Through the darkness I can see we have about an inch of fresh snow out there . . . 26 degrees, and the temperature ready to plummet. Winter is digging in its claws. When I wake up tomorrow in the homeland, the mercury will be cowering below zero. I think I won't wear a dress to work.

For the moment I'm still sitting here in my warm corner pretending I have nothing to do, but really I need to hoist myself off the couch and get laundry into the machine, get breakfast dishes washed, get the bed made, get the editing started. I'm driving straight up to Monson this afternoon, as my Wellington friends are ill, so I'll spend the night in a room by the frozen lake, listening to log trucks roll down the Moosehead road, heading for the mills.

I worked on a couple of poem drafts yesterday afternoon, squeezing them in around the editing chore. Maybe tonight, when I'm on my own, I'll work a bit more on them. My stack of new work is getting tall, and I suppose I ought to start thinking more coherently about how to collect it. But I've been so focused on making each piece; my mind doesn't feel ready to switch into gather mode. And Accidental Hymn is still so new, not even a year old. This is the downside of writing all the time: there's no breath between collections. The fresh clutters the old.

Anyway. This week, a flurry of poems poems poems, talk talk talk, travel and zoom and phone, in person, through the aether, and meanwhile I chisel out sentences on someone else's massive academic manuscript. What an odd way to make a "living."

And yet, last night, when P called to tell me excitedly about a project he's working on--producing a staged reading of a friend's play, pulling together actors and a performance space, even figuring out how to pay the actors just a little bit of money . . . the deep engagement and pleasure of bringing words into the air. As I was listening to him talk, all I could do was beam.