Minus 7 this morning in the homeland. I woke, as one does, to the sound of heavy equipment . . . a solitary  front-end loader moving snow piles in the chill darkness. I'd been dreaming about playing in my old band, we were trapped in some sort of fraught situation, possibly in a castle; and now the covers were sliding off the bed, and a front-end loader was bleating, and cold was clawing at the doors.

Now that I'm awake and clean and dressed, life feels less melodramatic. The loader has finished its work, the lights in the general store have switched on, and in a few minutes I'll hat, boot, and glove myself and hustle across the street for coffee. A small sunrise gleams over the fire-station tower. Pale chimney smoke hovers like dragon's breath, and an empty log truck growls up Route 15 toward Moosehead Lake. Pickup trucks slide into the parking spaces in front of the store, and, look, the loader is parking there, too, headlights ablaze, as its shadowy driver slips from his cab and trudges inside, questing for small talk and breakfast sandwiches.

Yesterday evening I worked on some poem drafts, then wandered down to the Quarry Restaurant to pick up my dinner. The chef at the Quarry, Lulu Ranta, provides takeaway meals for the artists-in-residence at Monson Arts. She's also, amazingly, been shortlisted for a James Beard Award. "How did they find me up here in the boonies?" she marveled to me last night. But as I sat alone at my apartment table, reading War and Peace and eating some kind of incredible steak with wine and mushroom sauce, I thought that the James Beard scouts had made a pretty astute choice.

Then I watched about two-thirds of the musical Oklahoma, which is problematic, to say the least, but stars Shirley Jones, who grew up just outside of Scottdale, Pennsylvania, in the same era that my mom lived there. Who knew that someone from Chestnut Ridge country could grow up to be the mom on The Partridge Family (and also the real-life mom of Shaun Cassidy, teen idol of my youth)? I felt I needed to spend some time with her.