Thursday before dawn: cold, dark, but the house is cozy and the little tree is bright. I'm glad to be home, glad that I won't be on the road again until mid-December, two weeks in my own bed, no weekend classes, a chance to finish editing projects, get Christmas shopping done, settle into winter.

This morning I'll be at my desk, then a walk, groceries, housework, and tonight I'll go out to write: a sturdy, steady sort of day. I've caught up with my Donne homework, I'm immersed in the Trevor stories, and my brain is pinging after a bubbly day with my smart, excitable students.

While I was making dinner last night, I had a long phone call with a son, silly facetiming with his new kittens but also a busy conversation about a teaching project he and I are hatching: co-leading a scriptwriting session with my Monson kids next semester, which would also give him a chance to share what it's like to be a recent high school grad from central Maine who's trying to make a life in the art world. We're both very excited about this: I mean, what could be sweeter than co-teaching a writing class with my own kid?

So here I am, sitting in my couch corner, in my little house, in my little northern city by the sea, thinking mildly about rejection letters, about laundry, about fixing myself a cup of tea . . . about the poetry of Donne and the stories of Trevor . . . about my faraway sons and the sound of my beloved opening a dresser drawer . . . about the thunk of cat feet as they hit the floor . . . about the suffering of friends and the wobbling of democracy . . . about cranberry-nut bread and warm hardboiled eggs . . . about maps and clues and streetlights . . . about the secrets of children . . .

And meanwhile the mind is a midnight city, a summer pasture, a thunderstorm, a matchbox-- 

A cold morning here in the north country: 18 degrees, with a high of 25 forecast. Last night, as I trudged back from dinner, the black air swirled with snowflakes. Outside the fire station a pile of guys were gathered around a broken-down firetruck, all of them gleaming under the streetlight. I walked from one end of the brief downtown to the other; and where the houses stopped, blackness suddenly dropped, like a stage curtain.

I've been carrying around William Trevor's short stories, carrying around John Donne's Holy Sonnets, thinking about winter, wrapping myself in lamplight. All of this rereading I do--the longing for reimmersion, for existence inside; to become story, language, character . . . Sometimes I stand back in wonder. How is it that I can't relinquish the familiar, the deeply known? The tales are etched on my bones.

And still time wanders forward; the men in their Carhartt coats lean forward to peer under the firetruck's hood; snowflakes spin and leap; I turn pages toward the same hard ending.

I've got a new poem out today, "Ode to the Haverford Park Apartments." When he accepted it, the editor noted a certain Frank O'Hara tone to it, an idea that has amused me ever since. I was not thinking of Frank when I wrote it, but I'm happy to have him floating through the lines as a ghost.

This morning I'll be at my desk; in the afternoon I'll be driving; in the evening I'll be trudging up Monson's dark Main Street. Teaching all day tomorrow, with the theme of imagination--an umbrella notion that covers not just the minutiae of figurative language but also straight-up lying, both of which we'll be playing with during class. And then home again.

These days I settle for a very small tree, one of those grocery-store table tops that holds about six ornaments and tucks behind the passenger seat of the car. Nonetheless, they are always far chubbier than any trees we cut from the Harmony land, which were nothing but bones. So, despite the smallness, this little one feels substantial; it holds lights well and swans cutely into the living space.

Everything inside the house is comfort: a small lighted tree, a tidy room, furnace growling, hot coffee poured. Outside a storm is raging--gale and rain--though it's milder than it was last night. Whenever I woke from my long dream, I would hear wind battering the windows, and then I would fall back into the long dream . . . escaping from someplace to someplace else, changing one set of clothes for another, wandering along a railroad track . . .

But now I am awake, and today, after my long sabbatical as holiday housekeeper, I will return to my work life. Compared to the demands of Thanksgiving, a day spent editing feels pretty mild. Holiday housekeeping is a complex task, requiring much juggling, organization, improvisation, and calm, in addition to many hours in soapy water. My hands are rather beat up, and my thinking-of-others focus needs a small break. It will be refreshing to spend an entire day alone in the house, in my small study, with my small concerns.

I need to catch up on those concerns: my Donne homework, for instance; my own writing, which has languished all fall. But I am healthy, finally, after weeks of illness. I had a magnificent holiday with my children. I'm full of energy, and full of affection, and my house is in order. I think I'll figure out how to get something done.

A brilliant orange dawn shimmers up from the bay, casting long fingers over the quiet neighborhood, over business-like cats trotting briskly up the sidewalk, over frosty parked cars and my withered garden, over the almost-bare maples etched against a paling day.

The house is Sunday-morning quiet . . . T is abed; the cat has hustled back inside to join him. The furnace mutters, the clock ticks, yet the house's low clamor casts a spell that is like silence.

Today is the last day of the holiday week, the first morning since Monday that I've awoken without my children in the house. I spent much of yesterday resettling our space: washing guest linens and reorganizing storage areas, reaming out the attic under the eaves to make room for the portable mattresses. We've only been in this house for seven years, but nonetheless the attic was filled with child-related clutter: college-era bins containing never-to-be-used-again dorm sheets; boxes of middle school paperbacks. I left the books (who am I to sort through another person's indispensables?) but ditched the dorm detritus, and now the attic is actually useful and mostly accessible. It's also reminded me that I'll need to tackle another winter chore: the maw of useless items known as the basement. But that is a story for another day.

