It's the last day of January, and the little northern city by the sea is draped in crisp snow. But the days are longer now. I've heard chickadees singing their spring song. Hawks and owls are courting. Snowdrops are budding along warm foundations. Earth is imagining the future.

For me. it's been a nose-to-the-grindstone week: editing editing editing, planning planning planning, interspersed with appointments and arguments with the insurance company and other such aggravating chores. I've got three classes on the horizon: an all-day zoom session on Saturday--a reunion of participants in the 2023 Conference on Poetry and Teaching, which I'll be team-teaching with Teresa. And then on Tuesday, a full day as a visiting poet at Penquis High School, up north in Milo; and Wednesday, my usual Monson Arts cohort. None of these classes is anything at all like the others, so my thoughts have been flying from "generative writing fun for friendly adults" to "beginning activities for resistant general-level freshmen" to "all-day revision experiments with familiar eager young writers." I'm feeling a little dizzy.

Anyway, the planning is now mostly done, so today will reduce down to exercise session, followed by editing editing editing, followed by hair cut and grocery shopping and an early dinner, and then T and I will go out to the movies to watch an old Busby Berkeley musical at the local film archive.

It hasn't been a great week--weird family stuff, weird medical stuff--but my state of mind isn't terrible, so that's something. The beauty of the snow has been uplifting. The sweetness of my partner as well. I'm reading, I'm writing, I'm cooking, I'm walking. And the chickadees are singing their spring song.

Yesterday's snow was by far the prettiest of the season--the sort that clings to every branch and twig and sparkles like crystal in the watery sunlight. I wouldn't have chosen to shovel the driveway at 6:30 in the morning, but the fast-moving clouds, the daybreak glitter, were a delight, as was the drive across town to the hospital, threading my way under laden tree branches as elegant as lace.

It's a week filled with appointments. Yesterday I got appointment 1 is out of the way, and today's schedule features appointment 2: oil change for the car. Once again, I'll be hustling out of the house early: this time for an easy drive around the corner to the garage, and a trudge home through the frosty neighborhood. Then class planning and editing, then picking up the newly oiled car and turning my thoughts to dinner, whatever it may be. Last night I made Glamorgan sausages, which are not actually sausages but sautéed patties of leeks, cheddar, and breadcrumbs. Tonight maybe we'll have Bolognese sauce, if I get it started in time.

I've started rereading Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts. I've been talking to my friend Betsy about an old essay I wrote, a piece about The Autobiography of Malcolm X--how dangerous it felt to address an icon's misogyny. I am tweaking revisions; also thinking about revision activities for my next Monson class; also plotting some writing prompts; also beginning to imagine a team-teaching day with my friend Gretchen--how will we combine poetry with dance and improvisational theater? . . . I am having some thoughts that seem to center around the notion of frame. My brain is both vague and bubbly, its usual state when I'm beginning to imagine new teaching situations.

Meanwhile, ice is falling from the trees, rattling against roof and windows, tapping and clattering, a thousand shards of glass.

Snow all night, and still snowing this morning. Maybe five inches, maybe four?--it's hard to tell through the window. What I know is that I have to dig out and drive in it this morning, all for the joy of a mammogram at the hospital across town. Blah.

Well, you've got expect such things from Mondays. They do like to cling to their spoiler role. And I had a restful Sunday, though every team I rooted for lost. I spent much of the day in the kitchen, making fish chowder, Yorkshire pudding, a baked Greek salad, raspberry sorbet. I read The Aunt's Story and worked on some poem drafts and went for a walk with Tom. So I guess I can cope with this stupid Monday.

This will be a busy week--appointments, editing, class prep--though at least I won't be on the road. I'll have to force myself out of dreaminess. I'll have to be useful.

But the snow is lovely--a fragile puff of cold, billowing like cream.

I think yesterday's class went well. It was a beginning essay-writing session--only three hours long and designed for people who are just starting to try out the genre or even writing altogether. For some, this was the first time they'd ever approached a piece via a focus on craft rather than subject, and it was sweet to see their wonder as they began to comprehend how.

The class took place at the University of Southern Maine library, maybe two miles from my house, so I was able to walk there and back, which was a pleasant addendum to the afternoon, given how housebound I've been this week. Efficiently backpacked, I trudged through the slushy Oakdale streets, up the hill into Deering Highlands, past the big Congregational church into my own Deering Center enclave. The air was gentle, scented with snow and soil and melt, and my body was glad to be moving through the world. 

