Today, on the last morning of 2023, I woke much earlier than I needed to. And so here I am, in my accustomed couch corner, in my accustomed red bathrobe, with my accustomed white cup and saucer, blinkily pondering time and its formalities.

I turned 59 in the year 2023. My mother broke her hip. My nation was in turmoil. Terrible wars raged around the globe. The seas warmed. Friends suffered. Humans hated each other. I received many rejection letters. I quit my job. Rain destroyed my crops. Trees threatened my home. The furnace broke twice.

On the other hand, strangers sent love letters to me about my work. I saved my poetry conference from death. I watched frozen sea fog hover over an icy bay, guillemots bob in surf, creamy waves crash on granite. I thought hard about poems with friends. I idled and sighed with friends. I ate meals with friends. I giggled and played competitive trash-talking card games and went for long walks alone and not alone. I made the home I wanted to live in. I lived in it with the person I adored. All year long our sons called us on the telephone and texted us goofy photos of their cats and fretted with us about their home repairs or their jobs or the books they were reading, and then they descended on us in a torrent for Thanksgiving.

I am an American, a white woman, an aging woman. I am both educated and working class. I am both rural and urban. I love my country and am perpetually angry at it. I am privileged in ways I recognize and in ways I do not. I know how lucky I am to live in Maine. I read old difficult books but I am not a scholar. I am precise about folding pillowcases and bad at earning money. I remember all of The Owl and the Pussycat and forget where I put the stamps. I am a caretaker of animals and people and plants. I love to be married. I love to be alone. I dislike parsnips and the smell of mice and all things related to Donald Trump. I do not pray, but sometimes I speak to the unknown.

A tender old year to you all.  Honesty is complicated.

Here's a newish poem. I send you much love.

Requiem

 

Dawn Potter

An old gravel road brushes the mountainside. The brush

is a finger, the hill the back of a cool thigh. A wood thrush

croons the narrow clouds, croons dusk over a slow river.

Under leaf and crown, air is the sheen of blue ink, a shiver

 

as sky unfolds. Land swallows mortal space. The gods 

are vast, impatient, but it is evening. Their lowered shields

flash bronze among the pines. Wind swirls; it kisses

curtains, hems, a candle flame. Glints of sun burnish 

 

stones and road. Rapt insects hum. Frogs dive or creak.

A headlight blinds, then fades. The new dark speaks—

a plaintive rustle, impermanent, unbound, yet still the ripe

grass shimmers . . . still the gods tighten their ancient grip.

It's been raining for three days--a slow cold rain seeping from eaves and hat brims. I like to be outside in most weathers, but even I have a hard time enjoying the raw chill of this perpetual drizzle. I do walk in it, but I'm glad to get home again, to lamplight and hot tea and a wood fire.

Yesterday I cleaned up Christmas: put away ornaments, recycled cards, took out the tree, vacuumed and dusted and mopped. With the holiday clutter gone, the tiny living room feels plain and spacious. The air smells of soap and new bread. In the cupboard, sheets are stacked in crisp folds; towels align precisely, a steeple of green and gray. This is the ode of the housewife; this is a paean to a green crockery bowl filled with papery onions, to minestrone bubbling on the stove, to dough rising under a red cloth, to heaped woodboxes and a neat basket of freshly split kindling, to a white cat asleep in a yellow chair.

And yet I also worked on a poem yesterday, a slow unrolling meditation that seems to want to be a long poem, that seems to want to be a disquisition on thought and dream and memory; and it sits now on my laptop like a scrap of unfinished weaving, threads of many colors straggling into a pattern. Today, as the drizzle taps at my study window, I'll tangle a few more threads, tie a few more knots, then untangle, untie . . . the inefficiencies of making--sometimes slow, sometimes sudden, never the same move twice, or always the same move, repeated like history or prayer or housework.

 Holy Sonnet 14

 

John Donne

 

Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you

As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;

That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee,’and bend

Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.

I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due,

Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end,

Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,

But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue.

Yet dearly’I love you,’and would be loved faine,

But am betroth’d unto your enemie:

Divorce mee,’untie, or breake that knot againe,

Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I

Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,

Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

* * *

I've read a lot of John Donne's work during the past six months, and a lot of it I haven't enjoyed. For me, he is a difficult poet to love: spleeny and cerebral, often petty in his angers . . . but when he's on, he's on, and this sonnet is most certainly on. I mean, good lord, that first line. Yesterday I copied it out, mostly because I wanted to feel what he was doing with the punctuation--not least those crowded apostrophes. But what about the simile "I, like an usurpt town"? What about that skin-crawling rape me, God ending? It's a poem that makes me shake.

At the moment I am not writing particularly well or easily, but at least I am reading hard. I'm immersed in Byatt's The Children's Book, which is complicated and painful and full of specific history, and Donne is racketing around in my brain. I suspect I'm on the cusp of a new project, but I don't know what it will entail, what it will demand of me. All I can do is keep paddling. This is not my favorite state of mind, but it's familiar, and it will end.

Today will be mostly housework: taking down the tree, putting away decorations, dusting, cleaning up the needle mess, plus my usual Friday schedule: washing sheets and towels, cleaning bathrooms and floors. It's possible that a day of plain chores will open some creative door; my brain does seem to be linked to my hands. In any case, I've got this sonnet to haunt me.

The year is rolling toward its end, and I worry that I've wasted my few precious open days. I had such plans for them, yet I've made hardly anything at all. Still, I did read. I did walk. I did think.

I'm still not formally back to work, but yesterday was as much of a work day as I've had lately. After getting the laundry and groceries under control, I hashed out writing prompts for an upcoming class, messed around with some revisions, read Donne's Holy Sonnets, and transcribed a poem into one of the handmade blank books I'd made in Monson before the holiday. This was really my first chance to get acquainted with the new desk and to figure out how it will function in my work setup. I use my standing desk for the computer, and I read and run zoom classes from the blue easy chair, so the sit-down desk won't be my primary workspace, unless I'm handwriting. But given how tiny the room is, the desk needs to serve usefully as a staging area, even if I'm not sitting at it. Yesterday, as I worked on prompts at the computer, I spread out all of my possible source materials on the desk behind me, where I could go back and forth among the splayed books as I cogitated. Then, when I was transcribing the poem and gluing up decorations on the pages, I sat at the new desk and worked efficiently and spaciously.

I know this seems like a silly topic for a post, but for my entire career my writing space has been half-assed. In Harmony I worked on one side of our bedroom, in a room without a door, on a table and in a space that weren't usefully designed for my body or habits. Gradually things improved, most notably when T made the standing desk. Then, during our year in the apartment, I was wedged into another bedroom corner and had to use the bed (a mattress on the floor) as a work annex. Finally, when we bought this house, I had a room of my own, ready to be made useful . . . and then the pandemic interrupted, and my son moved into my study, and I was back in a corner of the bedroom.

So maybe you'll forgive me for the disquisition on writing space. It's been such a long time coming. To possess a standing desk, a sit-down desk, a reading chair, and a good laptop; to arrange all of this in a small room of my own, surrounded by poetry books: this is a strange and thrilling luxury.

We got home midafternoon, driving into the sudden dense fog that was hanging over the little northern city by the sea as if we were crossing the line into Brigadoon. We unpacked bags, piled up laundry, then lit a wood fire and ensconced ourselves in front of it . . . books, cat, a cribbage board . . . eventually I did get up and make a frittata for dinner, but a foggy slide into a foggy evening was the theme du jour.

This morning, we're leaping back into the usual schedule: 5 a.m. alarm, T bustling off to work. I've got housework and groceries to deal with, emails to catch up on, my exercise schedule to reignite, desk things to organize. This week between the holidays is always an odd time--not vacation, given that T needs to go to work, but not exactly the daily grind either.

I've got Donne homework to catch up on, class planning to work on, poem drafts to mess with. Maybe some of that will get done this week. For the moment, my mind is overflowing with thoughts of dirty laundry and a bare refrigerator, but I can imagine other worlds.

