleven at Christmas dinner, and at least one mother (me) slept a whole lot better, now that she knew where her children were.

 Merry Christmas!

I write to you from my sister's dark kitchen in Vermont, where a tuxedo cat and two King Charles spaniels are trying to convince that I know all of the secrets of their breakfast. In the living room a son and a nephew are stirring in their sleeping bags; upstairs the others are still asleep. 

Across the fields the first shards of sunrise are glinting over the Green Mountains. Somewhere in Canada my older son is holed up in a motel room, the victim of terrible weather and a closed highway. We hope he'll arrive today, but are relieved he's safe and with a friend and cheerful enough, all things considering. My parents were without power for 36 hours but that ordeal is finally over. Our drive across the mountains was fairly hairy yesterday. It's been hard to make it to Christmas this year.

But those of us who've managed to arrive are in good spirits.

Love to you all--

Somehow we managed to get through that storm without anything more than minor twig damage. I have no idea why we were so lucky, as the city got hit hard. High tide coincided with the storm, and there are ugly photos of flooding and damage all along the waterfront, including at Portland Head Light, our iconic lighthouse, which was damaged by a rogue wave. The pier with my fish market was underwater; I'm quite relieved I did my fish shopping on Thursday before the storm hit. But our little neighborhood is on a rise, away from the cove, so it was spared the floods. What we had were the gruesome winds, tearing through the trees, ripping at roofs and window frames. It was scary, and I had a hard time concentrating on anything other than the storm.

This morning is calm, though very cold. We're not exactly sure when we'll get on the road; that depends on how icy it is out there. A precipitous temperature drop after a warm rainstorm is its own kind of trouble. But at least the gale has blown out to sea.

J is in Toronto; P is in New York; they will be wending their ways toward Vermont today. I will pack my cooler of cod and smoked mussels and smoked shrimp and pumpkin dinner rolls and whole-wheat sandwich rolls and rye herb twists and black cake, and my bags of wrapped presents, and possibly our snowshoes, in case there is any snow left in Vermont, and then T and I will also wend. 

I wish you all safe travels or safe staying-in-place, as the day requires. May the sun shine, and your creekbed not overflow.

This storm is dire.

I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of wind and rain; woke up again at 5 a.m. to an intense gale . . . lashing rain, a roar like a freight train. We have been forecast to get up to 70 mph gusts, and I believe it.

The big worries are these massive Norway maples. The one closest to the house, between our driveway and the neighbors', is in rough shape and is scheduled to be cut down in early January. I know my neighbors are inside their house, gritting their teeth, hoping that it will hold itself together till then. I know that's what I'm doing inside my house.

But so far we still have power, and thus a furnace and coffee. And I am not driving to Vermont today, thank goodness. With this wind I'm not sure it would even be possible.

Another good thing: Tom is on vacation, so he won't have to try to drive to work in this mess. We can hunker down and worry about the maples together. My plan is to do zero editing today. I'll sit in my blue study chair and finish copying poems into another handmade book, one I finished yesterday . . . a sheaf of seven recent pieces, under the title Enchanted Forest. Perhaps the sound of storm in the trees will be an appropriate soundtrack.

Today, the calm before the storm. We've confirmed our decision not to drive to Vermont tomorrow--the forecast is gruesome. Instead, we'll gather ourselves together on Christmas Eve morning and make the trek then.

It's Tom's last day of work before the company's holiday break, and tonight he has invited me to go on a date. So I'll don my new red dress and the two of us will drive into town for dinner; then wander the streets, admiring the colored lights strung on the coast guard boats and among the trees in the city parks.

In the meantime, laundry and such. A visit to the fish market to buy cod and smoked scallops for the holiday. A walk into the cemetery. Some editing.  Maybe I'll keep working on the new blank book I started yesterday, or wrestle with poem drafts.

The other day a writer posted about Accidental Hymn on Facebook, calling it "magnificent" and "stunning." These are large words, too large, and they make me shiver. I never get any better at dealing with praise, though I am intensely grateful for it. Possibly that is the secret of etiquette training: it teaches people to be gracious under pressure. But I'm a hick and don't know any better.

[Hick. What a great word. American slang is the best. I'm glad it's my native tongue.]

