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 . . .