I learned yesterday that my essay on poems by Baron Wormser and Teresa Carson was one of Vox Populi's most-read pieces of 2023, so that was cheerful news. Maybe I should write more essays than I do.

We stayed up very late last night and thus I have arisen very late. The house is still very quiet, and outside a high fog tangles in the tall white pines.

Christmas was sweet-tempered and messy and a walk by an ice-skimmed pond. It was games and books and panic over how to operate a new oven. It was dishwashing and dishwashing and dishwashing. It was, as it always is in this house, a deeply secular holiday punctuated by good cheer and silly competitions and extravagant meals. It's an easygoing day, except for the cooks, and that's the cooks' own fault.

This morning, after a late breakfast, we will head back to Maine and plunge back our own lives. Tonight we'll be inundated by the grievances of the cat. T will go to work tomorrow. I will wrestle baskets of laundry. But it's been good to be here, in the land of beef tenderloin and grasshopper pie . . . to hug one big son and talk to the other, to bask in the company of my long-beloved in-laws. Hurray for laughter.

Merry Christmas from the Yeti of Amherst . . . kind of like the Belle of Amherst: ironic and reclusive, prone to messing with expectations.

The Yeti is a new neighbor who resides a couple of houses down from my in-laws'. I don't think I've ever seen a better chainsaw carving. It's not an art I'm generally attracted to, but this Yeti is very handsome. And, as you see, quite festive.

* * *

As usual, I'm the only one awake around here at this hour. So I'm saying Merry Christmas to the tree silhouettes outside the window and to the reheated coffee in the cup beside me, and to you. I hope your day is silly and safe and peaceable, that you get a chance to step outside and breathe in a lungful of sharp wind, that you will wrap your arms around a person or animal or chunk of granite you love.

The Oxen

Thomas Hardy

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

I slept massively late this morning . . . more than two hours after my usual rising time. That's kind of a Christmas miracle in itself. But I'm still the first person up, sitting alone in the kitchen, looking through the big windows, down the steep wooded hill and the ice-skimmed pond at its foot.

No snow in Massachusetts, just winter grays and greens and browns and the house perched like an aerie on the ridge, with the big hemlocks and white pines climbing up to greet it.

We got here yesterday early in the afternoon, threading our way through heavy traffic. But there were no jams, and P arrived from New York in good time too. 

Now I have no plans, none. I live at the whim of others. I sit here in the kitchen with my laptop and a fat copy of A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book. My notebook of poem drafts is tucked downstairs in my bag, ready for delving, when the time is right. My biggest challenge will be learning how to use my mother-in-law's new stove to make coffee.

And yet--

Mezzo Cammin

 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

Half of my life is gone, and I have let

            The years slip from me and have not fulfilled

            The aspiration of my youth, to build

            Some tower of song with lofty parapet.

Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret

            Of restless passions that would not be stilled,

            But sorrow, and a care that almost killed,

            Kept me from what I may accomplish yet;

Though, halfway up the hill, I see the Past

            Lying beneath me with its sounds and sights,—

            A city in the twilight dim and vast,

With smoking roofs, soft bells, and gleaming lights,—

            And hear above me on the autumnal blast

            The cataract of Death far thundering from the heights.

I slept a bit late this morning, always an unexpected boon, and now here I loll in my couch corner, not yet rushing around. Today we'll be driving to western Massachusetts, our car loaded with bread, smoked fish, and salads. Theoretically the drive shouldn't take that long, but I daresay traffic will be nasty. And I have yet to pack my clothes, pack the cooler, prep the cat's things for his babysitter, etc., etc.

Only the NYC son will be with us; our Chicago son will be with his girlfriend's family. But even with one boy away, my in-laws' house will be buzzy and cheerful. We'll bask in my mother-in-law's excellent cooking, play around with the traditional silly Christmas decorations (e.g., imagine this tableau: a pair of white crocodiles pulling Santa's sleigh away from the Parthenon: a classic example of the good times we have with Christmas tchotchkes in Amherst), and enjoy long raucous family card games. It should be a fun holiday.

I am a little sad to leave my new desk, just as soon as I received it. But it will be waiting for my return.

 I went out to write last night (three peppy drafts!), then came home and bounced up to my study . . . only to discover that, while I'd been out, Tom had removed the ironing board that had been standing there for six years as a temporary shelf, and installed this beauty . . . a custom-made desk tailored to fit elegantly into the odd-shaped slot, and even with a little drawer, painted a charming green, and all my things arranged tidily on the surface.

The early-morning photo doesn't do it justice. It's simple and beautiful and gorgeously made. I am so pleased.

So today I'll have the fun of putting things into that drawer, of sitting down and doing a little work in my little room. It's is the tiniest sort of haven, hardly space to swing a cat (as they say, though who would want to?). But now I have two custom-made desks--one for standing, one for sitting--plus the small blue reading chair I found on the street and the midcentury straight chair (from a set rehabbed by Tom) you see in the photo. I have a rug barely large enough for a yoga mat, shelves of poetry books, beloved pictures hanging on the walls, and a violin murmuring in her case. I have two windows that look out over the back garden, and a door that latches. Yes, the only closet in the room is full of clothes because we don't have a usable closet in our bedroom. But that is a small matter. It is a sweet thumbprint of a room, and I love to be in it.

I've also got a bunch of other things to do: a trip to the fish market to buy smoked scallops for Christmas lunch; grocery-shopping for salad ingredients (my assignment from my mother-in-law); prepping three different salads for quick assembly at her house (roasting carrots, boiling beets, sautéing peppers). 

I will be taking lots of breaks from cooking to sit at this desk.

Three big stollen loaves, two small seedy loaves: no meals were prepared, but it was still a two-dishwasher-load day at the Alcott House. The project involved a lot of juggling--proofing times, baking times; glazes and egg washes--but at the end of the day, I had five fat babies and a house that smelled like heaven.

Then, in the evening, T and I went into town, planning to have a drink at a bar and then walk around and look at the light displays along the waterfront and in the squares. But when we walked past Eventide and saw empty seats, we changed our plans. Eventide is an oyster bar and seafood restaurant that is impossible to get into in the summer. Customers overflow onto the sidewalks; wait times are endless. Only now, on a weeknight in winter, does a local wanderer have a chance at a seat. So we took our chance, and ate a beautiful unplanned shellfish feast.

Then we walked--snaking our way through the streets, peering into shop windows, admiring the colors, eavesdropping on snatches of conversations--arm in arm like a pair of courting Victorians, as the cold sea breeze twisted our ears.

And then we drove home, curling along the cove, the low skyline carved against the blue-black sky, the neighborhood windows aglow. So strange that this is my home, this cold little city, this salt bay.

Today I'll mix up at least one more batch of bread (maybe challah? maybe rye rolls? maybe both). I'll go for my morning walk, through the streets, through the woods, through the cemetery. I'll fiddle with revisions, and tonight I'll go out to write, a big stollen tucked into my bag, for sharing at the poet party. I've got an idea for a writing prompt based on Dickens's use of simile. I'm starting to glimpse a hazy future poetry collection arising from these new raw drafts.

This has not been a wasted week. I haven't done as much straightforward writing as I'd planned to, but I have thought. In and among the holiday chores and excursions, I've been reading hard, imagining hard; feeling the sharp, sweet shock of future, present, past. It's the work, just as much as word-to-page is the work . . . the work of being aware of the privilege of being aware--a messy inarticulate phrase, but do you know what I mean? 

In yesterday morning's letter I didn't mention how I was planning to spend the afternoon. Maybe I thought I would jinx myself, and certainly I was nervous about how it would go. What I did was drive a half hour north to Gray and meet up with some of my old central Maine band mates and music friends, and we spent all afternoon working out arrangements for some songs. The reason I didn't mention this is because I am so rusty: for five years I've barely taken the violin out of its case, after spending the previous five years fully engaged as a working band member. I felt embarrassed and kind of gloomy. But what happened was entirely uplifting: everyone was so happy to be playing together, the awkwardness melted away, I felt engaged and concentrated . . . listening hard, rediscovering my hands. It turned out to be a wonderful reunion.