For the moment, the house is tidy enough. The upstairs guest room has returned to a teeny-tiny study. The downstairs guest room has returned to a teeny-tiny den. Today I'll go grocery shopping (my family consumed a shocking amount of bread, Kleenex, and toilet paper this week), and then I'll spend time at my desk, mulling over student pieces and prepping for my upcoming Monson class. I might work on a poem. I might rake leaves. I might make turkey soup. I might watch the Bills game. I will read William Trevor's Selected Stories and drink tea and fold laundry and do the crossword puzzle. My life feels too spacious, but I know that's a temporary condition. In a day or so I'll be as overwhelmed as usual. 

 And now the quiet house.

Furnace murmurs. Tea kettle sighs into silence on the stove. Cat, feeling bereft, curls on the couch between Tom and me. He is sad, and not sorry to be quiet; none of us is sorry to be quiet. It is the best medicine for this kind of sadness. Two mornings in a row I have cried after partings, tears leaking down my cheeks as I drove away from the bus station. It is terrible to watch my children walk away from me, and it is wonderful to watch them walk into their own lives. Both things are true, and that is why I always cry.

Well, it was a glorious week, and now it is over. Today I'll wash piles of laundry, stow away beds and bedding, refit my study, learn how to be two people and a cat again. It's a good life we have here. I am reminding myself of this. Inexorably, we construct our patterns of space and dependence.

I love my children so much. I am so happy that they are finding their own aeries. If they lived around the corner, maybe we would annoy one another more . . . who knows. As it is, there is no friction. We spent a week together, six people in a small house, without an eye roll or a cross word. The ease of plain affection: that is a kindness in itself.

It's cold outside. It's warm inside. I'm drinking tea and sitting under lamp-glow as the sky slowly brightens. My children will travel into sunlight.

Thanksgiving was everything I'd hoped it would be. Yes, the food planning all came together, and on cue too: not one single cooking mishap or appliance fail. Yes, the table looked pretty and everybody fit around it. But the biggest success was an entire day of good cheer: kids bundling up for a long noisy walk together; silly family game playing; enthusiastic potato peeling; goofy jokes and joy. It has been one of the best holidays ever.

But today we're breaking apart. The Chicago children will catch a bus to Boston this morning. Tomorrow morning the New York children will catch their bus. The good times are coming to an end, and by this time tomorrow I'll be moodily washing sheets and remembering how behind I am on desk work.

At least today we'll still have the NYC kids, and I think later this morning we'll probably all drive out to some chilly salt marshes and stare out at the Atlantic. And then we'll come home and take giant naps, and organize some leftovers for dinner, maybe watch a movie or play a game . . . 

I'm the luckiest person in the world. But I'll still cry when they're all gone.

I slept until 6:30--such a treat after so many truncated nights. Kindly, my brain decided to skip the 3 a.m. roll call--"Don't forget everything you have to do today"--and let me blink awake peacefully: dear slumberer by my side, first light gentle as a baby's gurgle, and the cat yawning without grievance.

I do have many things to do today, but yesterday was such a social bustle that I am glad to be doing none of them yet. Afternoon and evening were crammed with visitors, barbecue, hilarity, and now the beds are filled with sleepers, including J's oldest childhood friend, who drove hours through the snow to get here. Of course my heart is packed tight with sentiment and elegy, O these dear children. And the light in my beloved's eyes as he listens to their chatter, his hand reaching for my knee under the restaurant picnic table . . . Our waterstained lives unfold like a message in a bottle.

But I must return to the commonsense world of turkey dinner. Yesterday's projects, the apple pie and the cranberry-lemongrass sauce, both came out beautifully. The turkey has been herb-buttered and dry-brined. The giblet stock has been simmered and strained. This morning I will marshal my sous-chef forces: my army of stuffing mixers, potato peelers, squash mashers, carrot dicers, and Brussels sprout trimmers. I will pore over turkey time charts and consider the exigencies of gravy. I will attempt to remember the secret method of fitting six people around a four-person table.

I hope your day, too, contains some bustling comedy, some quiet moments in the corner, a hot drink, a chilly walk . . . Give your darlings a hug from me.

The New York City bus was hours late last night: our final travelers didn't arrive till close to 11 p.m. Thus, I am very, very sleepy this morning. But finally the entire crew is in the same town . . . though not under the same roof, as weeks ago the Chicagoites decided to rent an Airbnb room for a couple of nights, just to ease the crowd pressure on the little house. Turns out I was able to effectively solve the bed situation, but they possibly didn't believe in magic and kept to their original plan. The hilarious outcome is that the Chicago son and the New York City partner have never actually met each other, and now they are both pretending that the other is an invisible friend. One pair arrives in a house where the other pair mysteriously isn't. . . . 

That farce will eventually get disrupted today. In the meantime, the cat remains happily confused by the Cox-and-Box sleepovers, and I am sitting in my couch corner wondering if I'll be able to snag a nap at 9 a.m. Yesterday I made vanilla ice cream and got the hateful chestnut-roasting-and-peeling task out of the way.  Today will be a more focused kitchen workday--apple pie, cranberry sauce, dry-brining the turkey, maybe stuffing or squash prep--as the kids and their friends pour in and out of the house. It will be my favorite chaos. Given that neither boy grew up in Portland, the casual friend visitations feel particularly special . . . central Maine coming home to us.

