Yesterday afternoon, as soon as I went into the garden to weed, the rain started up again; then it poured again in the evening; and this morning everything is, again, dripping and cold. What a dank, wet start to June. Meanwhile, P is sending me photos from New York that make the sky look like LA's in the 1970s--the smoke situation is unreal. We had a whiff of smoke in Portland last night, but nothing to compare. 

Tonight I won't go out to the salon to write. I'm leaving for Vermont tomorrow and I have too much stuff to do . . . graduation presents to wrap and house chores to slap-dash and desk work to grind out, plus I'm longing for a quiet night before embarking on a weekend of flurry.

Reading-wise, I'm resting with a Louisa May Alcott novel before beginning the big summer reading project: Tolstoy's Anna Karenina with my boys. Teresa and I have put Donne on hiatus till August, so Tolstoy will be my only homework for a few months. I'm looking forward to another dive into the novel (my tenth? my twentieth?), though of course I'm dreading the misery of the tale. That's the hard part about being a serious rereader: I always know how bad things will get.

Otherwise, what's new? I finished that essay I was working on and sent it to a journal. I did a bit of legwork with poetry-book publishers, querying and such. I wrote a sonnet. I made oven-fried chicken and scallion bread and a mushroom salad. 

When I get back from Vermont, I'll be on the big downslide to the Frost Place conference: frantically writing introductions for readings, building giant stacks of books and paperwork, hysterically rewriting plans at the last minute, etcetera etcetera ad infinitum. For now I am trying to put that out of my mind and just think about wrapping paper and cute graduation cards. I was lucky to steal a few days to work on my poetry collection. I won't have another such chance any time soon.