Even I, a person who loves all weather, drew the line at kneeling in the mud in yesterday's 40-degree rain. No weeding or planting was accomplished. The cat and I stayed in all day, I lit a fire mid-afternoon, T and I ate lentil soup for dinner: it was, as my mother likes to complain with a shudder, raw.

I don't know that today will be much better, but I'll need to trudge out into it anyway: meet a writer for coffee this morning, then head out to the salon tonight. In between times, I have to houseclean and catch up on paperwork, probably edit a little, probably futz around with Frost Place stuff . . . it will be one of those days, filled with a thousand niggly chores.

But I got a lot done yesterday: importantly, I finished the first draft of that essay I've been laboring over, so that was a relief. I'm not sure why I found it so hard to put together, but such is the writing life. Sometimes the work feels like sewing teeth. Anyway, I crossed the finish line, puffing and sweating and tripping over my shoelaces, and now I can set the piece aside and let it stew in its sauce for a while. (Boy am I going crazy with the mixed metaphors this morning.)

And I finished a poem, and I organized a class, and I got a chunk of editing done, so today I can "relax" (e.g., vacuum and scrub toilets) without guilt. What a romantic life a poet leads.

Meanwhile, the rain keeps falling. The gardens are sodden; the streams are overflowing. Maine is water and mud and quarreling birds and green shoots and fog and cloud and magnolia blossoms and earthworms in puddles and torrents over dams and blue-eyed forget-me-nots smiling in the too-long grass.