You can see why this party week so excites me, on so many levels. It's a real fete--a gala, even. A glorious messy nostalgic reunion, with the added delight of adorable partners. Plus, my sweetheart's joy in the company of his children. And the cat's giddy glad-handing. And me in a dirty apron, inexorably concocting a feast.

Such a sweet afternoon and evening with our tired travelers, who had been up since 3 a.m. in another time zone but somehow kept going. We went for a chilly walk, then lit the fire and welcomed Tom home after work, hung around, ate spaghetti, played Yahtzee, and finally dispersed into beds. I hope the young people can sleep in, despite the inevitable getting-Tom-off-to-work noise we'll be making. The Alcott House is a hard place to have a secret: every room seems to be sitting in every other room's lap. But at least there are doors.

Our second wave of young people won't arrive till this evening, so the day is pretty open, with a certain amount of food prep filling in around the edges. J and H may go hiking or visit with a Harmony friend. Or the three of us might hang out somewhere together. It's nice to have no definite schedule, after my busy weekend of prep. I'll need to buy salmon at the fish market today, and I'll need to pick up the turkey by Wednesday. Otherwise, I can do whatever they want.

It's a cold morning--20 degrees and not forecast to get out of the 30s. But it will be sunny, and I wouldn't mind taking a look at the sea today. Maybe I'll drive the kids to the beach, if they don't have another plan. Or maybe I'll stay home by myself for a few hours and work on a poem. That would be an unexpected boon: a Thanksgiving holiday that includes time to write.

I received a text from a friend yesterday, which arrived as I was methodically combing the aisles of the Hannaford grocery store. "Joy might be for real this week," she wrote. Now my little house is filled with the breath of sleeping and waking bodies. I'm glad to pause and celebrate. 

A chilly Monday morning in the little northern city by the sea. I slept badly, not surprisingly, as my brain refused to stop mulling over its list of things to do. Still, despite that annoying brain, I arose feeling cheerful and ready for the day. This afternoon I'll pick up the first batch of young people at the bus station. This morning I'll do my exercises, run errands, buy groceries, and bake a cake. Holiday meal number 1 will be spaghetti with tender meatballs simmered in tomato-pepper sauce (my own, made in September), a salad, and quince cake with hard sauce (quinces from the bush I share with my neighbor).

Other than not having quite enough sleep, I am extremely ready for this party. The cat is also very excited. He loves bed making and company. Yesterday he helped me retool my study into a guest room and enjoyed sporting around on the actually very comfortable queen-sized bed I concocted from two foldable mattresses. This morning I'll make up the downstairs guest bed, and I'm sure he'll again be heavily involved.

I should get started on that job, and all the rest of them. But for a few more minutes I'll sit here quietly. I really am so happy about this coming week. I know I'm fussing more than is strictly necessary, but the fuss is part of my pleasure. I like to take care of people. I also know that the house will quickly become messy and noisy and disorganized. That's fine, that's lovely; it will all be lovely. I'm just so happy that the rooms will be full.

No sleep-in this morning. For some reason I've been awake since 4, up since 5. A shame to waste an early Sunday morning being conscious, but oh well. There are nice things about being up too. I am presently sitting comfortably in my mopped and tidied living room, admiring the dustless seashells on the mantle, the shelved books, the spiderweb-free ceiling corners, the neat stack of games, the boxes of firewood, the basket of kindling, hearth swept, stove blacked . . . And nearby, the kitchen, still smelling of soap; the dining room, with its polished table; the back room, prepped for its future as a guest room--clean towels on the door hooks, sheets and pillows at the ready.

That's what I spent all day doing yesterday, with a few breaks for bread baking, errand running, and a walk with my neighbor. Today I'll work on the upstairs rooms, transforming my study into a second guest room, setting up a pied-a-terre desk for myself in our bedroom: mopping and dusting, tucking away books and paperwork, making up the portable bed. . . . The Alcott House will be bursting at the seams, but everyone will have a room with a door.

In case you can't tell, I am thoroughly enjoying myself. There's no better reason to houseclean. The house is what it is: small, shabby, unfinished; now also scrubbed, cozy, and smiling.

Tomorrow morning I'll do the big grocery shopping, and then I'll concentrate on prepping the kitchen as the week's center of operations: I'll lay out bowls of staples--onions, tomatoes, potatoes; refill flour and sugar canisters; wash rarely used serving dishes. I do love our kitchen. Tom designed it beautifully as a work station--modest but efficient--and it's exciting to be able to put it to hard use. The last Thanksgiving dinner I made was during the pandemic, when he, Paul, and I were hunkered down pretending to have a party. This will be the real thing.

Throughout my married life, I have rarely been in charge of a holiday meal. Mostly we've alternated going to our parents' houses or, these days, to my sister's house since my mother no longer cooks much. I guess that's why I get so giddy about running the show myself. I love to cook, and I love my boys, and I love to be at home, and it is so sweet to wallow in all of that this year.

So pardon the tediousness of this letter. Chalk it up to domestic distraction and high spirits.

A beautiful sleep-in, a mild rainy morning, and I am feeling much more like myself. I was never absolutely ill from the shot cocktail but I did develop a generalized loopiness that made editing impossible. Nor did I think I should be driving a car. However, a loopy person can scrub bathrooms and do four loads of laundry and cook vegetable stock and peel quinces. So stuff got done.