This is the current state of my book. I may tinker a bit more, but I also got some materials to start working on the next one. The trim size is roughly 10" by 6" (I say roughly because I'm measuring with my fingers at the moment, and I didn't choose or cut the materials for this first effort). The cover is heavyish watercolor stock, and you can see the endpaper peeking through the punch hole.

Here's a view of the open cover and the endpaper--a fairly lightweight printed stock.

This is my title page. The pages are watercolor-weight, and the paper of the cutouts is more or less the same, but a darker white.

And this is an example of an interior page.

Yesterday I bought some cover and endpaper stock for my next try. I think the trim size will be different, and I may experiment with having the book open differently. I'll keep you posted.

* * *

Today, however, I'll be back on the editing train; also, probably working on a newsletter, hauling returnables to the redemption center, trying to figure out why I dreamed the cat was a goldfish, that sort of thing. T and I have been invited to a solstice party tonight, and we'll probably swing by for a little while. The forecast is looking more and more terrible for Friday, so it's looking more and more likely that we won't be traveling to Vermont that day. Maybe I'll work on my new book instead.

Probably I'll end up with too many of these things and have to start foisting them onto other people as unwanted gifts--my version of endless old-lady crochet . . .
 

I worked on filling my handmade book yesterday. I decided on a poem called "Winter Fragments," which I thought would cross from recto to recto well, and I made some cutouts that I'm going to paste to the verso pages that face each section of the poem. I am not perfectly satisfied with how I used the page space, but I wanted this to be freehand so was prepare to put up with whatever I ended up being able to make. I'll take some photos for you after I paste in the cutouts.

Now I need to make another book, because my next idea is to collect a small batch of prose poems and present them as tiny stories. I thought of doing that in this book, but I didn't have enough poems to fill the pages. A smaller, squarer book will work better, and I'll have to find materials so that I can put it together.

I like this bookmaking project. It is creative in a new way for me, a sort of private publishing--no public goals, but a new way to think about the power of the visual (letter forms, page space) as it relates to the words in my head. Plus I love paper and pens and the physical sensation of a made object in my hands.

Emily Dickinson collected her work in fascicles--small, self-bound collections, even simpler than the very simple book I have learned to make. I've never liked that word, though . . . fascicles: it sounds cold and academic. Why not say she made her poems into books?

Monday morning. The alarm seemed to go off very early today; I would have been glad to sleep for another hour. However, here I am.

It's the week before Christmas and things are winding down and winding up. I am now done with teaching until January 4, but I've got a pile of editing and a looming deadline. I've finished baking and package-wrapping, but I've got to track down materials for holiday meals. The travel forecast for Friday looks iffy, so our schedule may be upended. And so on.

Anyway, for the moment my day is normal. I'll get through my exercise class, and work at my desk, and finish dusting and vacuuming, and run laundry, and figure out something for dinner. Latkes, maybe.

The poem drafts are stirring around, begging for attention. I should probably think about submitting to journals. I want to mess around with a hand-made chapbook project. 

Yesterday, at the end of class, the participants were discussing the age-old writer's issue: how do you protect your writing time? how do you make yourself abide by your own schedule? Butts in seats, in other words. Why can that be so hard?

It's an interesting question to me because it's not my problem. I'm more of a firehose that has to be turned off so that other things can get done. I am shamelessly selfish about reading and writing time. I always have been, even when the boys were small and I was homesteading and had a thousand daily duties clawing at my throat. Of course my writing and reading patterns have made this somewhat easier. In Harmony I read while stirring a sauce or waiting for kids in the car. I wrote in tiny small spurts, not in long sessions, so I could run in and out of a room to check on a draft while boys were arguing over Legos or riding their bikes in the driveway. Now that I have no children at home, finding writing time is almost too easy. I can always sandwich it in if I want to. And I usually do.

But most other people seem to struggle, and I get why. Because being shamelessly selfish is kind of a terrible trait. 

I slept in till 6:30 this morning and then (pardon my slowness) I wasted a bit of time enjoying highlights from the Bills game I couldn't watch last night . . . especially the game-winning field goal, followed by a pack of big guys belly-sliding joyously across the snowy field. Lake-effect exuberance! What's not to love?

Yesterday I worked on two new poem drafts, did some dusting, did some grocery shopping, baked sandwich rolls for the holiday, shoveled the sidewalk, etc., etc. This morning I'd like to finish up the dusting, maybe clean the bathrooms, before hunkering down for the afternoon's final chapbook session. Then I'll be off the teaching clock till after the new year.

