Since late June I've been foraging handfuls of chanterelles here and there from my secret spots in Evergreen Cemetery, but yesterday I brought home a true cache, and here is the frying pan to prove it.

 

And here is the salad bowl afterward . . . pole beans, purple on the vine but green after cooking; chopped kohlrabi and baby red onion; and sautéed chanterelles . . . all gifts of (baby) farm and (urban) meadow. Toss on a little olive oil, some rice vinegar, salt and pepper, chopped marigolds and mint, and what could be better?

Yesterday was relatively lazy. T and I went on our chanterelle walk in the morning, then took a trip to the fish market in the afternoon. Otherwise, we mucked around at home. I dug potatoes and harvested kohlrabi and lost my pruners in the bushes somewhere. I read a Robertson Davies novel and listened to baseball and roasted a pair of little mackerel (stuffed with oregano and preserved lemon; brushed with harissa). It was a pleasantly slow day.

Today I'll be back at my desk, messing around with Frost Place stuff and some copyediting, prepping for a class I'll be teaching next week. Eventually I'll get outside and mow grass and such. The weather is still cool and lovely, perfect for drying laundry and eating breakfast at the little cafe table and transplanting kale seedlings. I need to order garlic for fall planting . . . because fall is not so far away.

Flowers in a darkened room, 5 a.m.

This morning the temperature is 57 degrees, far cooler than it's been for weeks, so chilly that I'm actually wearing a bathrobe. I'm not sure I've done that since June. I've pretty much forgotten what a long-sleeved shirt is, let alone a sweater. But last night's rainstorm broke the spell, and the little northern city by the sea has returned to its moderate ways.

Last night, after our dinner party, as Tom washed dishes and I dried dishes and we listened to the rain drip off the roof, I found myself wandering from little room to room, as I slowly toweled plate or glass, thinking idly . . . about how conversations morph from good manners to curiosity, how space holds and releases bodies, how flowers create shadows against painted walls . . .

What happens to a house that is quiet, then full of talk, then quiet again? Does the talk still linger in the vacant rooms, like wet air lurks in swollen doors and the covers of paperback novels?

Outside, a mourning dove performs her three-note lament: coo. coo. coo. Two runners thunk down the street, breath ragged, sneakers crunching sand. Daylight, pale as milk, slips through the maples, the ash tree; slides along the wet rooflines; fingers the shutters and doors. Alcott House, tidy, small, unfinished, unfolds itself to the morning.

Today--what shall I do today? The garden, I suppose; clothes on the line; books and a walk . . . any of this, yes, or something else entirely. The shape of the near future shimmers, familiar and mysterious. 

Saturday morning, and  I slept in, a lovely rare treat. The air machine and fans were roaring all day and all night, but as soon as got I up, I turned off every one of them, opened all the windows, and welcomed in the day, in all of its sticky glory.

Unfortunately for our dinner party, we're supposed to have thunderstorms this afternoon, so I'm not sure how T will deal with the grill situation. That's the problem with cooking over a fire pit: it needs a lot of time to build up coals. Anyhow I'll marinate the steak this morning, and start the French bread dough, and what will happen will happen. Somehow we'll feed these people.

On another note: I want to announce that two Frost Place Studio Sessions are now open for registration, both of them generative writing weekends: "Rilke and Imagination," on September 23 and 24; and "Revisiting Homer's Odyssey" (a reprise of a previous session and back by popular request) on October 28 and 29. These are open to anyone, poet or non-poet, whether or not you have any familiarity with Rilke or Homer. Each is on Zoom and costs $225.

Last night I brought materials for root beer floats to the writing salon and, golly, you'd think I'd brought Olympian nectar. Everyone, it seems, swoons over root beer floats. I'd had no idea. But now we both know: if it's late July and you want to make a friend happy, fix them a root beer float.

It was a good-company evening and a good writing evening too. I produced a big messy emotional draft that I'm looking forward to revisiting and a stupid one that I never care if I read again but that did make people laugh, so there's that.

Today will mostly be housework, meal planning, maybe some shopping, though I hope I'll be doing some writing as well. We're having, for us, a sizable dinner party tomorrow night: seven people crammed around our little dining-room table . . . unless the weather cooperates and I somehow figure out a way for us to eat outside. So I need to figure out the menu and maybe do some early prep: I have a vision of individual Bavarian creams or pannacotta; also on my mind: cold cucumber soup garnished with sweet corn and fresh dill. We'll see what transpires.

Currently, the weather is not cooperating at all . . . flirting with 90 degrees today and heavily humid and all-around miserable. I'll go out to pick blueberries early, and then retreat to my desk and my vacuum cleaner. I've been reading friends' poetry and essay collections; I've been reading a Robertson Davies novel; I've been busily revising a poem; and today is my older son's 29th birthday, so I am thinking of him all the time, my dear one, so far away and so close, first of the two best things I ever made.