The reason we got together is because Brian (guitar, bass, vocals) is organizing a big show in Dover-Foxcroft to honor Sid Stutzman, the founder of the band Doughty Hill, which has had many iterations over the course of 30 or 40 years. Sid's a songwriter, and the show will feature his originals, performed by many of the people he's taught, supported, and played with over the years. As my son says, it's kind of a lifetime achievement award for him. So we spent a few hours--Sid's son Sunny (bass, guitar, sax, harmonica, vocals), Brian's daughter Morgan (vocals, mandolin) and son-in-law Cliff (piano, arrangement mastermind), and me (fiddle, vocals)--working our way into new keys and harmonies, everyone so cheerful and glad to be at it together. The day was really a joy.

So this morning I woke up with sore fingertips (I need to get my string callouses back) but bubbling over with accomplishment. Not playing is always a cloud over my head, a shame. It feels right to be back at it again.

* * *

Today, however, will be a kitchen day. My mother-in-law has assigned me bread for the holiday meals, so I'll start off with a big stollen-making fest and then move on to whole-grain seedy sandwich loaves. In between I'll wrap the last gifts, work on revisions, do my exercises, pick up a library book, etc., etc. I'm looking forward to the stollen: I haven't made it for years, as Emily's black cake is usually all that's necessary in the fruitcake line. But this will be a nice substitute, and I'll be using dried cherries and apricots instead of the glace fruit, which should look just as pretty and taste better.

Such a busy so-called "week off from work," but in a good way: buzzing around among musicians, poems, and baking pans. Tonight T and I are going to go into town for a meal and a stroll under the lights. Tomorrow night, I'll see my poets for dinner and writing. 

Two hundred miles north I'd let the dog

run among birches and the black shade of pines.

I miss the hills, the woods and stony

streams, where the swish of jacket sleeves

against my sides seems loud, and a crow

caws sleepily at dawn.

--from Jane Kenyon, "Christmas Away from Home"

I was very wrong about that storm. The winds returned with a vengeance, and this morning Maine is a big mess. Our neighborhood seems to have escaped the worst of it: only a little water in the basement and some small branches down.  Power is out all over the state (though ours only flickered). When I drove across town to get my hair cut, I saw big trees down on major roads and wondered if vanity was leading me to make a dreadful mistake. Tom got sent home early because the power went out on the job site and all of the portable toilets blew over (and they were full: ew). Then he got trapped behind some downed trees for a while. A massive scaffolding blew over at the state office building where my neighbor works, and everyone had to be evacuated . . . Yesterday was quite a scene.

Today looks to be calmer, which means that the power guys can get up in their buckets and start solving problems. I do wonder how T will get to work, though, given the number of trees blocking roads and dangling on lines in that town.

I always feel so lucky when we come through these events unscathed. Our Norway maples are terrifying in a high wind. But the only thing that blew over was the recycling bin.

And I did get a great haircut . . . a new bouncy short bob that Sally the stylist says "looks like you're bringing the 90s back!" Make of that comment what you will.

Rain and gale last night, but the wind has since died down: all I hear now is a steady drip against the panes.

Monday morning of the last week before Christmas. I am up at 5 a.m., making coffee, emptying the dishwasher, considering my days. On Saturday my mother-in-law called to assign me my holiday tasks--mostly bread baking--so that job will be added to the mix. I'm getting a haircut today and may be going out to play music at some point this week. I've got shopping and wrapping to finish. I'll do my exercises and take walks and read books and work on poems. It will be a this-and-that week, small bustles but gloriously free of schedule.

Yesterday was downright lazy. I never left the house, a rare thing for me. I barely got off the couch, highly irregular if I'm not sick. Instead, I made a fire and sat next to it all day long--reading, working on revisions, organizing small sheafs of drafts. Eventually I moved to another couch and watched the Bills stomp the Cowboys. During commercials I made dinner. That was the extent of my physical labor.

I certainly won't have another day like that--my bones hate too much sitting--but it was enjoyable as a novelty, kind of like eating Doritos is enjoyable. As Tom continued his mysterious painting and drilling in the basement, the cat blinked by the fire, and my mind wandered among words, demanding nothing of itself. A certain ease of body and thought. Of course I am also in love, so that colors everything.

But today returns to briskness. The rain drums down, and T yawns as he opens and closes a dresser drawer, and the cat washes the tip of his tail. I wonder how many branches blew down in the night, how many loaves of bread to bake for the weekend, whether any of the words I wrote yesterday will make sense in new daylight. Being alive is a wonder.

The little northern city by the sea is steeling itself for yet another big Monday storm: two inches of rain and high winds. Lately, one's been arriving to start every week. But at least the leaves are off the trees, no snow or ice weight yet, and I am hoping for the best with our giant brittle Norway maples.

Yesterday I finished the Christmas cards, had a confab with my mother-in-law about Christmas plans, made a chicken dinner and an apple pie to enjoy with our neighbor, read a lot, and went for a walk. Tom, however, spent the day in the basement, sanding, running power tools, and by afternoon the scent of wood finish was rising through the house. He is making me something for Christmas, and I am politely staying as blind and deaf as possible. It's the magic of the season: the ability to know nothing about what's under my very nose.

Nothing much planned for today, at least for me. I might make red beans and rice for dinner. I might watch the Bills game late in the afternoon. We might go into town and walk around among the lights, if the rain holds off. The holiday spirit is upon us, and T has done an unwonted thing: he has made reservations for us to go out to dinner on New Year's Eve. We rarely do anything that night, but this year we will enjoy a multi-course dumplings-of-the-world feast at Bao Bao Dumpling House. I'm quite excited.

Of course you already know I'm easily excited. I like treats; I'm ready to be happy. Probably that's a bad characteristic for a poet. Maybe I should be more dissatisfied.

And, who knows, something huge may be about to happen. We have lived in this town now for seven years. That's a fairy tale measurement. Will a cranky dwarf emerge from a tree? Will a witch turn me into a toad? Will my prince be whisked away from our palace and transformed into a wisp of smoke in a glass jar? I am an elder sister, after all, so must be prepared for punishment.

I seem to have yanked some muscle in my lower back, which is why I am awake at 5 a.m. on a Saturday and creaking around the house like an old lady. However, the house is warm and the coffee is hot, and sitting upright already feels better than lying in bed, so I have hopes of ironing out the kink soon.

Yesterday I did a passel of housework (floors and bathrooms, towels and sheets), finished another batch of Christmas cards, went for a walk along the cove with my neighbor, solved a major revision problem in a poem draft (form and line break irregularities were damaging the narrative), and made Julia Child's soupe a l'oignon (just as good as I remembered: luscious slow-cooked sweet onions, toast melting into homemade broth teased with cognac, gratineed gruyere . . . and pardon the lack of French accents, but this blog platform is ruthlessly American). It was a productive and restful day, filled with homey busyness, yet I could feel my writing mind beginning to percolate. This is always when the poems take real shape: during long slow stretches of unstructured time, when my body is bumbling through tasks and my mind is floating among stories.

I started rereading John Fowles's The Magus, which is not a great novel, in many ways a deeply irritating one, but which captures, for me, the magnetism of landscape and desire, myth and danger. It is set on a Greek island in the 1950s; the protagonist is a wretched young man who does everything wrong, especially as regards women; the world he is sucked into is false and manipulative; yet the book, as a whole, is a breath of sharp wind. Pay attention, it tells me, to the terrible cruel beauties of the world, of history, of oneself. It is an English novel that tries to inhabit an ancient state of mind. And it almost does this, and when I read it, I almost do too.