The two poem drafts I worked on didn't feel too bad yesterday, though I may change my mind when I look at them this morning. I'm relieved to be writing; I'm always relieved to be writing . . . how would I endure myself without my my work? The idea is terrifying.

It is 6:30 a.m. and already I have managed to fall up a flight of stairs while carrying a cup of hot coffee, which splashed all over me, all over the stairs, and somehow had nothing to do with the cat. I'm sure he's disappointed not to have been the flashpoint of chaos.

Anyway, that's over, and I am now dry and re-coffeed and hoping the incident was an isolated uproar, not act 1 of Dawn's Long Stupid Day.

Yesterday's predicted rainstorm turned out to be a rain-and-wind-and-snow storm, and this morning we have a couple of inches of Crisco-like glop pasted over the cars and driveways. T came home mid-morning because the power had gone out where he was working, and I've been reading about car crashes and power outages all over the state. But our day was tame enough. We walked (slipped, slid) down to the meat market to pick out something for dinner; Tom futzed and fumed over his non-working photo printer; I edited articles for an academic journal and wrapped Christmas presents. And then, after dark, I cooked baked potatoes and steak, made guacamole and carrot salad, mixed together a batch of eggnog for dessert . . . you'd never have known I was the sort of incompetent person who would, a few hours into the future, fall up stairs into a cup of hot coffee.

Today I need to do another batch of Christmas bread baking. I need to go to the grocery store and start the dusting I didn't attempt yesterday. Nor did I look at those poem-blurts in my notebook; my plans got rattled by T's sudden appearance and then by the endless honks and groans of the crippled photo printer. Not that I've got anything against his coming home early. Far from it. But teeny Alcott House is a soundbox, and the air wildly shifts as soon as another person steps through the door.

This morning, for a few more moments, I'm letting myself pretend that I won't have to shovel snow. Here I am, safely and steadily pouring myself a second cup of coffee and wondering what book to read next, just like a regular well-balanced poet. What could go wrong?

It's snowing very lightly this morning, but that's a temporary condition. Rain is our seacoast forecast, lots of it, though further inland the snow will pile up. The snow is supposed to fall all day and into tomorrow, and I'm a bit regretful about missing it. I would have enjoyed a white day. But such is life along the moderating waters.

I wrote three draft-blurts at the salon last night, and a couple of them might be worth looking at today, though I was kind of sleepy toward the end of the evening so I could be misremembering their possibilities. My friend Betsy drove us back and forth to the West End, and I enjoyed sitting blinkily in the back seat, admiring the city's Christmas lights and paying no attention to traffic or parking.

And then, in bed, I dreamed I was wearing purple stockings, and I looked great in them.

* * *

Now, at 6 a.m., I am less confident about the stockings, but that's okay. I wasn't going to wear them today anyhow. I'll get through my exercise class, and work on my editing stack, and do some dusting, and probably venture out into the rain and drive to the grocery store. It will be a plain day.

But I do feel my mind ticking and circling. 

I had a vivid dream last night about the first house we landed in in Harmony, a falling-down rental farmhouse with all of the plagues of Egypt: no insulation in -40-degree weather, well ran dry in the summer, an infestation of flies . . . you name it, that house had it. Yet my dream was quite hopeful. The house was as bad as ever--worse even--but somehow my dream convinced me that all I needed to do was give it a really good cleaning and the place would be charming and lovable. This was a house that, even in its heyday, could never have been nice . . . a nineteenth-century version of a mobile home, we used to call it. But dreams are very convincing, and I woke up imagining that the South Road place was a secret delight, not a wreck falling off its foundation.

Now that I'm awake I'm wondering what I should take away from such a dream. Is this an attempt to rosy-up the past? Or to make me feel like I have the power to change bad into good? Or is my brain just wallowing in the details of stuff: toilet on the front porch, piles of mysterious cloth, cobwebs and dirt and sagging floors. Not all of this was actually on the premises when we rented the place, and for the year we lived in the house I did manage to keep it reasonably tidy, though structural decay made that hard. In other words, the dream stuff is not entirely memory stuff, though it feels natural to my idea of the place. This was the sort of house that should be full of garbage, though it was not when I lived there.

