I dreamed last night that T and I had bought another house--a shabby, old-style cottage beside a dammed pond, with the stream flowing nearly under the porch boards. Throughout the whole dream I kept muttering flood zone to myself. The cottage was painted dark red, and it was filled with old furniture and knickknacks that had belonged to some bygone elderly couple: floors layered in rugs over plywood over linoleum, every surface packed with somebody else's stuff. And outside, water flowing through a stony decaying dam. The dream was remarkably clear, and it remains clear in my waking mind: the way the house tucked up against the pond, the layout of the tiny rooms, my worries about flooding yet the inevitability of the move . . . we have to buy this place; there's no sense in trying to change fate.

Now, awake, I'm sad that I'll never actually glimpse that pond, that dam, that stream through the kitchen window of that little house. The cottage was not in itself charming, but the geography of the cottage, the relationship of window to exterior world, remains poignant in my mind. I don't know where we were--Scotland, perhaps; or maybe just Maine; or maybe a fairytale north: a land with a gray sky stretching high over gray water.

Now, awake, I sit in my own real-life shabby cottage, tucked into a curve of quiet city street, surrounded on four sides by sleeping neighbors, and above the houses a single early-bird gull carves the day's first flight pattern between estuary and shore.

My small cup of black coffee is hot and strong. The cat licks a paw, then paces upstairs and dives back into the bedroom. The cranky dehumidifier growls too loudly in the basement.

Yesterday, on our zoom call, Teresa and Jeannie and I talked about shadow boxes and sonnets and old poems that circle back to become the foundation of new work. We talked about the way our childhood landscapes are etched so sharply into our minds . . . we still count every stone in the walk; name every neighbor's mailbox; recall each storefront on the route to school. Teresa's land was urban, Jeannie's was suburban, mine was the Pennsylvania farm--but we all retain vivid awareness of our bodies in that place.

The past couple of days have cohered into a rich ripple of communal thought . . . writing with one group of poet friends on Thursday; talking with another set of poet friends on Friday afternoon. What humbling good fortune, to be able to listen to these generous minds at work.