I don't usually keep the air conditioner running all night, but this morning I'm glad I did: the overnight temperature never dropped below 70 degrees, and it's so soupy out there--air thick as beach water. We might as well be living in Philadelphia or something.

Today and tomorrow are both supposed to be wretchedly hot. I'm going to mow grass first thing this morning, get the beans picked and such, before I return to inside life. I finished my editing project so my plan for the day is to read and write--Donne's poems, my own poems, maybe begin scratching out some prose ideas--and then bumble out to the salon in the evening. I spent a few hours yesterday afternoon with a new draft, and it felt good to be back at it: wallowing in my brain-world, after a week of not much writing. 

5 a.m. Grey daylight, open windows. Still and sticky air. Overhead, a gull wails a long fading mournful cry. In the maples, a cardinal announces himself: chirk, chirk, chirk. Upstairs, the box fan murmurs.

Today will be hot. I'm glad I made lemon ice cream yesterday, and I think I'll put together a chicken salad to go with it . . . maybe Greek flavors--olives, peppers, feta, lots of mint. There's still a fair amount of shrimp and corn salad left from last night's dinner, but I expect T will pack it for lunch. We are in salad days, here in the little northern city by the sea.

I didn't quite finish the editing project yesterday, so that will be my morning, after laundry and dishes and exercise. Then errands; and then, I hope, some writing.

Teresa and I are starting up our Donne homework again, after a short hiatus. Back to work, back to work. Already the autumn is looming . . . teaching schedules, travel.

In a few days my older son turns 29. When I was 29, on that day 29 years ago, I was giving birth to him. And, still, everything about that day is so vivid. And here he is, a man. And here I am, still myself. Yet also someone I never expected to be.

Yesterday took a left turn, as I came down with some kind of stomach bug and ended up spending much of the day limply on the couch. However, a long magical sleep seems to have solved all problems, and I woke up feeling healthy and lively and eager for coffee.

So today will involve accomplishing the things I did not get done yesterday, such as grocery shopping and standing upright. I did manage to edit and do my exercises, which in retrospect is kind of surprising, though I think I wasn't, in the early morning hours, quite aware of how lousy I was beginning to feel. Funny how these things can sneak up. Also funny how a body decides to solve the problem. Mine commanded, "Lie down," and I meekly obeyed. This morning, the body said, "We're fine now. Get up." And here I am, myself again.

Outside a mourning dove coos. In the kitchen T slices bread for a sandwich. I hear traffic in the distance, and the air is heavy and humid, and my bare shoulders feel sticky. I suppose it will be another air machine day.

I'm hoping to finish this editing project today, but maybe it will drag out till tomorrow. I'm hoping to make a shrimp salad and work on some poems. I'm hoping to not spend the afternoon shivering under a blanket, somehow freezing on an 85-degree day. That was weird.

After a pleasant open-window weekend, this week's temps are supposed to be increasingly unbearable, so I guess the air machine will resume its clatter today. But for the moment the morning is cool. Outside, crows screech in the maples. Upstairs, T closes a drawer, yawns, murmurs to the cat. Early sunlight spatters the garden.

The days stretch ahead, torrid and bright--a week of ice tea and chicken salad and cold melon, of blazing forays into the herb patch, of wet glass rings on the tables and bare feet on cool tile.

When I was a child in such weather, I would loll on the farmhouse porch swing, swilling orange soda and reading stories of prairie blizzards.

Now the crows have stopped their argument, and I need to stop this wasteful writing and get on with my work day . . . laundry, bed making, sink scouring, dish washing, editing . . . plain song, plain air, arrow of my days.

Yesterday evening T and I drove over to the Eastern Prom and strolled along the water, along with many other happy Portlanders, on what might have been the first gorgeous Saturday evening of the season--staring out at the moored sailboats, speculating about giant yachts, panting up the awkward stone stairway to the street. And then we wandered over to the other side of the hill and ate dinner at Cong tu Bot, a hoppin' Vietnamese place filled with muttering dance music and tattooed young people and cold wine and incredibly delicious summery food. And then we walked up to the park on North Street and watched the sun set over the city and Back Cove; spotted our own neighborhood steeple across the estuary; gazed at the traffic snaking down the highway, the lights glowing over the Sea Dogs' field, the gulls and crows sailing toward their nighttime roosts. And then we drove 10 minutes back to our little garden nest.

On such nights the move to Portland does feel like the right decision. The city is small but so lively; our house is tucked close to that liveliness but still a peaceable homestead. Watery beauty, shady walks, fish piers,  a neighborhood library, mushroom foraging, a trellis of green beans in my front yard . . . I should complain about nothing.

