The moon is so brilliant this morning, floodlighting my dark kitchen, overexciting the cat. Now, as I sit here with my coffee, the moon peers through the living room window, round-faced and nosy, like an astronomical version of my Polish great-aunts.

It's a late-winter Tuesday in the little northern city by the sea. Crusty snow is retreating from the tree roots and foundations; the temperature is supposed to rise into the 40s. I wouldn't be surprised to see the first snowdrops unfolding in a few south-facing flowerbeds. And it's raptor courtship season: last year at this time daylight owls were swooping through the neighborhood grove known as Baxter Woods; noisy red-tailed hawks were spinning over the graves at Evergreen Cemetery. Now is the time when their sap begins to run.

My week stretches out before me. On the calendar it looks like an expanse of blankness, but that just means I don't have any scheduled responsibilities outside these walls. Desk work, desk work, desk work. Housework, housework, housework. I am itching to fiddle with a draft I wrote last week at the salon, and maybe that will be part of today. But mostly I have to keep my head down and chip away at the giant editing project.

I'm still rereading War and Peace; I'm moved and overwhelmed by it, as always. I'm still copying out Dante's Inferno, amazed by the coils of his imagination. I need to move forward into the next section of the 17th-century poetry anthology I'm reading with Teresa: the work of a poet I don't know at all, William Alabaster. Around the edges, I have been making chicken stock for the freezer, making minestrone, making pumpkin-buttermilk pudding, hanging laundry on the basement lines, filling the woodbox, sweeping the floors, making the bed . . . O, my realm, my mouse hole.

All day long, there is work, there are patterns--invention, intellect, habit, hands, the tug of muscle, the pant of breath. It is hard to find a hierarchy. Everything we do is everything we do.