Yesterday was such a good and restorative day. I wrote all morning, pulling together some drafts I'd scribbled during my Wednesday night "Body of Work" class, and ended up with a poem about ghosts that still needs work but is pleasing me.

Then I drove out to the nursery and bought a smokebush to replace a couple of dead clethras in the back yard, plus a few more wild nodding onions (quite excited about their hardy native qualities and their magnetic attraction for butterflies) and two rodgersias, a broad hovering plant that loves shady corners. I bought tuberose begonias for backyard planters, and for the vegetable garden I got marigolds and a flat of chard, so I can start pushing toward harvest a bit faster.  I spent a few hours digging all of these riches into the ground, and did some transplanting as well: moving bits of sweet woodruff so that it can spread throughout the backyard beds; transplanting and thinning spinach seedlings.

The backyard continues to look rough and accidental, but much of that is linked to its construction-site persona. Maybe someday I won't have sawhorses and boards and trampled dirt out there, but I do not complain about renovations. Tom foraged a stack of castoff lumber and will be using it to build storage shelves in the new shed this weekend, maybe even saving some of it for a new shed door. Every little change on this shabby homestead is a big step forward.

This afternoon I'll be back on the clock, leading that epistolary-poem workshop for the Maine Poet Laureate project. I'm a little nervous, as I think I'll have to do a bit more lecturing than I usually do, given the large size of the audience. (Ah, the magical draw of a free workshop!)  I'm hoping we can manage to have some conversation around the poems we'll be reading and writing, but teeny-tiny zoom boxes are hard on my bad eyes, and I worry I might have trouble seeing raised hands. Though of course I wouldn't be me if I didn't have something to worry about.