We've had a brief and much-appreciated respite from bad weather, but today the heat will return, climbing into the 90s by mid-week. I'll do a bit of gardening this morning, and maybe in the afternoon I'll once again venture into the shops and try to find an outdoor dinner table. I've got pork chops to marinate for dinner; new carrots and kohlrabi to julienne for salad; green beans, chard, and lettuce to harvest; sage to cut and hang up for drying.

I'm still reading Bedford's The Legacy. I've got some poem blurts to transcribe from notebook scratches. I'll listen to evening baseball on the radio.

O summer. 

 It's 7 a.m., and I just rolled out of bed . . . an unbelievably late rise time for me. I'm still trying to unstick myself from my dream. The romantic male lead and I were in our little house. I knew that soon all of our acquaintances would be arriving in a flurry, desperate to barricade themselves inside with us, and we'd spend the rest of time frantically defending against an enemy onslaught. So my bright idea was: Let's change the setting and the time period, honey, and everything will be fine.

If that's not a writer's dream, I don't know what is. First, I get to shack up with Handsome Guy. Then I predict trouble. Then I rewrite the script to avoid it. Then I return to my romance situation with Handsome Guy. All problems solved.

Ah, dream world.

In real life, overnight rain soaks the towels and sheets on the line, and the cat shoves his nose into my face, nagging me to get out of bed and let him out. The romantic lead dozes over his coffee, and the script remains plodding and obscure, though on the bright side there are no legions of enemies galloping down the street and we're not transforming our windows into arrow slits and my house is not packed to the gills with neighbors and cows.

Outside, the fog is thick and briny, and the local songbirds are haunting my blueberry bushes, determined to overcome the netting obstacle. I think the weather will brighten, eventually, and maybe the laundry will dry, and maybe I'll mow grass. Tonight the romantic lead and I are going out to dinner, and I hope we will have no trouble with invaders on horseback.

I've started rereading Sybille Bedford's A Legacy, which is right up there with Lampedusa's The Leopard in its evocation of a particular vibrating time and place. The Leopard is set among mid-nineteenth-century Sicilian nobility, whereas A Legacy is a strange and opulent Edwardian Europe. Here's a taste:

In the year 1891, Manet and Seurat were already dead; Pissaro, Monet and Renoir were at their height of powers; Cezanne had opened yet another world. Sunday at la Grande Jatte and le Dejeuner dan le Bois, la Musique aux Tuileries, les Dames dans un Jardin, the ochre farms and tawny hills of Aix were there, on canvas, hung, looked at--to be seen by anybody who would learn to see. And so were the shimmering trees, the sun-speckled paths, the fluffy fields, the light, the dancing air, the water--But were they seen? Were they walked, were they lived in? Did ladies come out into the garden in the morning holding a silver tea-pot? did flesh-and-blood governesses advance towards one waist-high in corn and poppies, clutching a bunch of blossoms? did young men dip their hands into the pool and young women laugh in swings? Did gentlemen really put their top-hats in the grass?

For the age of the Impressionists was also still the age of decorum and pomposity, of mahogany and the basement kitchen, the overstuffed interior and the stucco villa; an age that venerated old, rich, malicious women and the clever banker; when places of public entertainment were large, pilastered and vulgar, and anyone who was neither a sportsman, poor, not very young, sat down on a stiff-backed chair three times a day eating an endless meal indoors.

My father [Jules] talked little about this middle period of his life. But others knew him, saw him, talked, survived; and I know that on the French Riviera in the Nineties Jules Felden drove a team of mules--

I made a plum cake for last night's salon . . . and if you happen to own The Joy of Cooking, you might look it up because this is a beautiful, simple, and unusual way to feature peaches or plums: a thin circle of biscuity dough invisibly supporting a corona of caramelized fruit that somehow is not a juicy mess but a tender sliceable dessert.

This morning the fog is thick and sea-smelling, but the wildfire smoke is gone and temperatures are supposed to moderate, and I think it will be a lovely open-window day. I'll work at my desk, then shift into housework mode after lunch, putter in the flowerbeds, read Sybille Bedford's novel The Legacy in the hammock, un-pin sheets from the line, amble in the cemetery . . . not all of these things, I'm sure, but some of them. My solitary July continues, long days alone, decorated with small spurts of sociability, punctuated by T's return home in the evenings. I am a breath unto myself, a white cabbage moth flitting among the broccoli plants, a dandelion feather. 

Just as I was accustoming myself to unemployment, a small editing project dropped from the sky. So this morning I'll be back at it: paying off the chimney-sweep bill, the accidental-new-dress bill, the buy-copies-of-my-own-books-from-the-publisher bill, etc. First, though, I'll go for a walk. The humidity seems to have lessened, maybe because there's been no rain for three days in a row, and I want to check my secret chanterelle patches in the cemetery and watch the mockingbirds and the hawks, so busy with their duties among the headstones and trees.