Details are dream clutter. Poem clutter, too. Do not think I am using the word clutter pejoratively.

For some reason I jolted wide awake at 4:30 a.m., and now here I am, blearily drinking coffee and pondering my fingers on this keyboard. Outside, it's cold and blustery but still too dark to see what the sky has in store for the day. Inside, the little Christmas tree gleams in the corner. Paperwhites bloom on the kitchen counter.

Last night I made falafel for dinner, and the kitchen still smells of tahini and spice. Later, I dreamed that I needed to make a book but I had nothing to put in it.

A few days ago my friend Baron said to me, "You must be in a good place to write such a poem," and I am wondering: How can I tell? The poems are arriving so differently from the way they used to arrive. I seem to be writing fewer of them, yet they are accruing quickly. New drafts often manifest close to their final form. They generally show up in communal settings--at the salon, during class. It is as if everything I have studied and honed for the past twenty-five years has been dumped on its head. Solitude is unnecessary. Deep revision is unnecessary. Literary models are unnecessary. Go into the world and write.

[N.B. Of course I have spent decades doing all of that apprentice work. I'm not eschewing it. But over the Covid years my writing practice has radically changed . . . at first, by necessity, when P had to move in with us and I lost my solitude. Turns out that clatter and disruption can be an open door.]

Instructions for writers (but only if you are me):

Tie a piece of string to the doorway before entering the maze. That will give the villain something to untie as soon as you get good and lost.

If it sounds good, it is probably a riddle.

Thanks, friends, for the kind words about "Arcadia, 1939." The title does a lot of heavy lifting in this poem, maybe too much; and as I was telling my friend Baron, I know the piece teeters on the sentimental line. Yet, of course, why shouldn't poets be drawn to writing about pleasure, not just about pain? And if you want pain, you can look for it in the title, and in the Yeats allusion . . .

Yesterday was a busy poem day: I had one poem published, another poem accepted for publication, and a third poem rejected. A little taste of everything, all in a single email update.

Meanwhile, I toiled away at an editing project, and cleaned floors, and ran errands, and filled out Christmas cards. I made it through my exercise class, and I baked lemon-blueberry scones, and I read a chunk of John Fowles's novel The Maggot. I hung laundry in the basement and scoured the kitchen sink and thought about the class I'll be teaching in February, on narrative poetry. I drank tea and fiddled with my phone and worried about the future. I let the cat in and I let the cat out and I considered my incipient manuscript and I wondered why my glasses are always so smeary.

I lead such a predictable life. Except that I have no idea what it's leading to.

I woke up to discover we got our first snow last night--just a thin coating but, still, that's worth a celebration. Suddenly the neighborhood roofs are phosphorescent; the driveways are like bright trails; the streetlights put forth a Dickensian glitter, and I expect Bob Cratchit and his goose to trundle up the street at any moment.

Of course, as soon as the sun rises this will all retreat to ordinary, and the slush will take over and the charm will vanish. But at least I got the first glimpse.

So, Monday morning: a good one so far . . . snow and a warming house, hot coffee and tree lights, and the cat making a scene about the white stuff on his feet.

I'll grit through my exercise class this morning, then finish up the housework, put in some time at my desk, and maybe later in the afternoon start working on Christmas cards and package wrapping. While I was teaching yesterday, T was printing his card-of-the-year--a lovely impressionist photograph of downtown Portland in the rainy dark. What with all the bread I baked on Saturday and the shopping mostly done and the boxes shipped and now the cards stacked and ready, I am feeling surprisingly calm and pulled together about this encroaching holiday instead of like my more usual whining madwoman.

* * *

And I've got a new poem out in Vox Populi: "Arcadia, 1939."

Seventeen degrees this morning. No wind, but a deep stillness; cold settling like sod, the air freighted with cold. Cold as a version of Bohemia in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale--a real land that is also an imaginary land. Cold as a way to exit, pursued by a bear.

Lately my imagination has been pinging all over the place, like those miniature pinball toys with rolling silver beads and elusive holes punched out in the shape of Santa, the ones that show up in Christmas stockings and are lost forever the next day. I think this is the result of my Thursday-night salon prompts: where I'm put on the spot to produce something, anything, from a pile of random Frankenstein scraps . . . a sort of automatic writing, clanking noisily into the dustbin of my brain, while sitting in a room crammed with other people's also-clanking dustbins, and we're all frantically filling our trash bags with returnables we hope to turn in later for a nickel apiece.