I'm drawn to The Magus at moments when I'm trying to write, and I always give into the lure to take it off the shelf again. It is, despite its flaws, a book that feeds imaginative honesty. My guess is that most other people would hate it, and might be right to do so. The male-female/colonial-empire relationships can be excruciating. But the book lives in the raw light of Greece, both as setting and as state of existence. And that light dazzles and burns.

Up a little later than usual, as T doesn't need to leave for work quite so early today. Yesterday I kept being overcome by sleepiness, then slept hard all night . . . I'm not sick, or bodily exhausted; I feel good, actually, but clearly something internal is longing for naps, so why not give in to it?

I haven't been able to settle down to writing yet. Yesterday I sorted through some recent drafts, decided which had promise, which did not. But I didn't do much else literary, other than read Oliver Twist. And at the salon last night, my starts were clunky and unpromising. My head's not in the game at the moment, but I'm not going to fret. Sometimes it takes me a few days to switch from workworkwork into a productive state of idleness. Even if I don't write a useful word this week, I'll be soaking up spaciousness, and that may be good enough.

Today I've got a few errands to run and Christmas cards to fill. I'll finish Oliver and find another novel to read. I'm planning to make French onion soup, and that will take time--the long caramelizing stage cannot be rushed. I'll walk in the cold air. Whatever I accomplish today will be good enough. 

I'm thrilled to announce that registration is open for the Conference on Poetry & Learning at Monson Arts.  In addition to K-12 teachers, university instructors, and teaching artists, we welcome participants from other community-based settings, such as social services, the prison system, and lifelong learning programs as well as anyone who's following a nontraditional path as they strive to integrate poetry into daily life. The conference will take place in early July, with Teresa Carson, Maudelle Driskell, and me serving as faculty.

We would love to see you there; we would love it if you would share this news widely. We will have scholarships available and will offer professional development credits. And the setting and the food are amazing.

* * *

So far my vacation week has involved a fair amount of non-vacationing, but that's fine. Yesterday I somehow used up most of the day on conference-launch projects and a giant grocery-shopping trip, though I did get in that beach walk with friends. Today I've got a phone meeting about press releases, etc., but otherwise the day should be quieter. I hope to take a long walk, work on Christmas cards, mess around with revisions, finish Oliver Twist, do a spot of housework, and go out to write tonight. For some reason the week seems to be moving very slowly--not in a frustrating or sloggy way, but I keep getting confused about dates and times. Should it be Tuesday or should it be Friday? I'm really not sure.

Anyway, the little tree shines bravely against the panes. Frost coats the windshields. Flocks of starlings and gulls sweep through the early-morning sky. The teakettle creaks and hums. The cat blinks in his chair. The house is tidy and warm, a sturdy little ship in a winter sea.

Love lives beyond 

The tomb, the earth, which fades like dew— 

               I love the fond, 

The faithful, and the true.

--John Clare 

Home again, home again, and here to stay till Christmas weekend. Yesterday's class was so fun--three different handmade books, a room full of busy, happy kids, the pleasure of watching another great teaching artist at work--but I am really pleased to be stepping into ten days of unstructured space.

I have things to do of course: today or tomorrow, registration will open for the new Monson Arts teaching conference, so that will be a flurry. I've got work to do on The Poetry Kitchen setup. But I'm also going to have plenty of easy time for reading, writing, walking, planning, cooking, gazing out the window . . . I am so looking forward to these days.

Naturally there will be chores--exercise, housework, shopping, meals. Today I've got to bumble through all of those tasks, but also I'm hoping to meet friends for a walk on the beach, to curl up under a blanket with Oliver Twist, to imagine how I might fill the books I made yesterday.

Pleasures are ever in our hands or eyes,

And when in act they cease, in prospect, rise:

Present to grasp, and future still to find,

The whole employ of body and of mind.

All spread their charms, but charm not all alike;

On diff'rent senses diff'rent objects strike;

Hence diff'rent passions more or less inflame,

As strong or weak, the organs of the frame;

And hence one master passion in the breast,

Like Aaron's serpent, swallows up the rest.

--from Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

All went well on the drive north, though I'm glad we left early as the wet roads were starting to ice up by nightfall.

Now I wallow in my large bed listening to emergency vehicles fly past. Some misery's going on out there, a crash or a house fire. Underneath this apartment is the general store, and I feel the thumps and bumps of opening time, I'm starting to imagine coffee, but now here come now more sirens and I crane out the window to watch another fire truck and ambulance speed north toward Greenville.

A Tuesday morning flurry in Monson, Maine. Whatever's going on out there is a multi-department response because the firetrucks are still coming. I just saw a Sangerville ambulance, and that town's 20 miles away. Jeez, something bad is happening somewhere.

I guess I need to fork myself out of this bed and address my own responsibilities--25 high school kids playing with paper and thread all day. Meanwhile there's a house is burning down. 

Rain and rain and rain, and I'm hoping today's travel up north won't be affected. The high school programs have a guest scheduled for tomorrow--a book artist--and she and I are planning to drive up together today. But the vagaries of the snow line are vexing.

For now, I'm going to avoid fretting. The rain is lovely, clicking against the shell of the house. And I had a productive weekend: I finished the little editing project, wrote a bunch of website copy for the The Poetry Kitchen site, read a chunk of Oliver Twist, went for some long walks, and watched a nailbiter football game that my team actually won. Without this weather setback, I'd be in a holiday mood: a teaching week with no driving and no class planning, just floating up north as a passenger and having fun all day playing with paper and thread.

Whatever the weather situation, once this class is behind me, I'll be on Christmas time: desk cleared, classes over till January. Even if the next editing project arrives this week, the schedule will be loose; no one at the press will expect much from me till after the new year. So for a week or so, I'll be home alone all day: reading and writing, reading and writing, and, around the edges, working on plans for upcoming classes.

Time. I'm very happy about the prospect.

Such a dark and foggy morning, smudged with streetlight, window light. A storm is on the way: wind and rain, which I hope won't impact tomorrow's drive north. For now, though, just this fog--thick, quiet, over a Sunday-silent street.

So much suffering . . . Gaza, Israel, Ukraine, and around the corner. Weatherbeaten faces of panhandlers shivering on median strips. The blink and burr of hospital monitors. The bodies of children in a bombed-out building.

Meanwhile, I sit here on my shabby couch, with my coffee and my cat. It is unfair. It is unconscionable. It is impossible to parse.

* * *

Oliver Twist is young man's novel. Dickens was filled with adolescent ire, overflowing with glib prejudices and solutions, his voice devolving into a terrible comedy as he described children trapped in chimneys or starving to death in cellars. The cartoon descriptions are horrifying, as he meant them to be, but they also reveal a tyro-poet reeling through his sentences, drunk on his own talent for conjuring up such vivid, shocking, hilarious horrors. 

* * *

What does it mean to see oneself?

* * *

To inhabit the consolations of bare ground in December . . . The last of the kale curling up from among a few scattered lumps of snow.  Grass, dull as khaki: the shine of holly berries and shriveled crabapples: heaps of acorns, like wooden marbles . . . My mind stands beside the bay; watches eiders bob in the small ripples. There are no answers, only a constant shift and flail, among puzzles and locked gates. Still, something cracks.

Saturday morning, early December. Notably warmer than it's been: 30 degrees at 6 a.m. and temperatures forecast to climb. Yesterday was a rush-around of doctor's appointment, editing, housework, zoom meeting, the photo show, dinner out in a trendy Old Port restaurant. I felt like a regular city girl, striding through the Friday night crowds--past the baritone-horn player mournfully hooting Christmas carols outside the movie theater; past the lit-up trees in parks and courtyards; over cobblestones and bricks; past crowded restaurants, humming bars, the glint of harbor.

I enjoy these little jaunts with my neighbor. It's fun to have such a local friendship: to share a walking habit and an interest in gardening, to make little forays to restaurants or plant nurseries, to discuss neighborhood cats and speculate about neighborhood gossip. It's a friendship that's arisen entirely from sharing a fence line; we would never have crossed paths otherwise. And it adds an everyday sociability to my life that I haven't had since my children were toddlers.