Tonight I'll go out to the salon to write. This afternoon I'll bake a plum cake to bring along. This morning I'll hang clothes on the line. Such is my plan for my day. Perhaps the mockingbirds and the hawks will drop by to watch me.

I'm rereading Iris Murdoch's novel The Unicorn, and in it she reprints the lyrics of a ballad, which a quick Google search suggests has Manx roots. I don't remember noticing it before, but this time through the book, the words floored me.

O what if the fowler my blackbird has taken?

The roses of dawn blossom over the sea;

Awaken, my blackbird, awaken, awaken,

And sing to me out of my red fuchsia tree.

O what if the fowler my blackbird has taken?

The sun lifts his head from the lap of the sea--

Awaken, my blackbird, awaken, awaken,

And sing to me out of my red fuchsia tree.

O what if the fowler my blackbird has taken?

The mountains grow white with the birds of the sea,

But down in the garden forsaken, forsaken,

I'll weep all the day by my red fuchsia tree.

The air has cleared, the wildfire smoke has dissipated, and the windows are wide open to morning coolness. This makes two days in a row without rain, practically a record.

Yesterday I went into town and finally did the birthday shopping, and along the way wandered into a small shop I'd never seen before and accidentally found a beautiful handmade linen dress for myself--a dress made by a New England designer, completely affordable, with a lovely surprising drape. I was amazed.

Given my finances, I should not be buying dresses. However, these things happen, and it was cheering, and collecting little things for my son was also cheering, and then, magically, he called as soon as I got home and we had a long newsy chat about this and that. So my early-morning triste moment passed, and I crossed back into cluttered life.

At my desk I worked on website descriptions for upcoming classes. In the yard I finished mowing and trimming. In the living room I read Iris Murdoch's The Unicorn and thought about Rilke. In the bathroom I scoured a toilet. In the kitchen I sliced up peppers and onions and cooked wild rice. Through the windows I could hear the hoot of the big boats docked on the Fore River wharfs. Overhead, gulls wailed their creaky wails. The ocean was invisible but very close.

Today, another formless day of form. I'll do my exercise session; I'll work at my desk; I'll read, garden, wash clothes, cook. The hours will trickle away, and the box fans will murmur their monotonous song, and a cardinal will splash and flap in a driveway puddle. I am caught in a net of solitude and I am not struggling.

The windows are open, but maybe not for long, as we've got wildfire smoke coming our way today. And maybe some rain too, naturally. But briefly, at least, I can listen to the birds.

I need to mow the backyard this morning, before the heat and the air quality deteriorate. I need to work on teaching plans. I need to do housework and go birthday shopping. I'm feeling a little triste, which could be a result of the air quality or of struggles with poem revisioning or economic frets related to my next editing project, which has been delayed longer than expected. I'm keeping busy but earning nothing, and I'm trying not to feel guilty about that.

But now that I know for sure that the project is delayed, I can start planning the next few weeks with this in mind. I want to make another blank book. I am considering another prose project, possibly an extension of the essay I finished recently about aging and art. I want to take the violin out of its case.

Tonight, for dinner, I'll simmer chicken with wine and fresh oregano. I'll sauté peppers and make a salad of new beans and concoct some kind of dessert with the blueberries from my front-yard bushes. All I can do, at the moment, is be a dedicated housekeeper and poet, neither of which feels adequate. Not that anyone is complaining, but I beat myself up for being a financial burden. This is normal and life-long, and I'll get through it.

We had flood watches, tornado watches, ridiculous downpours, and I never did leave the house to go birthday shopping because trudging through city streets in this outburst just seemed dumb. Instead, I made baguettes and Vietnamese summer rolls and stared out the window at the relentless weather.

Now we've arrived at Monday morning and the rain has stopped and a chickadee is singing. Supposedly the day will be hot and sunny, which is hard to imagine. I've got errands to run and desk work to muddle through, and tonight I'll walk out to my poetry workshop, and my wedding anniversary is coming up this week, and T and I will have been married for 32 years, and that is a fat chunk of life. I don't know how we'll celebrate, or if we'll even remember it. We're not very good at our wedding anniversary. We weren't particularly good at getting married either, though on the whole we've done a decent job of being married, bar a few sulks and explosions.

It's so, so wet outside--another inch or so of rain yesterday on top of inches and inches and feet and lakes of rain since the beginning of June. We're lucky: our neighborhood isn't in a flood zone, and our basement seeps here and there but isn't terribly wet. Still, the saturated soil is worrisome. I don't know how much more water it can take before the downpours simply pool up on the surface and turn the place into a marsh.

There's nothing I can do about it, however, other than mow the bionic grass and yank the bionic weeds. I did harvest the first handful of pole beans yesterday. The blueberries are beginning to ripen. With a week or so of sun the garden could still be productive. It's not too late for summer.