I'm now on holiday hours: no thoughts of paying work until next weekend. Cooking, cleaning, laundry, and chatter are my entire focus. Today I'll mostly be concentrating on housework; deep-cleaning and reorganizing the downstairs rooms, trying to turn them into a reasonably sensible place for six people to kick around in for most of a week. Little Alcott House will be stuffed to the gills, but she can do a good job, if I encourage her.

So far I've got four quarts of gorgeous bronze vegetable stock ready for use. The quince harvest is precooked and ready for the quince cake I'll make on Monday. Today and tomorrow I'll make baguettes for garlic bread and a batch of cornbread for stuffing.

In the meantime, I'm rereading Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris, one of the most perfectly constructed novels I know. My edition includes an introduction by A. S. Byatt, whose death was announced yesterday. I am a poet who is desperately in love with fiction; I study poems and breathe story. It is an odd trajectory, but there you have it. And both Bowen and Byatt are among my great influences: as women novelists and story writers, they rank with Woolf, Munro, Murdoch, Compton-Burnett, Drabble, Fitzgerald, and Atwood in my private pantheon of female modernism. Byatt was a deeply intellectual writer, immersed in the mores of academic thought. Yet she used that immersion creatively; her canvases were immense. Possession was her most famous novel, and probably her most fun. But the series that encompasses The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, and A Whistling Woman is a tour-de-force--an adventure into the swirling worlds of academia, feminism, religious fervor, artistic change, landscape change, science, public morality, psychosis, and the Cold War between the 1950s and the 1970s, following one volatile brilliant family through this maze. I've never read anything else like it.

So I lift a cup to her memory: thank you, Antonia, for helping me invent my own mind.

 So far, so good with this Covid/flu cocktail--just the usual punched-arm sensation with no other symptoms. The beautiful thing is: if this changes and I start feeling terrible, why, I can just lie down on the couch and nothing in the universe will be vexed with me. I am caught up with editing, I have plenty of time to prep for next week, and no one expects me to show up anywhere.

That said, I hope to be exercising and editing and running errands. I did some leaf raking and mulching yesterday afternoon, and today I'd like to settle the bed-sheet issue, start some housework, make the vegetable stock for next week's recipes. But we'll see what the vaccines say.

It was good to get out to write last night, and then, when I got home, I read an email from a student--my shyest, most withdrawn participant; an international student who has missed several classes because they had gone back home for weeks; a student who has never shared their own work in class: this person sent me an email asking if they could send me some of their writing to read. Just ask Tom if I was or was not crowing excitedly in the kitchen.

I see these kids for one full day every other week, late September through April, with larger gaps around vacation breaks. The kids don't really spend all that much time with me, so building trust is a challenge. The big plus is that they we're together for full-day stretches, and the work we do--reading, talking, writing--is emotional and intimate. Some kids respond quickly and overtly, while others are harder to gauge. All of them, however, do the work I ask: they all write hard; I can see that. And in every class I include some kind of paired project, so that two kids are talking together alone and figuring something out. My hope is that this less nerve-racking connection will help the shyer kids get more comfortable with the larger group. Receiving that email last night made me feel as if I were doing something right.

Last night's salon group was small--just four of us gathered--but every one of us happened to be a teacher. We all teach in different milieux: one is a full-time high school English teacher, one is a renowned MFA teacher, one is a visiting improv-theater artist in K-12 schools, and then there's me: a teacher of teachers, the director of what is essentially a teaching laboratory project for high school writers. As we were talking together about our own writing prompts, I could feel how skilled these other poets were at their jobs--at cogitating how and when and why to shift the reading of words into the writing of words. It was exciting. Good teaching is a deeply creative act.

I woke up from the sweetest dream-interaction with a very old friend, and now I am floating sleepily into my morning on the currents of that charming blur. It's 30 degrees outside, warmer than it has been, and the next few days are forecast to get into the mid-50s. This afternoon I need to get my Covid and flu shots but I hope I'll feel well enough tomorrow to do some raking in the sunshine. 

The trip up north was easy and sociable. I had the treat of fresh venison steaks for dinner in Wellington; then an early morning drive over the empty gravel roads to a roomful of enthusiastic writers. Even the drive home afterward was simple enough. And it does feel good to know that I'll be home in my own bed every night for the next two weeks.

Today will mostly be editing, plus maybe an errand or so before the shots, and then my writing salon in the evening. I'm kind of dreading these shots: after being sick for a month, I really don't want to undergo a second round of malaise. But at least I'll be able to loll on the couch, not forcing myself into the car for yet another weekend away from home. And at least the malaise will be brief.

I've got a ton to do to prepare for the holiday onslaught of young people. Still, it will be the happiest sort of work: they are the light of my eyes, those darlings. 

The Long Journey

Dawn Potter

in the moon, on the moon, through the dark
front hall of the abandoned asylum,
in rodeo dust, against the white forehead
of the nun who smacked Teresa with a ruler,
under the backseat of the Dodge Dart,
next to the wheat pennies and the stubs
of candy cigarettes, along the highway
with the needles and the beer cans
and the forgotten pelt of a long-dead squirrel,
beside me, beside the heart thunking wetly
inside the cavity of my chest, under the slow
brush-beat of a snare in the green-tinted club
on Logan Street, above the bantam rooster
crowing on the wheelbarrow, above the sick child
breathing harshly in his sleep, in the memory
of the song we heard in Canterbury Cathedral,
it was Beethoven, we cried, and the pilgrims
came and went and loved and died, and time
opened its ears and listened and time fell silent
before it sang again.