This weekend I'll need to finish the housework I didn't get to yesterday. I want to work on poem drafts, catch up on desk things, start rereading Oliver Twist. I haven't cooked a proper dinner since Monday evening, what with T's auction duties and my writing group, and I'm looking forward to a slow evening together.

I haven't really let you into the story behind all of my zoom meetings this week. Details to come in that regard, but I will say that they involve creating a new zoom teaching platform now that the Frost Place Studio Sessions are defunct. So: stay tuned for The Poetry Kitchen, an online collective that will host classes and gatherings. I love all of the messy camaraderie that kitchen implies, and I'm eager to get 2024 offerings up and running. 

Another very cold morning, and a busy day ahead--a doctor's appointment, a zoom meeting with my poetry lab quartet, and then an outing with my neighbor to the photo auction gala that Tom's been prepping so hard this week. She and I will make a tour of the art, and then we'll go eat Puerto Rican food, if we can find a parking spot and a table, while poor T spends the whole evening managing crises or tediously standing around.

At least he had yesterday evening off, home alone on the couch while I was away churning out a couple of satisfying poem blurts at last night's salon. I returned to discover him watching Godzilla, and what is more relaxing than that?

I've been making progress on the small editing project, falling behind on housework, and sleeping reasonably well at night. My kids are checking in on me; Joe Castiglione, my favorite Red Sox radio announcer, just got elected to the Hall of Fame; and I'm reading a good book: Irene Nemirovsky's Fire in the Blood. Next, I think I'll go back to Oliver Twist. I haven't had a Dickens wallow in ages, and one of yesterday's writing prompts reminded me how rich and raw and stumbling and miraculous that young man's novel was when it appeared. The dear child: I should spend a few days with him again.

Thirteen degrees this morning in the little northern city by the sea, and the furnace is chugging along like a champ. The house is so comfortable, with its tiny lighted tree, its hot coffee, its heaped woodbox. Yesterday evening, as Tom carpentered at the gallery, I wrapped presents for shipping, talked to a son on the phone, watched Hitchcock's Rear Window, made a plain supper of tuna melts and tomato salad. It's been good to have so much time to myself this week: I've caught up on work; I've caught up on Christmas obligations; I've taken a small step back into my own creative cadence.

Today I'll finish a small editing project, do some housework and maybe some baking, go for a long walk in the cold, mess around with poem drafts, probably venture out to the salon to write. The sturdy complications of body and words . . . a donkey hitched to a cart, trotting down a flat gravel road, long ears alive in the breeze . . .

 Tom forgot to set his alarm, so we overslept this morning and have been rushing around in a tizzy. I, for one, am glad he got a bit of extra sleep, given that he had zero time off yesterday. He didn't get home till after 10 and will have the same packed schedule today and tonight . . . that's too much carpentry for a 58-year-old carpenter.

But my own work schedule has suddenly lightened significantly: I finished and shipped the big editing project. Today I'll tackle the small project, sit in on a zoom meeting about plans for a February class, and probably do some Christmas baking and wrapping. Of course there are troubles too: the furnace stopped working, again, so I spent much of yesterday being cold and waiting for the repair guy. But supposedly things are back on track . . . though two emergency calls in a month doesn't seem like a good omen.

Anyway, for now, at least, the furnace is firing, and Tom is trudging forward, and I have a clean desk. Last night, I made wine biscotti; tonight I'll do a batch of Christmas cookies, probably jelly tots. I finished the Trevor stories, and will start Brett Ellis Easton's Less Than Zero, a book I don't particularly want to read but that was set at my son's college in the 1980s, so he's interested in my take on it. December tumbles forward.

Yesterday was nose to the grindstone [what an unpleasant image that is; imagine how your nose would look afterward]--editing, editing, editing--and today, I hope, will usher in the magic moment when the big project leaps from my computer to the author's. Welcome to the holiday season, when freelancers try to shove everything out the door and authors and press editors try to shove everything back in. Everyone wants clean desks for Christmas.

Meanwhile, T will hardly be home for the next few days. Straight after work, he's got to rush to the gallery and start erecting displays for this Friday's big photo auction gala, a lavish event that his photo co-op sponsors each December. Tons of artists contribute, tons of people attend, and T is in the thick of it. So I won't be making dinner for the next couple of nights, just tooling around doing my own stuff and warming up leftovers. Probably I'll try to catch up on some holiday baking, wrap presents to ship to Vermont, that kind of thing. This is an odd week, with lots of alone-time in the house, and I should make the most of it.

Outside, a crust of snow shimmers under the streetlights. I hope to go for a walk this morning, before I settle down to work. I barely stepped outside the door yesterday, and now I've got a yearning for wind and birds. Lately the hawks have been so busy, sailing hungrily over the trees. Crows flock in the maples, and gulls line the roof ridges, all standing on one leg and staring moodily toward the bay. I want to be out and about among them.

I've nearly finished the collection of William Trevor stories. Close to 600 pages of instruction: it's been fascinating to ponder one ending after another, one beginning after another. He's very quiet in what he does, and very purposeful. Chekhov comes to mind.

I want to be better at what I do. I always want to be better at what I do. But of course I do what I do because I am who I am. Trevor's stories are a good reminder of that. His subjects are few, but his frames constantly shift, subtly, inexorably. Always there's another angle of sight.

"A lazy Sunday" is how Tom described yesterday, which I guess is accurate, if one lumps reading and writing under the heading. Certainly they look like it from the outside. Interestingly, before making that remark, Tom spent much of the day cleaning up his shop area and his study, so apparently he lumps housework under the lazy heading too. I'm beginning to have my doubts about the connotations of lazy, but so be it: we had a Sunday that did not involve working for other people or engaging in brisk physical activity, and much of it was spent in front of a fireplace.

As I lazily read several hundred pages in a short story collection, worked on two poem drafts, and made a lamb and mushroom pie for dinner, the rain fell. At some point overnight it turned briefly into snow, and now everything is coated with slick white slush. Inland towns must have gotten much more accumulation than Portland did because lots of schools are delayed or canceled this morning. Or maybe school superintendents got drunk on the first sight of flakes.

Anyway, I have nowhere to drive today. I'll get housework under control, bumble through my exercise regimen, and then burrow into the editing pile. I really hope I can finish the big project this week, get the little project done quickly, and emerge semi-weightlessly into the Christmas stretch. With another Monson trip before the holiday and a bunch of traveling scheduled afterward, I need to make the most of this home week. The "lazy" Sunday was a pleasant boost.

And two poems drafts! They are still under construction, but I'm so glad I was able to pull them out of the notebooks and into first shape. The Trevor stories have also been time well spent. I've been thinking a lot about how he handles endings. His stories are generally paced as traditional slow-unrolling narratives, but the endings arrive unexpectedly early, as if someone has clipped a thread. It's startling but also exciting, like getting off a train at an unexpected stop. I want to think about how this might transfer to poems.

Magically, I managed to get nearly all of my Christmas shopping done yesterday . . . only a couple of small items left to find or bake. Thank goodness for my neighbor: I am such a bad shopper, and it would never have occurred to me to go to craft fairs, but they were just the ticket. 

Then I finished the housework, did a pile of laundry, raked leaves, made a batch of Christmas cookies, and  at dusk T and I walked out into the neighborhood to admire the lights. It was a fine December Saturday.

With all of that behind me, I can devote today to reading books and working on poems. Rain is on the way, and it will be a comfortable backdrop. Maybe I'll light a fire early in the day and curl up on the couch with my books, notebooks, laptop, and tea cup. Maybe I'll cuddle into my blue chair and dreamily stare through my study window into the wet yard. Each aerie has its writerly charms.

With a long week ahead of me at home, I won't have to work this weekend on anything that isn't mine . . . no class plans or meeting agendas or emails to authors. It feels ridiculously luxurious to possess a full day for reading and writing.