Garlic harvested and hung to cure in the shed. Hill Country flowerbeds weeded. Chard sowed where the garlic once grew. Overenthusiastic creeping thyme dug from part of the front walkway. Last season's compost emptied from bins, shoveled into the leaf-mulch corner, pitchforked for aeration. I didn't get to the grass mowing but I did accomplish more than I thought I would. Thank goodness for my exercise regimen, which keeps me fit for these mulish chores.

Of course I read in the interstices. The day was all mine, as T spent it taking pictures on Peaks Island. But in the evening he cooked steaks, tomatoes, and zucchini on the fire. I cooked mixed grains and buttery chard in the kitchen. We drank some good beer and played darts and ate homemade vanilla-walnut ice cream for dessert. It was a sociable summery end to a sort of summery day.

But today will be rain. It hasn't started yet but it's forecast to be a downpour. Our plan is to eventually slog into town to go birthday shopping for our son. I hope we manage to do it, but I can imagine enthusiasm lessening, once the deluge sets in.

And now, right on cue, here come the first drops. The rain, the rain . . . all summer long, a suffocation of wet.

It rained again last night, of course, and will rain more this weekend, and, really, what is a day without rain? Is it even a day? The humidity is as thick as socks, but the temperature hasn't rebounded to scorch levels and open windows lure slippery breeze and birdsong. The paperbacks on the coffee table are curled at the corners, the upstairs fan batters at wet air, the salt is clumped in the salt dish, there are damp round paw prints on the chair cushions.

As usual, I planned to work in the garden; as usual, everything is soaked. I want to go birthday shopping for my son this weekend, but that is really my only plan. Maybe I'll end up at my desk again. Maybe I'll go mushrooming in the cemetery. Maybe I'll take myself out for lunch. I don't know.

I've got four new finished poems. I've sent the new manuscript to a few presses. I've been reading and reading. I've been sketching out teaching ideas. I've used this stretch of underemployment gainfully, but of course I'm also fretting about making no money. Presumably I'll be back to editing at some point next week, but for now my life is a slow river. I watch the squirrels chase each other, round and round, up the trunks of the maples. I watch the downpours fill the gutters.

These long pauses . . . they are rich but they are odd, and I have to be patient with myself as I navigate them. They are a kind of writer's retreat--long days alone with myself--yet they are interspersed with home duties--yet my attention to home duties also seems to feed the long days alone with my thoughts--yet the words and sentences rise like cream--

It is good not to be frantic. It is good to not be interrupted. Whatever I am doing, wherever this mishmash of chore and art takes me, the cadence of these solitary hours is a dense adagio.

Notes to self about being alone:

Don't drink too much coffee. Jitter is a distraction.

It is okay to keep lying down on the couch with a book.

When you don't know what to do, take a walk.

The book you are reading does not have to be a hard book or it can be a hard book or it can look like an easy book but really be a hard book and it can be a book you've read a hundred times before and the reading may not be for gain of knowledge or skill; it may be for gain of calm, or gain of sentence rhythm, or immersion in landscape, or absorption of history, or a wallowing in strange words, or a love affair with character.

Be a re-reader. Be a re-reader. Be a re-reader.

Notice your room.

Notice your body.

Forget your audience.

I've been picking away all week at the minutiae of three different poem drafts, and then last night I went out to the salon and a new poem tore into life . . . maybe not completely finished, but I think essentially so--a ten-minute response to a prompt that asked us to make an idea/color/abstraction concrete. We each wrote a couple of such words on cards, then chose another person's card from the bowl, and I ended up with passion. The timer was set, and the poem exploded.

Such moments are cathartic, especially after a week spent dryly playing with spaces and line breaks, and I came home feeling as if I'd run a race against myself and won.

So this morning, after my exercise session, I'll transcribe the blurt and figure out whether what I felt is real. I've got other desk work to do today, and housework and laundry and gardening and all of the regular tasks, but first to the poem, first to this surprise that I was desperately waiting for.

I got a note from a friend yesterday expressing pleasure in the runaway experience of reading yesterday's blog post. First, thank you! But, second, you can do it too. At moments when I'm struggling to write or (especially) when I'm feeling dissatisfied, or separated from my center in some way, or distracted or angered by an external situation, I write the present tense: I focus on taking in, through various senses, exactly what is happening at that moment around me and inside me, and I write quickly, with very little editorial interruption or end punctuation, pressing one perception against the next without judging whether or not they go together. Frequently I end on a quickly posed question, but I avoid a settled conclusion, explanation, or moral. I leave things ragged.

It's notable that often I'm pleased with what I make, though the process is sloppy. I think that's because the practice deletes the scrim of craft that often works to blunt perceptions rather than illuminate them. I'm certainly not against form or craft, but I'm also very aware that they can be wielded as defensive measures rather than as revelatory tools. I see this in a lot of poems, mine as well as other people's. This little prompt subverts that tendency, and it also works well as a daily notebook habit. Every morning, write the present tense. After a week, after a month, after a year, what do you start noticing about yourself as a creator?