[from Calendar]

The furnace grumbles, the clock ticks, coffee steams. Streetlights are the only daylight. It is 5 a.m. on a mid-November Tuesday in the little northern city by the sea. I am cold but getting warmer. The cat is prowling outside in the exciting dark. Upstairs in bed, Tom is sighing and clanking his cup against his saucer.

Today I'll hit the road again: another trip north this afternoon, a night in Wellington with friends, and then Monson in the morning. The theme of the teaching day will be moving forward: how does a writer get anywhere? The quote of the day will be from Theodore Roethke: "Every sentence a cast into the dark." We'll be reading Herman Melville and Terrance Hayes and Lord Byron; we'll be playing with ways to encourage ourselves down a page.

Yesterday I caught up, finally, with my stack of small obligations: poems and stories that friends had asked me to read, student work I needed to comment on, editing clients I had to respond to. I finished a big chunk of my current editing project, and I did the grocery shopping, and I underwent my exercise regimen. I read most of Philip Roth's Everyman, and I baked a berry cobbler, and I simmered a concoction of chicken, maitakes, garlic, butter, and Meyer lemons.

After I get back from Monson tomorrow, everything will turn toward holiday planning. I don't usually give Thanksgiving this much thought, but my houseful of young people is overexciting me. I want to make a big batch of vegetable stock for gravy and dressing use; I want to bake baguettes and cornbread for the freezer . . . ahead-of-time supplies that, earlier this week, I thought I'd have to buy instead of make. But now that I have a few more days to myself, I can manage the back-story parts of the meal as well: the hidden ingredients . . . broth, cornbread for stuffing, homemade ice cream for pie . . . 

Did you think my upcoming schedule was insane? So did several members of my family. As a result, I am not going to Vermont next weekend. That trip is rescheduled for January, and I'll spend next weekend doing what makes far more sense: prepping for four houseguests and a week of meals.

I am both disappointed in myself and deeply relieved. It was a ridiculous plan that was once marginally less ridiculous. Before I knew that the Chicago kids would be arriving on Monday, before I was forced to schedule a Covid shot on Thursday, I had some wiggle room on either end. But the schedule evolved into absurdity.

Now, with a different sort of week looming, I'm feeling much calmer. I'll still be heading north tomorrow, but now I have time to recover, if needed, from my shot and still clean house, acquire sheets, shop for groceries, and maybe even fancy things up a little. During the summer and early fall I dried bundles of flowers, herbs, and grasses, and I've been slowly arranging them in vases around the house. I want to add some autumn color--red dogwood stems and such--and I've been laying out new patterns of shells and stones on windowsills and mantle. As you can see, my vision of "fancying things up" is humble.  But it still requires care.

Today will be a desk-work day: editing, mostly. With my sudden gift of extra time yesterday, I was able to deal with student drafts and a college recommendation, which lightened today's load considerably. And Tom and I even had a chance to go for a brisk stroll along the Eastern Prom and up through our old Munjoy Hill neighborhood--so much better to hang out with my beloved than to be rushing off to Target to buy sheets. I slowly made minestrone for dinner; I finished my book about Cabeza de Vaca and started reading Philip Roth's Everyman. Every little sweetness counts.

Twenty-two degrees in Portland this morning--by far our coldest moment this season. Yesterday I pulled out the remaining fennel and cut a big bouquet of parsley for drying. Now the extant crops have dwindled down to a few broccoli sprouts, some hardy herbs, a bit of weary chard and arugula, and a boatload of enthusiastic kale. Still, that's not bad for almost-Thanksgiving in Maine. Unless we get a big snow, we should have garden produce for the holiday.

But said holiday is weighing heavily on my mind. On Tuesday I'm driving north to teach; home on Wednesday. On Thursday I'm getting Covid and flu shots. On Friday I'm driving to Vermont to see my parents and sister; home on Sunday. Then my older son and his partner arrive on Monday, my younger son and his partner arrive on Tuesday, the holiday ensues . . . and you may have noticed that there is zero space in this schedule for housecleaning, grocery shopping, shot malaise, or mental preparation.

So I've made the sad decision that I cannot spend today baking Emily Dickinson's black cake. The cake may not materialize at all this year. Instead, I've got to go to Target and buy another set of sheets; I need to focus on creating detailed dinner menus and shopping lists for Thanksgiving week; I need to catch up with a few work odds and ends. It's possible that, after the holiday, I'll snag a day to bake Em's cake. But it's a complicated project, and I don't have the wherewithal to do it today.

Yesterday, though, I did have a few quiet hours. Midafternoon I lit the wood stove and settled onto the couch with my notebook and my laptop, and I teased out a new poem from my scrawl . . . a draft I'm very pleased with, that went into a surprising place formally, that felt intelligent and direct and a little bit magical. Maybe I'll find another few hours today. Right now, I think that's more important than getting the cake baked.

It was good to sleep in, good to wake up in my own bed, good not to be working for anyone else this weekend. Good to have heat, and a not-lost cat, and a very alive husband. Good to be drinking hot French-press coffee; good to have a coffee table full of books, a wood box full of wood, a garden full of kale.

