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.