Finally I got outside yesterday afternoon: mowed grass, yanked out peavines, started in on the weeding. This morning I hope to get more weeding done, before the heat picks up. I'm still waiting for my new editing project to arrive, but I'm keeping busy. I've been working on poems (juggling three different revisions yesterday); I've been reading and walking and mushrooming and housecleaning and having phone meetings with various people linked to my various jobs; today I'll get my hair cut . . . It's been a scatty, unremunerative week, but such is the freelance life.

No rain again! That makes two days in a row. It's supposed to get hot this afternoon, and maybe I'll turn on the air machine later in the day, but for now the house is airy and cool. T is still abed: he has to go to a company-wide safety meeting today, instead of to the job site, so he's taking the opportunity to wallow. I'm listening to the hum of the fan, to the rattle of a cicada . . . a sweet midsummer soundtrack. The present tense is all around me--thin whistle of a cardinal hopping along the back fence; and now, upstairs, my beloved sighs and rattles his coffee cup against the saucer; first daylight blinks among the broad maple leaves; I need to remember to wash this dirty living-room window, and where is that airplane going, the one I hear rising above me? A walnut drops from its tree, clonk, against the rusty roof of the neighbor's flat-tired white jalopy, and the cicada starts up again, a long staccato hiss; the cat stomps upstairs to complain to T about something or other, my fingers fly over the keyboard, inventing as they go; and now another airplane--where to, where do they all go?--and yesterday I talked to one of my sons on the phone and that warm feeling of son happiness is still bubbling in me; it's good it lasts so long, every drop is like nectar, oh, my dear boys; and the flowers on the mantle are getting droopy, I need to change them today, I need to hang clothes outside on the line today, in my little yard, which is like a square of brocade, cut to fit among the houses and driveways and fences; I wonder what will happen, as I pin up the shirts and underwear? what dog will trot down the sidewalk? what mourning dove will coo from the wires? how will my eyes take it all in, this spinning world?

Oh, the rain! And poor Vermont! So many familiar places washed out . . . Ludlow and Andover, where I lived in my youth, when I was farm-managing . . . downtown Montpelier under water . . . Route 2 blocked with mudslides . . .  My own family, in the Middlebury area, seems to have escaped the worst (so far) but, friends around the state, I am worried about you.

In Portland we got downpours but no flash floods. Everything is soaked, and later this afternoon the heat is supposed to return so we will be back in the tropics again.

I spent yesterday working on a couple of poems, finishing Anna K, and otherwise pottering at my desk. Today, maybe, I'll be able to garden, but not until things dry out some. I feel lucky to have a garden at all right now. Poor Vermont.

I slept badly last night, mostly because my brain wouldn't stop frantically listing all of the yard chores I needed to get done today. So when I woke up to rain this morning, and then discovered that it's supposed to rain all day long, even I, lover of weather, became sour. Yesterday, it was not forecast to rain at all, but it rained for most of the day. Today, it was not forecast to rain much, and now apparently it is. My peas have a fungus, my lavender is rotting, my tomatoes aren't setting fruit . . . the endless rain is steadily destroying crops, and it's depressing. On the bright side, the shrubs all look extremely happy, and the grass won't stop growing. But how can any farmer dry hay?

Well, all of my night anxieties were for naught, as it looks as if I'll be doing nothing in the garden once again. I'm still waiting for the next editing project to arrive, so the day is pretty open, without yard chores to anchor me. I spent much of yesterday trying to solve a transition issue in a poem, and maybe I'll keep wrestling with that today, or maybe I actually managed to figure it out. I need to undergo my exercise regiment and then grocery-shop, and I'll finish reading Anna Karenina, and I've got a phone meeting in the afternoon. I won't be idle. But this perpetual rain is both tiring and tiresome. It's hard to stay cheery when I'm watching my plants yellow and die.

Another morning of fog.

In this barely daylight I watch a cardinal perched on the neighbor's eave. He is a red jewel in the mist, bobbing, flicking his crest, then bursting into flight.

The house is quiet. The street is quiet. The fog is a curtain of quiet.

Yesterday I worked in the garden: transplanting carrots, fennel, kale; sowing arugula and lettuce; harvesting peas, broccoli, chard, onions, a few early fingerling potatoes. But the peas are done now, so today I'll tear out the vines, fold up the trellis, plant a fall crop of something or other in their place. 

The fog is beautiful but also melancholy, or perhaps I am melancholy. I sit here with my cup of coffee, writing words to you, but spilling over wordlessly . . . worries and dreams . . . the well of the inarticulate woman is dark and still; drops of cloud cling to her hair; an underworld river murmurs.