This weekend I hope to find a few hours to make a batch of Emily Dickinson's black cake. I need to vacuum and mop. I'd like to plant the bulbs I brought back from the island and rake leaves into garden beds. I need to harvest the rest of the fennel and deal with the cold frame and cut a last batch of parsley for drying.

I finished reading the crappy mystery yesterday, and I finished Smith's On Beauty on the island, and now I have started reading Andres Resendez's A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca, about the 1527 odyssey of four Spaniards who made their way from Florida to the Southwest and were the first Europeans to live among the North American Native tribes before they were decimated by disease and enslavement.

Smith's On Beauty was a somewhat aggravating read. I want to like Zadie Smith's novels more than I do, and I can't quite put my finger on what doesn't work. She is intelligent, well read, curious, and insightful, but the novels often feel both too packed and too unfinished. In this one she played with the plot of Forster's Howard's End, in the setting of a New England academic community, considering biracial marriages and children, adultery, class differences among Black residents, political differences among Black academics, city versus suburb, England versus America, etc., etc. The palette is vast, the characters teem, this is an approach I am ready to love, yet some element doesn't quite work. I suspect dialogue is part of the problem: there is something awkward in how she handles voices. I suspect character motivation is also an issue: her leading male characters have so little charm that it's hard to imagine why the women would ever have been attracted to them, let alone stayed married for a lifetime.

But I respect the bigness of the effort. I like a writer who is willing to bite off a giant mouthful. Smith does that again and again; she doesn't stop trying; and so I will probably keep reading her novels, hoping that in one of them she'll figure things out.

I went for an early morning walk in the snow yesterday, delighted to feel the flakes hovering in my breath, to watch the light transform . . . and then I arrived home to discover that the furnace had stopped working. Grateful this didn't happen while we were on the island, but still. Anyway, after a flurry of texts with T, I called the burner service. Woman on line: "Do you have backup heat? I can't guarantee when he'll arrive." Me: "Oh, yes, I'll be fine." But as I'm lighting the wood stove (half a minute after hanging up), in strides the furnace guy. Fastest response ever: He appears, he diagnoses a problem with the igniter, he repairs it, he leaves. Seven minutes have passed.

But since I'd already lit the fire, I kept it stoked all day--a treat I usually save for holidays and extreme cold snaps. I worked downstairs beside it, the cat slept beside it; the house was charming and cozy, with snow falling and flames flickering.

We never got much accumulation, and it's gone now--vanished into rain. Still, it was beautiful, reminding me of how much I like winter, how much I even like the shortened days, with the wood fire and the lamps. I'm not a natural depressive. Though I can be episodically glum, I don't suffer from light loss or other seasonal changes. Really, I'm just as happy in a shadowy winter room as I am in a sunlit summer one. They both please me.

Today, I'll finish a chunk of editing, work on a syllabus for next week's high school class, and then after lunch I'll meet with my poetry test-kitchen pals for an hour or so of chatter. I got a couple of good drafts from last night's salon, and what I would really like is a day just for myself so that I can transcribe them. But that's not going to happen. I didn't even have time to make it happen on the island. Right now my own poems are the least important thing. But scrawls are better than nothing.

And here I am, home again.

We left the island at about noon, after stopping for a last windy walk along the seawall. It was 35 degrees, a full-on November day, and I filled my pockets with wet snail shells. Then on we went, pausing for lunch at a Bangor truck stop and finally turning into our own driveway just before dark.

Now the forecast for our first morning back is snow/sleet/rain. Nothing has started to fall yet, but the temperature hovers at the freezing mark, and T will likely have a sloppy drive into work. I'll be back at my desk--editing, answering emails, sorting through Monson conference stuff--plus dealing with piles of laundry, house chores, and groceries. But at least I am well again. Despite all of the sorrows of our visit, my body did, finally, decide to start recovering. The Victorians were not wrong about sea-air convalescence.

I finished Zadie Smith's On Beauty, which I hope to discuss with you in the next couple of days. Now I am temporarily reading a lousy mystery novel that I snitched from a shelf in the cottage. It's no good, but who leaves a mystery--even a badly written one--before it's been solved?

I hope to go out with the poets tonight, but we'll see what the weather says.

It's a cold dawn. The wind continues to howl, and the gulls tip sideways against the gusts, as if they're avoiding a wall. This morning is our last in the cottage; we won't be back till April.

Health-wise, I feel much better . . . not 100 percent cured but 90 percent at least. Otherwise it's been a sorrowful visit, between the loss of Curtis and the loss of the cat, and the nights have had a certain Irish wake quality. Still, we did hike; we did get chores done around the place; we did sleep late and read a lot and indulge ourselves in idleness.

Now I am drinking my coffee and staring into the flying air. Now I am watching the clouds roll, the water shiver, the trees vibrate in the constant blow. This place is not my home, but for 20 years it's been my small doorway into a secret garden.

A gale whipped up in the night, and now, at first light, wind is tearing at the water, at the spruce trees, at the sky. The air is a constant roar, and I glimpse whitecaps on the usually serene cove. A thin rain clacks like sleet on the window, though the temperature is warmer than it has been--nearly 50 degrees instead of chill mid-30s. In the storm the cottage feels even more fairy-tale than usual. At any moment a witch or an enchanted swan might tap on the door.

