My goal was to save all of today for the garden, so I spent yesterday morning on class planning, the afternoon on housework and groceries, and now Saturday stretches before me: potato planting, weeding, bagging sticks, mowing grass, plus laundry on the line. Tulips and lilacs are budding, peas are up; the weather will be cool but bright, and then rain will arrive tomorrow, right on schedule.

Tuesday will be my last writing day with my Monson class (we'll have one more session but will have a guest artist working with us all day), so I decided to focus on a fun time with the Big Three: character, action, and setting. I spent a chunk of the morning getting that arranged and then the rest of the morning designing next Saturday's free zoom epistolary workshop: five poem examples with simple prompts. Thus, for now, I am caught up with class prep, though I still need to figure out next Thursday's panel discussion at Back Cove Books.

Meanwhile, I am reading Reynolds's bio of Whitman and Idra Novey's novel Take What You Need, which is set in the Allegheny Appalachians, my old stomping grounds, and fills me with elegy. T and I have settled back into our cozy routine, though I miss those kids, I always miss those kids. This morning I watched a big raccoon trundle busily through the backyards, and the cardinals are singing like crazybirds, and the street is speckled with children playing some weird private version of whiffleball, and I haven't lit a fire in the wood stove for two nights in a row, and my windows are in dire need of washing, and my clean sheets smell like air.

Tomorrow, while it rains, I will read Donne and work on poems and maybe drive to the plant nursery and impulse-buy a few flats of this and that. This is my last non-working weekend for a month, and I want to hog it all to myself.