The deep heat has broken, and our windows have reopened to the air. Along with a breath of coolness, island weather has returned. A thick briny fog descends over the little city, draping me in sea thoughts. I sit in my couch corner, in the dim and cloudy living room. I lick a finger and expect it to taste of salt. The ocean feels very near. It could be lapping at my feet.

Outside, in the privet hedge, a hidden bird chip-chips to itself. Upstairs, in the bedroom, a box fan stirs a slow breeze. I'm living in a story, set in an endless Maine summer, wet and misty and smelling of oysters.

On the coffee table: the books I'm reading, the book I'm avoiding. I've almost finished Anna K, and that means suicide by train is imminent, and I've been unable to convince myself to face it again. Such a terrible, terrible ending. So, instead, I've distracted myself with Margaret Drabble and Louisa May Alcott novels, giving myself a week of rest before I plunge back into Tolstoyan dread.

But on page 202 of my battered 1888 copy of Eight Cousins Alcott writes: "This love of money is the curse of America, and for the sake of it men will sell honor and honesty, till we don't know whom to trust." No respite in that sentence, no respite in Drabble's novel The Seven Sisters either, where young women are murdered under London highways and aging divorcees stare forlornly out the windows of their third-floor walkups.

The air smells of brine and roses. Upstairs, Tom rattles a coffee cup. The box fan hums, but the little bird in the hedge has fallen silent. 

I'm living in a story, set in a swirl of other stories, and I might as well go ahead and finish Anna K. because  I'm not going to escape from her, even if I try. 

Another hot day on the horizon, and the air machine is chugging away, making a small dent in the torrid heat. With one tiny A/C and two artfully positioned box fans I can keep the house about 10 degrees cooler than the outside world, and considerably less humid. The house climate's not perfect, but it's not bad, and I slept decently all night, even occasionally under a blanket.

I finished up my editing project yesterday and my next assignment has yet to arrive. So, till then, I'm unemployed, meaning that today will be a housework day, an errand-running day, a reading and writing day. There's plenty to keep me busy: bathrooms, floors, windows; sheets and towels and sweaters; notebooks packed with poem-blurts; the sad and lonely end of Anna Karenina.

My sister seems to be making a spectacular recovery after her emergency eye surgery, despite a dire prognosis, so that is a huge relief. My children are cavorting in foreign lands. Everything I wrote at the salon felt like it was channeling Lewis Carroll, but oh well. Some days are like that.

Not a drop of rain yesterday, but the soaked earth is reverse rain: as the sun heats, it draws out the deep and murky scent of water, which lingers in the air as more than humidity . . . a tropicalia, here in the little northern city by the sea.

But, yes, there was sunshine, and thick heat too, a real summer day; and I'm very glad that Tom installed the air machine last night. Otherwise, our sleep would have been no sleep at all, upstairs in the little sweatbox.

Today will be another such. For the moment the machine is off, windows are open to cool morning air and birdsong, and my bare shoulders are perfectly happy. Since returning from the Frost Place, where I tossed and turned every night, I have been sleeping with the intensity of an old cat. I can't tell if I feel refreshed or just sodden with sleep, and I'm sure the weather is adding to the confusion. Intense rain, followed by intense heat: my body has forgotten the sensation of briskness.

Today I hope to finish the editing project on my desk. I want to go out to my writing salon tonight. I might wash some windows. As you see, I am so non-brisk that I can't even plan in chronological order.

My notebook is packed with drafts from Frost Place lessons, but I've barely touched them. It's not that they're bad; it's more like my brain is short-circuiting and I can't figure out what to do next.

The doldrums: that's what Coleridge calls this state, when he writes about the windless seas in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I might be there. I'm keeping a sharp eye out for albatrosses.

On Tuesday I did watch a hawk snatch a bluejay out of a maple tree. It was quite alarming. Not an albatross moment, but surely some kind of omen.

The fog is thick again this morning, but supposedly, supposedly, the sun will shine today. Intuitively this feels very unlikely, given our long acquaintance with dankness and the actual current existence of dankness, but I will be glad to be mistaken.

The endless rain has affected many things, including T's ability to install the air conditioner . . . so if the weather does in fact become hot and sunny, this house will be miserably stuffy. But verifying the existence of sunlight might be enough of a solace.

T and I will both be back in the saddle today. He'll be heading out to a new construction site, and I'll be doing the final cleanup on a novel, getting the files ready for proof stage. In the interstices I'll go to the grocery store, maybe cut some grass, conceivably hang clothes on the line, endure my exercise regimen. July stretches before me like a hay field, lovely but businesslike: mow, rake, bale; mow, rake, bale. I'm ready to get to work.

 . . . and of course I woke to rain, and rain will likely fall off and on all day, and that is the way things are here in the little northern city by the sea.