You see what I mean? Every hole is a rabbit hole.

It's a cold morning here, and I slept in till 6:30, which was a treat. Now I am sitting in my couch corner with my white cup and saucer, listening to laundry churn, as I do so many, many mornings in my life. Housework soundtrack, it's technology's gift to the housekeeper-poet: the laundry washes itself while she muses about how even 100 years ago she wouldn't be sitting here writing about laundry but in the cellar or in the dooryard cranking the work pants through a wringer into a vat of rinse water. And that 1922 person herself might be praising technology, which had given her this speedy wringer to replace the horrors of a stovetop clothes boiler . . . and on and on, back through the ages travels the burden of laundry, to pop up in that highly unbelievable scene in the Odyssey, when Nausicaa and her servant girls are cutely washing the palace laundry in cold, sandy seawater . . . If you need proof that Homer was a man, that scene should do it for you. 

Anyway, enough with the historical laundry plaints: today I turn my attention to baking. I am responsible for all of the holiday dinner breads, and so today I will begin my task with either a double batch of soft pumpkin rolls or some herb twists, or possibly both. Eventually I'll make some larger sandwich rolls as well and maybe some whole-grain dinner rolls to mix in decoratively with the pumpkin.

But I will not forget the poem draft I've worked on for much of yesterday. It's shaping up in a way that pleases me: a tight little prose poem set inside both a body and a stereotyped western town, simultaneously. If that is hard to picture, be assured I am amazed by the notion as well. But also so interested.

I'm so glad I went out to the salon to write last night, as I got a draft out of it that I think might really be worth revising . . . one that wanders into a very surprising (to me) imaginative/physical maze. I hope, today, I can find a chance to transcribe the scrawl and start playing around with what might happen to this beginning.

The weather yesterday was lovely--high 40s, rain-wet, brilliantly sunny; the kind of day that sparkles in all directions. I went for a long walk in the morning, then spent the day at my desk, editing and working on Frost Place stuff, with bits and pieces of housework stuffed in around the edges. 

Today is forecast to be another beauty, and tonight I'll be going out again: first to an event at T's photo co-op, and then my neighbor and I will slip away and have a meal together while T is busy managing whatever it is he'll have to be managing. The social whirl continues . . . I've only made dinner at home one time this week. 

But I think, I hope, I can find an hour or so to work on this new poem draft. I am beginning to get excited about the poems in this disorganized, unfinished, potential collection.

This morning the big round moon is shining down on the neighborhood, a message that yesterday's rain has floated out to sea. Last night the fog was so heavy that the ghostly Congregational church steeple looked like a set-piece from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. But now the moon floats blandly in a clear sky, with only tree branches to mar its face.

I'm looking forward to an after-storm walk this morning, before I get sucked into desk work. Yesterday I bustled hither and yon, working but also running errands, wrapping presents to ship, making apple-pear sauce with a batch of softening fruit, folding laundry. Today will be another such mash-up: desk work, a phone meeting, class prep, mixed in with changing sheets and shoveling ashes and scouring the bathroom ceiling, and then out tonight to write at the salon.

I think I told you a month or so ago that I'd made the first cut for a major prize, and yesterday one of my recommenders sent me the piece she'd written about me for the foundation. I was nervous about reading it, as I've had a lifetime of training in squinching my mind away from praise, but I did . . . and the piece turned out to be a small history, from another person's eyes, of what I had done in my life as a poet. It was so odd to read about myself in that way. So odd to be looked at.

Since then, I have been feeling a small vibration, a small interior hum. It is as if my past is singing some sort of lullaby . . . barely a sound, the words indecipherable. 

 Last night T and I walked around the corner to the Vietnamese place and ate big hot bowls of pho, which, like good borscht, tastes like the cure for all miseries . . . not that we were miserable, but some kinds of food have that savior quality. And then we walked home in the drizzle and sat by the fire and read our books, as the rain pattered down and the little Christmas tree shone, and there was no better place to be.

