Home again, and tired, after two long spates of driving in rain. But what a beautiful storm . . . slow and persistent and warmish, and now spring in Maine has turned the corner, really left winter behind. The early flowering trees are beginning to bloom, tulips are opening, catkins are swelling on the maples, and the lilac is covered with tiny miniature blossoms, looking as if they've been shrunk down Alice-style.

My class went well, and we parted with the kids teasing me in that charming way teenagers have, a skill my own boys perfected and one I miss so much: when teasing plays out as funny acerbic kind-hearted affection. We wrote and wrote, messing around with prompts that brought us into surprising intersections with characters, action, place. I think we all left feeling good about the year and what we'd been able to make.

Now, after a restorative night in my own bed, I'm trying to reconfigure my brain into Wednesday--exercise session, laundry, editing, maybe a touch of gardening, early dinner prep, and then teaching an evening class, the last of three sessions on writing a series of poems. 

I guess it's a good thing that freelancing, homesteading, and motherhood have all given me sharp lessons in (1) how to juggle a million things at once and (2) how to switch focus at lightning speed, because that's the story of this week.

I'm still reading Reynolds's Whitman bio, also pecking at a Le Carre novel, The Russia House, that I found in a free bin in Skowhegan last week. But I don't know when I'm going to get a chance to do any poem work. My notebook is packed with draft blurts that I haven't had a moment to transcribe, and my Donne homework awaits, and and and and and and and. 

Ah, well, someday.