My back is feeling better, but my yard is feeling worse. What an ugly storm. Though it's still too dark to see exactly what's going on, I can tell our beautiful snowpack has taken a beating. Sleet has been falling all night. Watery slush coats the back stoop; melt is seeping into the basement. Under the streetlight the road looks like a decaying bobsled track. This is the sort of garbage weather that everyone hates, even me, and I'm a dedicated lover of weather.

I guess this will be an inside day, but at least I'm only slightly hobbled this morning. I've got a meeting today, and the endless editing pile awaits, and there are floors to clean and emails to answer, and if the roads are okay by this evening I'll go out to my writing salon.

Lately I've been considering undertaking a translation project--nothing extreme, just my own version of a section or so of The Canterbury Tales. For an upcoming class I was looking for decent translations of a section of "The Wife of Bath's Tale" and couldn't find anything I liked. So I did it myself, thinking hard about meter and rhyme, making decisions about the priorities of sound and sense. I worked hard on that translation, and the job was invigorating, and now I'm wondering what it would be like to do more of this kind of work.

Of course I don't have the space to start such a project now. Too much editing and teaching; not enough clean time for thinking my way into an undertaking of this scope. But maybe someday I'll have the chance to wrestle my way into Chaucer's mind.