This was my last trip up north till after the holiday, and it was a good day: we made blank books with the book artist Rebecca Goodale, who was magnificent with the high schoolers, and then we played around with couplets and sonnets, and I think we all left class feeling happy. I tell you: these are the nicest kids; such a pleasure to hang out with.

Today I'll deal with the overflowing laundry basket (how can missing one day of laundry result in such a mountain?) and undergo my exercise class. Then I'll turn my attention to a new editing project, and, I hope, find time in the afternoon to wrap some presents and get them into the mail. 

The rain is still pattering down; I think it will rain like this all day and into the night, a mild soothing rattle, a good day to be at my desk or the kitchen counter; a good day to trudge out into the brisk wet and hurry home to a fire in the stove. For some reason I feel full of energy this morning: and I love weather, as you know; and both of my boys checked in yesterday, bubbling about the little details of their lives; and I have a new draft-blurt in my notebook that is scratching to be let out; and and and.

You know what work is—if you’re

old enough to read this you know what

work is, although you may not do it.

Forget you. This is about waiting,

shifting from one foot to another.

Feeling the light rain falling like mist

into your hair, blurring your vision . . .

--from Philip Levine's "What Work Is"

This is Lake Hebron, in Monson, Maine, at about 4 p.m. in early December. The town is very quiet. There are no artist residencies in session till after the holidays, the three restaurants are all closed on Mondays, so very few people were out and about when I arrived. I bought a sandwich for dinner at the general store, and settled into my apartment for the evening, which I mostly spent on the couch, dozing in and out of a movie that starred a very young Spencer Tracy and was so dull that I can't even remember the title.

And now I am writing to you, while glancing across the way to see if the store is open yet so I can toddle out and get my coffee and a yogurt. 

This morning the kids and I will be working with a book artist to make writing journals, and I'm very much looking forward to having an art project. Then, after pizza, we'll play some form games, look at a couple of sonnets, write a couple of drafts, depending on how much time we've got left before the buses arrive.

And then the long ride back to Portland.

In the meantime I sit here in the shadowy apartment, watching loaded log trucks rumble through town, the pickups and SUVs drift up onto Route 15 and head out toward jobs, and now I hear the slam of a car door outside the store, which must be the sign that coffee has become available. A sheriff's cruiser flies past, blues lights churning, and they are exactly the same shade as the Christmas lights flickering in the store window. This is a busy corner before sunrise.

So I think I will put my coat on and head outside to see what's what . . . yes, here comes another loaded log truck, jake-breaking as it slides into town, and now an ambulance speeds toward Greenville, lights ablaze . . . crises are happening, and I would like some coffee.

Sleep returned to me, thank goodness, and this morning I feel so much better. By yesterday noon, the vaccine auras had worn off, so I was merely unrested, not sickish, and with the aid of a large cup of tea I got through my class fine.

And thus, today, I feel ready enough for the drive north and tomorrow's giddy day with high schoolers. I'll probably spend the morning doing house stuff and then leave here in the early afternoon to get myself situated before dark. I'm going straight up to Monson today, as my Wellington friend is sick, so I'll spend the evening clanking around in a borrowed apartment, maybe working on some poems, maybe watching screwball comedies from the 1930s, maybe falling asleep at some ridiculous early hour.

It's chilly outside this morning--22 degrees--and the furnace is chuffing away, the kettle is hissing on the stove, lamplight pours into shadow. I am fond of winter . . . the turn inward, the rituals of warmth. I like the shortening days, how night encroaches, the way houses become islands anchored to the darkness. Blankets and wood fires, oven-warmth, the lace of frost on windows . . . But lest I start to sound like a sentimentalite, a James Whitcomb Riley or some such, emoting over the saccharinized familial past in "Snow-bound," I stake a claim for winter's terrors as well . . . that these comforts are also fear of death, a fight against nature, which would prefer to kill me and start fresh in the spring.

As was to be expected, I was a bit under the weather yesterday, and slept badly last night too, which is unfortunate because I'll be teaching all afternoon, but oh well. The class, which had had only four registrants for weeks, suddenly filled to capacity yesterday, so that has entailed a flurry. Nonetheless, I did have a mostly quiet day . . . a walk and grocery shopping before the rain started, and then an afternoon of kitchen projects and reading. I made a fresh batch of preserved lemons, baked a pumpkin-buttermilk pudding, simmered chicken and leek soup, and meanwhile the rain pattered down and a fire crackled in the grate and the cat buried himself in the couch blanket.