The mood here has taken a turn for the tragic because W's little cat has disappeared. This is deeply unfair of the Fates: given W's so recent loss of her husband, why should they also take her only pet? Tom and I are unsettled and anxious, and W is deeply distressed but trying to hold herself together. The loss of Gracie is a pall over everything.

Still, we are all trying to go about our business. Tom and I hiked Day Mountain yesterday morning--not a particularly tall peak but with a severe and striking vista of the open Atlantic. Then we came back to the cove, and he finished trimming out the window in W's house and I brought her down to the cottage so that we could do a little bit of writing together. Who knows if it helped anything, but at least it was a way to rechannel our perseverations.

Today is my last full day on the island. With this storm Tom and I likely won't be able to do much outside: we'd be blown into the sea. I might work on some manuscripts; he might sort out Curtis's film rolls and do some more odd jobs for W. Meanwhile, the wind howls and buffets; the rain clicks like pellets; the cove churns; the crows screech.

There's been no sunshine here on the island. The sky has been a roil of cloud, constantly reinventing itself in new patterns and hues. On Beech Cliff, yesterday morning, we glimpsed slivers of Somes Sound, of Frenchman's Bay, of Echo Lake pressed between granite and air. The colors of the hills are brilliant, even lurid, though the hardwoods are mostly bare now. Lichens and mosses, scrub and conifers . . . a riot of golds, reds, greens, blacks, browns, whites, caught between the twisting moving sky, the twisting moving sea.

The park is quiet. Yesterday we met only one other hiker on our trail. Maybe tourist life is still in swing over on the Bar Harbor side of the island, what with the cruise ships and all, but the Southwest Harbor side is tucking itself in for winter. Along the shore, Arctic ducks are taking up their seasonal abode in the island's chilly shelter, and the cove outside the cottage periodically erupts with honking and splashing. This morning the water is a broad glassy ripple, tide running in, sky striped like a baby's blanket--pink and lemon and blue and white. A single lobster boat idles. Spruce trees crowd up against the cobbles.

Inside the cottage kindling crackles in the wood stove. The coffeemaker gurgles and mutters. I am sitting in a big chair, staring through the glass door into a thicket of sumac. Through the kitchen window I can glimpse the top of a church spire. There is a sensation of fairy tale, despite the prosaic coffeemaker and the boat motor in the cove.

I am still not entirely well, but I am significantly more well than I was. Certainly my energy is returning, even if I'm still coughing and hoarse. We climbed the cliffs yesterday, then worked outside in the afternoon--planting daffodil and tulip bulbs on Curtis's gravesite, harvesting celery and a giant pumpkin, planting garlic. Tom began trimming out a window in W's house. I made garlic bread; I made tomato soup with black bean salsa.

At night I dreamed what I cannot remember in daylight. 

Tamaracks are the codas of autumn--a last beat of color before winter grays and whites and greens and browns assume preeminence. Just after the last deciduous leaves shrivel, the green tamarack bursts into brilliant gold, preening for a week or so before dropping its needles and becoming that strange being: a naked conifer that is not dead.

We arrived in West Tremont at about noon, unpacked, lit a fire in the stove, and I sat still, staring out into the cove, dipping into a book, while T made grilled cheese sandwiches. He'd driven the three hours up; he was making lunch; he was coddling me, and I liked it. Already I could feel the tension and illness leaching away. We lingered over our sandwiches, then wandered up through the long grass to see W at her house, and sat with her for an hour, talking idly, mourning Curtis but also laughing a little about this and that . . . being alive, as people are: helplessly alive.

And then T and I drove out to a small local trailhead, the Ship Harbor walk--not at all a demanding hike but through a gorgeous mixture of spruce forest, glassy cove, and open crashing sea, with cobble beaches of pink granite and broad cliffs dotted with tide pools, such as this one.

We watched loons and guillemots and what I think were mergansers bobbing along the line between the choppy surf and the sleek cove. I lay on my back on the rocks and stared into a sky that had no color at all.

And then we drove back to the cottage, and read beside the fire, and then I made chicken curry and W came down from her house, and we had a little red-wine wake for Curtis, and W told stories of her folksinger past, the days of hanging out with Jean Ritchie and Dave Van Ronk and running into a rude Bob Dylan at a record store in the days before he was Bob Dylan. . . .

And then bed, and the sound of the sea.

 It's cold and quiet this morning. I slept till 6:30, thank goodness, and now I am briefly idling with coffee and you before I push myself forward into packing chores. I still feel dumb as a stump: yesterday I drove past the grocery store without remembering that I needed to buy groceries; this morning I forgot to finish making the coffee. This cold has bitten a giant hole in my brain.  I've been sick for the better part of two weeks now, and I haven't taken a day off from work, including the weekend, and apparently my intelligence has reached the end of its rope.

I still have much packing to do--food hampers, clothes, books--plus dealing with laundry, houseplants, cat care, etc. So I won't linger with you long. My plan is to carry along manuscripts to read, plus John Donne, plus Zadie Smith, plus my own notebook. Maybe my brain will revive and I will actually get to all of this. I know T wants to hike, and I hope I'll want to as well, though for the moment I can't imagine dragging myself to the top of a mountain. 

