Another cold morning, another new fire crackling in the stove. Already the night sky is bluing. Cats are a-prowl; dogs are sniffing the scarred snow piles. Coffee steeps in the press, and slippers squeal across washed floors.

Yesterday I caught up on the housework I hadn't finished during the week, and then I fidgeted with some poems. One draft turned out to be tiny--only eight lines long--so I titled it "Russian Novel." I read Hammett and Tolstoy. I lay on the couch and listened to a Red Sox spring training game, the thwaps and chonks of summer wafting through wintry air.

Tomorrow I'm supposed to head north to teach, but I'm fairly sure we'll be postponed, as snow is forecast for Tuesday. The storms of March are beginning, as they always do in Maine. I just hope they don't interfere with my Saint Patrick's Day jaunt to Chicago. I will be sorely disappointed. However, I will not start fretting yet. 

On Friday, amid my other busyness, I brought Ruckus to the vet for his annual exam. He was pronounced healthy as a horse. (Why are horses particularly healthy?) He flirted and yowled and displayed his extreme good looks; and though he's about to turn 11 (on the ides of March, naturally), the vet removed him from the aging pet schedule. "This cat is too peppy to be treated like a senior!" 

But even as Mr. R rumpused, another woman in the waiting room was weeping into her cat carrier. Clearly, poor George was making his final visit to the vet, an ordeal I have undergone with so many of my own animals, and will undergo again, too soon, when the magnificent Ruckus succumbs to time.

As always, melancholy weaves its way.