Tomorrow I'll hit the road again--my last trip up north before Christmas. And then my days will settle down for a couple of weeks, until the holiday travels begin.

I imagine this is the vaccine cocktail still talking, but I'm feeling a little blue: self-questioning, second-guessing myself, thinking I ought to be a better human being/friend/parent/daughter/artist. The Christmas season, with its weighty past, often encourages this kind of thinking, even without the aid of three vaccines. Also, all of the books I've been reading are filled with lonely people, so blame literature.

My guess is that a few gleams of sunshine and a lungful of November wind will break the mood. Heck, maybe even a shower and clean hair will do the trick. Bodies are susceptible to comfort. At least mine is. And there's a bowl of paperwhites budding on the kitchen counter. There's a jar of shining lemons. How can I stay sad, with such gold?

Yesterday I got not one, not two, but three vaccines simultaneously: Covid booster, flu, and tetanus. Not surprisingly, I woke up this morning feeling as if my shoulders had been in a fight, but so far I'm not having any other reaction to the cocktail. Still, I'm prepared to collapse onto the couch and groggily stare into ancient episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, should that become necessary.

Saturday, rain in the forecast, no particular plans. I might wrap Christmas presents. I might go to the grocery store. Tom will be out all day, building a display wall for an upcoming photo auction, so I'll be kicking around by myself. I have to teach tomorrow, and I'd like very much not to work today, but we'll see. Work tends to sneak up and throttle me when I least expect it.

I've been reading Colm Toibin's story collection The Empty Family, finishing up Betsy Sholl's As If a Song Could Save You, messing around with a new poem draft. I'm feeling a little inadequate as an artist, but maybe that's just a body full of vaccines talking. Do more, try harder, study, experiment, never rest. You see what I mean about work throttling me when I least expect it?

In parental lore, I am a lazy, sloppy little girl. Lazy and sloppy, lazy and sloppy. This is not the actual story, not the whole story, not the unfolding, aging tale of a life. But it stays with me, like a "My Name Is ___" sticker I forgot to peel off my shirt. 

Friday morning, trash day, doctor's-appointment day, that kind of day. And here I am, with my small cup of black coffee, preparing to pull myself together, but not pulling myself together yet. In the dining room the cat is crunching up his breakfast. Upstairs, T is pretending he doesn't have to get out of bed and go to work. Outside, a pale frost coats the gardens, the windshields, the roofs.

Friday morning. At the salon last night I wrote three poem-blurts. One might have possibilities, but the other two are dumb. I guess that's better than nothing. Still, I worry about my tendency to slop over into improv comedy. I have trouble staying serious with these prompts.

Friday morning, and two editing projects have shown up on my desk, and I have to teach on Sunday, and my small semi-work-stoppage is over, and I wish I'd gotten more accomplished. I say that, and then I see that I wrote two new poem drafts, cleaned the house thoroughly, read four books, did a passel of class planning, gave a public reading, and mostly finished the Christmas shopping, and I wonder what I expect of myself. Sometimes (all of the time?) I am an idiot.

Last night's storm was wild--wind, rain, flickering power, crashing tree branches--but somehow the zoom link held and I did not get kicked out of my reading, though I fully expected to. It was lovely to hear Meg and Cat, to note their accidental resonances as the howl and the hiss of the storm intensified their voices.

It's still too dark to see what damage was done, but I expect I'll spend some of today picking up sticks. I have another poem brewing, a double sonnet, and I've been reading Betsy Sholl's gorgeous new collection, As If a Song Could Save You. I baked cookies and walked to the bookstore and pulled together a plan for next week's Monson session (playing with form). Today I need to clean my study, get the place into shape for my upcoming round of Sunday-afternoon classes. I hope to go for a walk. I hope to go out to the salon to write tonight.

I've been thinking a lot about free-verse sonnets. I read my Accident Sonnets last night, and I've been planning the form class for the kids, but also I've been asking myself if the lack of rhyme and regular meter is a cheat or an opportunity. I mean, I can rhyme and pace . . . and I can do them pretty well. But something different happens when I remove those strictures while retaining the fourteen-line fence. The jaggedness runs up against the fence, tears itself against the fence. A kind of ferocity sets in.