Talk to you tomorrow--

Finally, this cold is starting to fade. I got through an entire poetry reading last night without coughing: a miracle! I had a busy social afternoon and evening and didn't feel as if I needed to be wrapped in mummy gauze and propped up in a dusty corner. I stayed up late and did city stuff like eat dinner at a restaurant at 9 p.m. and yet I enjoyed myself.

I'm still not 100 percent well, but I am definitely getting better, and maybe a few days of ocean wind and no alarm clock will complete the task. Today will be the transition to getting there: desk work and housework and maybe yard work and definitely errands errands errands. And then another restorative night in my own bed, and then we'll head off to the lands of the east.

I'll be carrying along work with me. I've got stacks of reading to do--other people's manuscripts, an editing project. I've also got a notebook full of my own scrawls, which I've had almost no time to transcribe or ponder. I'll be working for my friend, probably mostly in her garden, and T and I will go on some hikes in Acadia together, and my friend wants to do some generative writing together, and of course we'll all be cooking and socializing and mourning Curtis. So our days will not be lounging and television. But they will be unstructured and quiet . . . wood stove and ocean, slow light and slow waking.

Yesterday was a bit of a prologue to that . . . time spent with Baron, my oldest friend in poetry, my first teacher, the person who looked me in the eye and said, "You could be a poet"; and Baron's wife Janet, beloved for nearly as long as I have known him; and Betsy, friend of all of us, a humble and scintillating seer, heart of the society of poets that has welcomed me to Portland. All of them older than I am: in their presence I still feel like a raw youth, and yet, still, the years have marked us all; we have a history that criss-crosses and tangles and straggles away into lint and thread.

Betsy was musing, after Baron's reading, about poets who write within history and poets who do not. These days, I don't know how not to write within history. Big or small . . . mostly small, I guess. The small stories. Love and despair. The consequences. 

Portland had a light frost on Tuesday night, while I was in Monson, and another one last night. I guess that's it for my flowers, but I don't know when I'll get a chance to clean them out of the garden. I've got to work this morning, and then I'm meeting my friends Baron and Janet and Betsy for lunch, then getting a haircut, then going to Baron's reading this evening . . . and tomorrow will be work plus crazy errand-running-and-pulling-things-together so that we can leave for Mount Desert Island in the morning.

I really, really hope I'll be able to rest at the cottage because I am exhausted. This cold still hasn't released me from its grip, and I haven't been sleeping well, and I've had so many obligations, and the atmosphere in Maine has been stressful, to say the least. But I'm trudging onward. Class went well yesterday; the weather  was clear for driving; I lit a fire in the wood stove as soon as I got home and made an easy dinner of shrimp and macaroni. I'm doing the best I can.

Now I've started reading another new-to-me novel: Zadie Smith's On Beauty, which I plucked from a free-book pile at a Brooklyn breakfast joint. And I'm drinking my small cup of coffee, and I'm sitting in my couch corner, and heat is pouring sweetly from the furnace vents, and I have nothing to complain about. I'm meeting friends for lunch, and then I'm going a cottage by the sea. The messy interstices will work themselves out.

[The dinner party]

Twenty-six degrees in Monson, with a crunch of snow on walkways and roofs. Last night I had dinner with the artists-in-residence, who were gathering for a sit-down dinner at Lulu's restaurant. Usually Lulu fixes box dinners for everyone so that they don't interrupt their work if they don't want to, but periodically they get a restaurant meal, and I lucked in on that last night. Lulu is a magnificent cook--originally from the Philippines but married into a central Maine family--and she won a James Beard Award this year. She insists she's not a chef. "I'm just a cook," she says. Whatever she calls herself, her meals are a delight, and she was especially excited last night because she'd just learned that her daughter had shot a deer for the freezer. As the token central Mainer at the meal, I found myself having to explain what tagging a deer means, how hunting season works in Maine, how to tell a doe from a buck, what people do with the meat, etc.--a somewhat fraudulent position as I have never fired a gun.

[Trigger warning: I ate some of that deer.]

But I enjoyed the bustle of Lulu's orange-clad husband and daughter, striding in and out of the front door among the trick-or-treaters with tubs of this and that for Lulu. And then, to my pleasure, I got invited back into the kitchen to check out those tubs, which turned out to contain heart, liver, and stomach caul. Within minutes Lulu had seared the heart, whipped up a bourbon glaze, and was offering around slices. I've eaten venison often, but I'd never eaten such fresh meat before. I do love trying new foods, and this was spectacular good fortune in that regard: a wild harvest cooked quickly, simply, and skillfully.

[Thinking about the buffalo hunters]

I'd brought Zesch's The Captured with me for my overnight in Monson, imagining I might spend the evening looking through the notes, but the lighting in this apartment is terrible, and the notes are in teeny-tiny type and my eyes are rotting in my head, so I didn't make much headway with that. Instead, I turned on the baseball game, and I sent texts to my family regaling them with the tale of my exciting deer-heart experience, and I found myself thinking about the book's descriptions of how the captured children became immersed in the central ancient business of buffalo hunting, the communal intensity of that work . . . how afterward, when "rescued," some of the children shot their parents' poultry full of arrows or refused to eat cooked meat. I had no conclusions to draw; merely, I was thinking in parallel. I had accidentally stepped into a then-and-now, here-and-there time warp, via historical narrative and my own unexpected present tense. I think such moments are worth orbiting. I think it's dangerous to make easy pronouncements.