* * *

What does it mean to live like an artist? I think it means doing the work when the work can be done: writing all day, writing every day, if that's what can be done . . . writing in tiny bursts, in snatched moments, if that's what can be done . . . The thing is, to stay aware, to be ready. I cannot turn off my quotidian life. I have to juggle multiple jobs; I have to run a household; I have to veer into emergencies and chaos, into doubt and gloom. But I can be ready. And when I see a door, I can open it.

The streets are filmed with rain; and in the gleam of the neighborhood Christmas lights, they glitter in the darkness like a movie set. I slept in till 6 this morning, and now the first streaks of day smudge the sky, the houses hunch black-windowed and quiet in their tiny yards, the cat is out racketing among the bare shrubs. 

This will be a peaceful weekend, I hope. Today I'm going to go into town to do some holiday shopping with my neighbor, then finish up the housework I didn't get done yesterday and spend time with poem drafts, maybe rake leaves if they're not too sodden. After being sick and traveling for much of October and being sick and on the road or entertaining for most of November, I am pleased to be beginning December at home and in good health. No traveling next week; then an overnight to Monson during the following week; then Christmas in Massachusetts with Tom's family. Compared to my recent schedules, this month's is almost civilized. And that is not a thing I often say about December.

I feel as if I need to halt the clocks, stop and take stock of where I am and what I'm up to. This year has been a windstorm of family emergencies, a close friend's death, other friends' sufferings, job upheaval, and public anxiety--and not just for me. So many people are enduring their own versions. Yet it's also been a year of revelation: learning that it's never too late to develop generative new friendships; building confidence in my skills as a teacher and mentor; writing the best poems of my life; strengthening bonds with old friends; basking in the affections of my children. These days, I am beginning to recognize that I'm on the cusp of old age. How do I want to enter this era? I want to stay physically viable. I want to be as loving as I can. I want to ponder the definitions of rest.

Here's one definition I've figured out. Over the past year, I've taken to doing a small thing that, oddly, has helped me out a lot. When I catch sight of my face in a mirror, I smile. At that moment my aging skin, my graying hair become immaterial. Despite my jaded, judgmental eyes, the smile transforms. It steals my attention from complaint; it reaches out, self to self, in pleasure and anticipation. Vanity is not the point. The eagerness of connection is all. Hey! my smile says. Nice to see you!

How is this rest? On the simplest level, the smile exchange slices away tension. It is a pause. It resets my default busyness; it stops me in my tracks. But the smile also reminds me of how easy it is to exude dissatisfaction and how often the public display of unhappiness stems from anger at fate: How have I gotten old? How could this have happened to me? The thing is: when I smile at my aging face, I stop thinking of myself. That seems counterintuitive, but it's true. Instead, I begin thinking about the pleasure of receiving a smile. No matter how old I am, I love it when a face lights up at the sight of me. In those moments, I never think, Gosh, that smiler has a lot of gray hair, and I bet their neck used to look so much better. I'm absorbing the electricity of their presence. So if I give myself the gift of a smile, I'm also reminding myself to give it to other people. There are worse things to be than an old lady who smiles.

I apologize if this post comes across as an annoying self-help sidebar. Feel free to ignore it, to go on with whatever better ideas you've figured out. Because that's all this is: just a little idea I figured out for myself that helps me forget to mourn my shiny youth. My shiny youth had plenty of sorrows--love angst, vocation angst--that time has smoothed away. Being old has its compensations, and one of them is compassion: for all of us.

Many people dislike these short days, this enveloping darkness, but I am not one of them. I like the late afternoon dusk, the lamps and the wood fire; I like the blind windowpanes and the slow arrival of morning. I like opening the back door, leaning into invisible winter, breathing a sudden lungful of metallic cold.

Today is the first day of December, the last day of the work week. I hope to finish editing a chapter today, to clean the downstairs rooms, to undergo my exercise regimen, to look at poem blurts in my notebook. I'll talk to Teresa about Donne. I'll drop off a package for a friend. I'll figure out something for dinner. Maybe I'll rake leaves before the rain begins.

The day stretches before me; the day is still nighttime. I am awake but the sky is not, and anything could be happening outside in the black garden . . . who are these animals, these stones? The town nurtures its forest secrets; the wild sea mutters as it flows into a tranquil cove. Something happens that no one understands. Something changes; it grows, it dies away.

The tremor behind the real, burning bright.

Thursday before dawn: cold, dark, but the house is cozy and the little tree is bright. I'm glad to be home, glad that I won't be on the road again until mid-December, two weeks in my own bed, no weekend classes, a chance to finish editing projects, get Christmas shopping done, settle into winter.

This morning I'll be at my desk, then a walk, groceries, housework, and tonight I'll go out to write: a sturdy, steady sort of day. I've caught up with my Donne homework, I'm immersed in the Trevor stories, and my brain is pinging after a bubbly day with my smart, excitable students.

While I was making dinner last night, I had a long phone call with a son, silly facetiming with his new kittens but also a busy conversation about a teaching project he and I are hatching: co-leading a scriptwriting session with my Monson kids next semester, which would also give him a chance to share what it's like to be a recent high school grad from central Maine who's trying to make a life in the art world. We're both very excited about this: I mean, what could be sweeter than co-teaching a writing class with my own kid?

So here I am, sitting in my couch corner, in my little house, in my little northern city by the sea, thinking mildly about rejection letters, about laundry, about fixing myself a cup of tea . . . about the poetry of Donne and the stories of Trevor . . . about my faraway sons and the sound of my beloved opening a dresser drawer . . . about the thunk of cat feet as they hit the floor . . . about the suffering of friends and the wobbling of democracy . . . about cranberry-nut bread and warm hardboiled eggs . . . about maps and clues and streetlights . . . about the secrets of children . . .

And meanwhile the mind is a midnight city, a summer pasture, a thunderstorm, a matchbox-- 

A cold morning here in the north country: 18 degrees, with a high of 25 forecast. Last night, as I trudged back from dinner, the black air swirled with snowflakes. Outside the fire station a pile of guys were gathered around a broken-down firetruck, all of them gleaming under the streetlight. I walked from one end of the brief downtown to the other; and where the houses stopped, blackness suddenly dropped, like a stage curtain.

I've been carrying around William Trevor's short stories, carrying around John Donne's Holy Sonnets, thinking about winter, wrapping myself in lamplight. All of this rereading I do--the longing for reimmersion, for existence inside; to become story, language, character . . . Sometimes I stand back in wonder. How is it that I can't relinquish the familiar, the deeply known? The tales are etched on my bones.

And still time wanders forward; the men in their Carhartt coats lean forward to peer under the firetruck's hood; snowflakes spin and leap; I turn pages toward the same hard ending.

I've got a new poem out today, "Ode to the Haverford Park Apartments." When he accepted it, the editor noted a certain Frank O'Hara tone to it, an idea that has amused me ever since. I was not thinking of Frank when I wrote it, but I'm happy to have him floating through the lines as a ghost.

This morning I'll be at my desk; in the afternoon I'll be driving; in the evening I'll be trudging up Monson's dark Main Street. Teaching all day tomorrow, with the theme of imagination--an umbrella notion that covers not just the minutiae of figurative language but also straight-up lying, both of which we'll be playing with during class. And then home again.

These days I settle for a very small tree, one of those grocery-store table tops that holds about six ornaments and tucks behind the passenger seat of the car. Nonetheless, they are always far chubbier than any trees we cut from the Harmony land, which were nothing but bones. So, despite the smallness, this little one feels substantial; it holds lights well and swans cutely into the living space.

Everything inside the house is comfort: a small lighted tree, a tidy room, furnace growling, hot coffee poured. Outside a storm is raging--gale and rain--though it's milder than it was last night. Whenever I woke from my long dream, I would hear wind battering the windows, and then I would fall back into the long dream . . . escaping from someplace to someplace else, changing one set of clothes for another, wandering along a railroad track . . .

