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.