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.