But now I am awake, and today, after my long sabbatical as holiday housekeeper, I will return to my work life. Compared to the demands of Thanksgiving, a day spent editing feels pretty mild. Holiday housekeeping is a complex task, requiring much juggling, organization, improvisation, and calm, in addition to many hours in soapy water. My hands are rather beat up, and my thinking-of-others focus needs a small break. It will be refreshing to spend an entire day alone in the house, in my small study, with my small concerns.

I need to catch up on those concerns: my Donne homework, for instance; my own writing, which has languished all fall. But I am healthy, finally, after weeks of illness. I had a magnificent holiday with my children. I'm full of energy, and full of affection, and my house is in order. I think I'll figure out how to get something done.

A brilliant orange dawn shimmers up from the bay, casting long fingers over the quiet neighborhood, over business-like cats trotting briskly up the sidewalk, over frosty parked cars and my withered garden, over the almost-bare maples etched against a paling day.

The house is Sunday-morning quiet . . . T is abed; the cat has hustled back inside to join him. The furnace mutters, the clock ticks, yet the house's low clamor casts a spell that is like silence.

Today is the last day of the holiday week, the first morning since Monday that I've awoken without my children in the house. I spent much of yesterday resettling our space: washing guest linens and reorganizing storage areas, reaming out the attic under the eaves to make room for the portable mattresses. We've only been in this house for seven years, but nonetheless the attic was filled with child-related clutter: college-era bins containing never-to-be-used-again dorm sheets; boxes of middle school paperbacks. I left the books (who am I to sort through another person's indispensables?) but ditched the dorm detritus, and now the attic is actually useful and mostly accessible. It's also reminded me that I'll need to tackle another winter chore: the maw of useless items known as the basement. But that is a story for another day.

For the moment, the house is tidy enough. The upstairs guest room has returned to a teeny-tiny study. The downstairs guest room has returned to a teeny-tiny den. Today I'll go grocery shopping (my family consumed a shocking amount of bread, Kleenex, and toilet paper this week), and then I'll spend time at my desk, mulling over student pieces and prepping for my upcoming Monson class. I might work on a poem. I might rake leaves. I might make turkey soup. I might watch the Bills game. I will read William Trevor's Selected Stories and drink tea and fold laundry and do the crossword puzzle. My life feels too spacious, but I know that's a temporary condition. In a day or so I'll be as overwhelmed as usual. 

 And now the quiet house.

Furnace murmurs. Tea kettle sighs into silence on the stove. Cat, feeling bereft, curls on the couch between Tom and me. He is sad, and not sorry to be quiet; none of us is sorry to be quiet. It is the best medicine for this kind of sadness. Two mornings in a row I have cried after partings, tears leaking down my cheeks as I drove away from the bus station. It is terrible to watch my children walk away from me, and it is wonderful to watch them walk into their own lives. Both things are true, and that is why I always cry.

Well, it was a glorious week, and now it is over. Today I'll wash piles of laundry, stow away beds and bedding, refit my study, learn how to be two people and a cat again. It's a good life we have here. I am reminding myself of this. Inexorably, we construct our patterns of space and dependence.

I love my children so much. I am so happy that they are finding their own aeries. If they lived around the corner, maybe we would annoy one another more . . . who knows. As it is, there is no friction. We spent a week together, six people in a small house, without an eye roll or a cross word. The ease of plain affection: that is a kindness in itself.

It's cold outside. It's warm inside. I'm drinking tea and sitting under lamp-glow as the sky slowly brightens. My children will travel into sunlight.

Thanksgiving was everything I'd hoped it would be. Yes, the food planning all came together, and on cue too: not one single cooking mishap or appliance fail. Yes, the table looked pretty and everybody fit around it. But the biggest success was an entire day of good cheer: kids bundling up for a long noisy walk together; silly family game playing; enthusiastic potato peeling; goofy jokes and joy. It has been one of the best holidays ever.

But today we're breaking apart. The Chicago children will catch a bus to Boston this morning. Tomorrow morning the New York children will catch their bus. The good times are coming to an end, and by this time tomorrow I'll be moodily washing sheets and remembering how behind I am on desk work.

At least today we'll still have the NYC kids, and I think later this morning we'll probably all drive out to some chilly salt marshes and stare out at the Atlantic. And then we'll come home and take giant naps, and organize some leftovers for dinner, maybe watch a movie or play a game . . . 

I'm the luckiest person in the world. But I'll still cry when they're all gone.

I slept until 6:30--such a treat after so many truncated nights. Kindly, my brain decided to skip the 3 a.m. roll call--"Don't forget everything you have to do today"--and let me blink awake peacefully: dear slumberer by my side, first light gentle as a baby's gurgle, and the cat yawning without grievance.

I do have many things to do today, but yesterday was such a social bustle that I am glad to be doing none of them yet. Afternoon and evening were crammed with visitors, barbecue, hilarity, and now the beds are filled with sleepers, including J's oldest childhood friend, who drove hours through the snow to get here. Of course my heart is packed tight with sentiment and elegy, O these dear children. And the light in my beloved's eyes as he listens to their chatter, his hand reaching for my knee under the restaurant picnic table . . . Our waterstained lives unfold like a message in a bottle.

But I must return to the commonsense world of turkey dinner. Yesterday's projects, the apple pie and the cranberry-lemongrass sauce, both came out beautifully. The turkey has been herb-buttered and dry-brined. The giblet stock has been simmered and strained. This morning I will marshal my sous-chef forces: my army of stuffing mixers, potato peelers, squash mashers, carrot dicers, and Brussels sprout trimmers. I will pore over turkey time charts and consider the exigencies of gravy. I will attempt to remember the secret method of fitting six people around a four-person table.

I hope your day, too, contains some bustling comedy, some quiet moments in the corner, a hot drink, a chilly walk . . . Give your darlings a hug from me.

The New York City bus was hours late last night: our final travelers didn't arrive till close to 11 p.m. Thus, I am very, very sleepy this morning. But finally the entire crew is in the same town . . . though not under the same roof, as weeks ago the Chicagoites decided to rent an Airbnb room for a couple of nights, just to ease the crowd pressure on the little house. Turns out I was able to effectively solve the bed situation, but they possibly didn't believe in magic and kept to their original plan. The hilarious outcome is that the Chicago son and the New York City partner have never actually met each other, and now they are both pretending that the other is an invisible friend. One pair arrives in a house where the other pair mysteriously isn't. . . . 

That farce will eventually get disrupted today. In the meantime, the cat remains happily confused by the Cox-and-Box sleepovers, and I am sitting in my couch corner wondering if I'll be able to snag a nap at 9 a.m. Yesterday I made vanilla ice cream and got the hateful chestnut-roasting-and-peeling task out of the way.  Today will be a more focused kitchen workday--apple pie, cranberry sauce, dry-brining the turkey, maybe stuffing or squash prep--as the kids and their friends pour in and out of the house. It will be my favorite chaos. Given that neither boy grew up in Portland, the casual friend visitations feel particularly special . . . central Maine coming home to us.

You can see why this party week so excites me, on so many levels. It's a real fete--a gala, even. A glorious messy nostalgic reunion, with the added delight of adorable partners. Plus, my sweetheart's joy in the company of his children. And the cat's giddy glad-handing. And me in a dirty apron, inexorably concocting a feast.

Such a sweet afternoon and evening with our tired travelers, who had been up since 3 a.m. in another time zone but somehow kept going. We went for a chilly walk, then lit the fire and welcomed Tom home after work, hung around, ate spaghetti, played Yahtzee, and finally dispersed into beds. I hope the young people can sleep in, despite the inevitable getting-Tom-off-to-work noise we'll be making. The Alcott House is a hard place to have a secret: every room seems to be sitting in every other room's lap. But at least there are doors.

Our second wave of young people won't arrive till this evening, so the day is pretty open, with a certain amount of food prep filling in around the edges. J and H may go hiking or visit with a Harmony friend. Or the three of us might hang out somewhere together. It's nice to have no definite schedule, after my busy weekend of prep. I'll need to buy salmon at the fish market today, and I'll need to pick up the turkey by Wednesday. Otherwise, I can do whatever they want.

