I woke this morning to the sounds of spring: steady rain, punctuated by the Pew, pew pew of a cardinal clinging to the lilac outside the bedroom window.

For thus far undiscovered reasons, our thermostat has decided not to work, so we've got no furnace at the moment, not a big deal at this time of year. The little wood stove is perfectly capable of warming up an April house, so at 5:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning I am sitting luxuriously beside a fire as rain patters at the windows and the cat demands that I improve the weather. Really, what could be more charming than hot fresh coffee and a wood fire? We should all have it. I feel like Mr. Wodehouse in Jane Austen's Emma, tucked up in his shawl next to his fireplace and mildly bossing his neighbors into eating gruel.

Yesterday afternoon's epistolary workshop was my last teaching gig till next Sunday afternoon, when I'll start another a three-week round of the chapbook class. It will be good to have a few days off, after this nutty week. I've got lots of editing to do, lots of Frost Place planning to work on, but a break from public performance will be restful. Shy people and teaching: why do we get into it, I ask you?

Yesterday, while I was mucking around with epistolary poems, Tom was building a ramp into the woodshed. This morning, as I gaze out into the dark rainy morning, the new ramp gleams like a funny little sign of affection: here, my love, let me make the wheelbarrow easier to manage . . . words never spoken, words embodied entirely by a small structure of scraps and screws. Our connection has been punctuated with so much unromantic romance. It's comic and it's poignant, and as he dozes upstairs, as the rain patters and the cup of coffee I made for him cools beside the bed, I think of a poem draft one of my friends wrote yesterday in the epistolary workshop: a poem that spoke to the jumble of silence and habit and comfort and irritation that defines a long intimate life together.

Last night we listened to the Sox squeak out a win in an up-and-down exciting game. I baked chicken thighs marinated in salt, fresh tarragon, and fresh garlic chives; roasted feta with peppers, red onion, and cherry tomatoes; made a mango and raspberry cobbler. We played cards and Yahtzee; I talked to our son on the phone; we read and fiddled with a crossword puzzle and dozed on the couch. Old person life is pretty fun.

And today I don't have plans, other than to read Donne beside the fire. Old person life continues.