I did manage to break out of my severe laziness and finish (mostly) spring-cleaning the kitchen, and I did fiddle with a new poem draft, and I read a lot of Anna Karenina and found chanterelles on a walk and talked several times with my sister, who, fingers crossed, is finally doing better after her surgical horror. Nonetheless, rain and leftover Frost Place weariness continue to exert their magical powers, and doing anything feels difficult.

However, tomorrow must be a work day, so I need to get myself primed for that. I've got an editing project to finish and another prepared to drop on me, and at the moment I have zero desk stamina. Maybe that will change, if perchance we get some sunshine. This rain is an atmospheric sleeping pill.

Rain and rain and more rain, then going to sleep and waking up to rain that keeps on raining. I think southern Maine had 45 minutes of sunshine in June, and July is heading down the same wet road.

On the bright side, however, it is a fine promoter of laziness, exactly when laziness fits the bill. Tom's employer gave him extra paid time off over this holiday, and I am still recovering from the Frost Place, so we have been in a state of mind for idleness. As the rain pattered down, we spent much of yesterday under the couch blanket--reading, dozing, doing crossword puzzles, listening to baseball. The fridge is full of leftovers, so meals were undemanding, and the rain was a soundtrack to our inertia. And then, in the evening, we watched a dreadful Elvis musical. The day was 100 percent indolence, and after all that non-work I slept like a baby.

But I can only live the potato life for so long. I'm getting fidgety, so this morning: exercise regimen, and then I'll return to kitchen spring cleaning, or vacuum upstairs, or go for a fast walk in the rain . . . something to satisfy my urge to move.

I've got a notebook packed with Frost Place blurt-drafts that are another possible project for today: transcribe a few into my machine and begin to play around with them. New thoughts, empty time . . . something good could happen.

And in actual good news, after emergency second surgery, my sister's eye is finally showing signs of improvement. That's been a horrible lingering worry, overlapping with the last couple of days in New Hampshire and playing out gruesomely during these first days of return.

And so, on this unhurried Monday, the rain continues to rain, and the cat continues to cat, and the house is beginning to smell like a closed-up summer camp, and I am a green walnut rattling in an empty jar--contained, also awake.

Again, fog blankets the little northern city by the sea. Upstairs and downstairs, fans hum in bedrooms, summer soundtrack, air upon air, fog stirred into humid breath and sound. The cat and I are the only risers, and he has already slipped into the shrubbery, snaked his way across the dew-dripping grass. I have made coffee, emptied the dishwasher, unfolded clean dish towels, and now I listen to a freight train grumble past at the crossing, now I sit in my couch corner, under my circle of lamplight, and watch my fingers figure out what to say.

It was a funny evening, our impromptu dinner party with the poets. Flank steak and peppers cooked over the firepit; roasted potatoes and an arugula salad, and then brownies and fresh strawberries; also hilarity. We had no plans to have a party this weekend, yet the party turned out to be just the thing to have this weekend. Now I am sitting here in my couch corner, in this house draped with sleep and fog, and my fingers are writing to you, and for the moment the future feels immaterial. Only this brief space of now exists; I cannot tell if I will pour another cup of coffee, if I will wash my hair, if birds will begin singing, if the glaciers will melt, if the stars will blink out.

But the future slides forward regardless, dragging the past and the present in its wake. This morning, in my inbox: "an essay by Dawn Potter," which I seem to have written and will perhaps read again, but for now it is simply a glint of letters and spaces.

The cat complains at the door, the coffee pot steams and beckons, I cannot rest in the present, everything in my slow world, this slowest of slow worlds, pushes me to rise and engage: to imagine, to desire, to fear . . .

Meanwhile, fog blankets the little northern city by the sea. Meanwhile, the cat crunches chow, and the fans whir, and I pour that cup of coffee, and outside in the wet lilacs a robin begins to sing.

I want not to think about the Supreme Court. I want not to think about my sister's eye surgery. I am thinking about both of those things.

Yet, somewhat unexpectedly, my Frost Place life is about to rekindle today because my friend and sort of boss M is stopping by to spend a day and night here before heading south toward home, and that means our mutual friend Z, who lives in Portland and was at the conference, will also be here all day. Hurray for unplanned holiday parties that balance out the fury and the worry--

One great thing about the Frost Place is that everything there is so grubby that my own home, unvacuumed for a week, looks pristine. So I am not going to be rushing around like banshee: a little bit of cleaning here and there, fresh sheets on the guest bed, and a steak on the grill. Good enough.

And remember that crazy mulching I did before I left? The gardens still look damn near perfect. Some things really do work out the way you imagine.

Yesterday, fog hung over Portland all day long. This morning it's back but supposedly there will be sunshine, sometime, before the rain starts up again tomorrow. I don't know if I'll ever get anything dry on the outside lines again. The humidity is deep, even when rain isn't falling. But this evening we can wipe the dew off the outside chairs, and sit beside the fire pit, and talk and laugh and watch the flames. Independence Day. Let it mean what it needs to mean, for you.