It's a cold morning--20 degrees and not forecast to get out of the 30s. But it will be sunny, and I wouldn't mind taking a look at the sea today. Maybe I'll drive the kids to the beach, if they don't have another plan. Or maybe I'll stay home by myself for a few hours and work on a poem. That would be an unexpected boon: a Thanksgiving holiday that includes time to write.

I received a text from a friend yesterday, which arrived as I was methodically combing the aisles of the Hannaford grocery store. "Joy might be for real this week," she wrote. Now my little house is filled with the breath of sleeping and waking bodies. I'm glad to pause and celebrate. 

A chilly Monday morning in the little northern city by the sea. I slept badly, not surprisingly, as my brain refused to stop mulling over its list of things to do. Still, despite that annoying brain, I arose feeling cheerful and ready for the day. This afternoon I'll pick up the first batch of young people at the bus station. This morning I'll do my exercises, run errands, buy groceries, and bake a cake. Holiday meal number 1 will be spaghetti with tender meatballs simmered in tomato-pepper sauce (my own, made in September), a salad, and quince cake with hard sauce (quinces from the bush I share with my neighbor).

Other than not having quite enough sleep, I am extremely ready for this party. The cat is also very excited. He loves bed making and company. Yesterday he helped me retool my study into a guest room and enjoyed sporting around on the actually very comfortable queen-sized bed I concocted from two foldable mattresses. This morning I'll make up the downstairs guest bed, and I'm sure he'll again be heavily involved.

I should get started on that job, and all the rest of them. But for a few more minutes I'll sit here quietly. I really am so happy about this coming week. I know I'm fussing more than is strictly necessary, but the fuss is part of my pleasure. I like to take care of people. I also know that the house will quickly become messy and noisy and disorganized. That's fine, that's lovely; it will all be lovely. I'm just so happy that the rooms will be full.

No sleep-in this morning. For some reason I've been awake since 4, up since 5. A shame to waste an early Sunday morning being conscious, but oh well. There are nice things about being up too. I am presently sitting comfortably in my mopped and tidied living room, admiring the dustless seashells on the mantle, the shelved books, the spiderweb-free ceiling corners, the neat stack of games, the boxes of firewood, the basket of kindling, hearth swept, stove blacked . . . And nearby, the kitchen, still smelling of soap; the dining room, with its polished table; the back room, prepped for its future as a guest room--clean towels on the door hooks, sheets and pillows at the ready.

That's what I spent all day doing yesterday, with a few breaks for bread baking, errand running, and a walk with my neighbor. Today I'll work on the upstairs rooms, transforming my study into a second guest room, setting up a pied-a-terre desk for myself in our bedroom: mopping and dusting, tucking away books and paperwork, making up the portable bed. . . . The Alcott House will be bursting at the seams, but everyone will have a room with a door.

In case you can't tell, I am thoroughly enjoying myself. There's no better reason to houseclean. The house is what it is: small, shabby, unfinished; now also scrubbed, cozy, and smiling.

Tomorrow morning I'll do the big grocery shopping, and then I'll concentrate on prepping the kitchen as the week's center of operations: I'll lay out bowls of staples--onions, tomatoes, potatoes; refill flour and sugar canisters; wash rarely used serving dishes. I do love our kitchen. Tom designed it beautifully as a work station--modest but efficient--and it's exciting to be able to put it to hard use. The last Thanksgiving dinner I made was during the pandemic, when he, Paul, and I were hunkered down pretending to have a party. This will be the real thing.

Throughout my married life, I have rarely been in charge of a holiday meal. Mostly we've alternated going to our parents' houses or, these days, to my sister's house since my mother no longer cooks much. I guess that's why I get so giddy about running the show myself. I love to cook, and I love my boys, and I love to be at home, and it is so sweet to wallow in all of that this year.

So pardon the tediousness of this letter. Chalk it up to domestic distraction and high spirits.

A beautiful sleep-in, a mild rainy morning, and I am feeling much more like myself. I was never absolutely ill from the shot cocktail but I did develop a generalized loopiness that made editing impossible. Nor did I think I should be driving a car. However, a loopy person can scrub bathrooms and do four loads of laundry and cook vegetable stock and peel quinces. So stuff got done.

I'm now on holiday hours: no thoughts of paying work until next weekend. Cooking, cleaning, laundry, and chatter are my entire focus. Today I'll mostly be concentrating on housework; deep-cleaning and reorganizing the downstairs rooms, trying to turn them into a reasonably sensible place for six people to kick around in for most of a week. Little Alcott House will be stuffed to the gills, but she can do a good job, if I encourage her.

So far I've got four quarts of gorgeous bronze vegetable stock ready for use. The quince harvest is precooked and ready for the quince cake I'll make on Monday. Today and tomorrow I'll make baguettes for garlic bread and a batch of cornbread for stuffing.

In the meantime, I'm rereading Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris, one of the most perfectly constructed novels I know. My edition includes an introduction by A. S. Byatt, whose death was announced yesterday. I am a poet who is desperately in love with fiction; I study poems and breathe story. It is an odd trajectory, but there you have it. And both Bowen and Byatt are among my great influences: as women novelists and story writers, they rank with Woolf, Munro, Murdoch, Compton-Burnett, Drabble, Fitzgerald, and Atwood in my private pantheon of female modernism. Byatt was a deeply intellectual writer, immersed in the mores of academic thought. Yet she used that immersion creatively; her canvases were immense. Possession was her most famous novel, and probably her most fun. But the series that encompasses The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, and A Whistling Woman is a tour-de-force--an adventure into the swirling worlds of academia, feminism, religious fervor, artistic change, landscape change, science, public morality, psychosis, and the Cold War between the 1950s and the 1970s, following one volatile brilliant family through this maze. I've never read anything else like it.

So I lift a cup to her memory: thank you, Antonia, for helping me invent my own mind.

 So far, so good with this Covid/flu cocktail--just the usual punched-arm sensation with no other symptoms. The beautiful thing is: if this changes and I start feeling terrible, why, I can just lie down on the couch and nothing in the universe will be vexed with me. I am caught up with editing, I have plenty of time to prep for next week, and no one expects me to show up anywhere.

That said, I hope to be exercising and editing and running errands. I did some leaf raking and mulching yesterday afternoon, and today I'd like to settle the bed-sheet issue, start some housework, make the vegetable stock for next week's recipes. But we'll see what the vaccines say.

It was good to get out to write last night, and then, when I got home, I read an email from a student--my shyest, most withdrawn participant; an international student who has missed several classes because they had gone back home for weeks; a student who has never shared their own work in class: this person sent me an email asking if they could send me some of their writing to read. Just ask Tom if I was or was not crowing excitedly in the kitchen.

I see these kids for one full day every other week, late September through April, with larger gaps around vacation breaks. The kids don't really spend all that much time with me, so building trust is a challenge. The big plus is that they we're together for full-day stretches, and the work we do--reading, talking, writing--is emotional and intimate. Some kids respond quickly and overtly, while others are harder to gauge. All of them, however, do the work I ask: they all write hard; I can see that. And in every class I include some kind of paired project, so that two kids are talking together alone and figuring something out. My hope is that this less nerve-racking connection will help the shyer kids get more comfortable with the larger group. Receiving that email last night made me feel as if I were doing something right.

Last night's salon group was small--just four of us gathered--but every one of us happened to be a teacher. We all teach in different milieux: one is a full-time high school English teacher, one is a renowned MFA teacher, one is a visiting improv-theater artist in K-12 schools, and then there's me: a teacher of teachers, the director of what is essentially a teaching laboratory project for high school writers. As we were talking together about our own writing prompts, I could feel how skilled these other poets were at their jobs--at cogitating how and when and why to shift the reading of words into the writing of words. It was exciting. Good teaching is a deeply creative act.