Afterward, fresh-off-the-boat scallops for dinner, alongside buttered pappardelle and charred red cabbage; a fire in the wood stove; a long night's sleep in my own bed; a quiet Sunday morning to come.

Which is now.

Daylight unfolds over the little snowcrust gardens, over the paper-hat roofs, over a slow man and a slower bulldog, over a busybody cat trotting delicately around a sidewalk puddle.

I don't have pressing plans for the day, other than a trip to the grocery store to buy potatoes for fish chowder. I'll read my Patrick White novel; I'll take laundry off the basement lines; I'll walk up to the cemetery; I'll fidget with a poem draft; I might watch the Ravens game. Next week will be busy--an array of appointments and work obligations--but I am not going to think about any of that today.

What I am thinking is, How spacious the mind. I open a book and read a sentence from the novel by White: "Smells came in at the door, petrol and oil, fish, sea, and the white, negative smell of dust." The notion of smell as white . . . I am surprised, taken aback, abruptly convinced. I forget the plot, the character's reason for being in this place; I forget the place itself. My mind ticks over the oddness of white. Also, the author's name is White. I, too, am a writer entangled in my own common nouns. We are a strange group, all assigned the same table at a wedding, though we don't know what to say to each other. Robert Frost mutters to Ocean Vuong. I light a cigarette for Oscar Wilde.

How spacious the mind--its coiling inventions, its satisfying lies. Outside, the air is full of crows. Outside, snow spackles the grass, smoke curls up from the chimneys, the breeze is scented with trains.

If you read these words, picture your part.

Yesterday was an unexpected flurry of weather--snow, sleet, rain, slush; the streets and sidewalks a sudden slippery wretched mess.

Thus, I haven't taken a walk for two days, I missed my last couple of exercise sessions because of work schedule and a visitor, and I'm beginning to feel like a yam. Today I'll spend all afternoon in a chair, teaching a class; and though I'd hoped to walk to the university library where we'll be meeting, road conditions may be against me. Blah.

Ah, well. At least I can run up and down two flights of stairs and haul a vacuum cleaner around. Housework, the endurance sport.

Otherwise, what's new? Not much, I guess. Cackling over Trump's $83 million defamation verdict, drinking tea with an old friend, starting a new novel (Patrick White's The Aunt's Story), reading some Longfellow, copyediting a manuscript, fiddling around with a poem draft, braising teriyaki chicken, losing at cards . . .

And now the cat is curled up on his yellow chair, T is asleep upstairs. Outside, crows argue with jays; gulls argue with crows. Pale slush is spilt milk under this dim morning light.

I am trying to be a decent person. But who knows?

Friday, Friday. It's been a long work week, and it isn't over yet as I'll be teaching on two Saturdays in a row. Tomorrow I'm leading an in-person afternoon intro essay-writing class for the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. Next week will be an all-day zoom generative-writing extravaganza with last year's teaching conference participants. Then I've got a two-day stint up north : an in-school, four-classes-of-freshmen teaching-artist day plus my usual Monson Arts session. I'm prepared to be exhausted.

So I'm going to try to keep today low-key: a morning walk with a friend, some housework, some class prep, some editing. But I hope none of this will rule the hours, that maybe I'll get a chance to write and read and idle.

I'm feeling slightly blue this morning: a little anxious about family matters, about poems, about employment. I assume the haze will wear off and I'll trudge forward into the day, without clarity but at least with my usual donkey trot. I'm grateful for the man upstairs, just waking up for work; for our young people, far away in their lives but always extending their hands. I'm grateful for books and long walks, for you, for my poet friends and my nothing-to-do-with-poetry friends, for my idiot cat, my kitchen, my garden. A cocoon in a harsh world.

It snowed all day yesterday, then last night apparently rained on top of that, so this morning everything is slick and nasty and dangerous-looking.

The cat is disgusted with winter. He barely sets a paw outside, just glowers and stomps and picks at the furniture, with the clear goal of trying to drive me crazy.

Despite the foul weather, life is sinking back into its usual pattern. After driving P to the bus station, I spent the day washing sheets, changing the guest room back into my study, editing, dealing with emails, and so on and so forth. Today, more editing, and then a midmorning phone call with the curator at the Maine Women Writers Collection about restarting the process of moving my papers into their archive. Before the pandemic I'd had some early conversations with the then-curator about making that move. But then everyone got distracted, the curator changed jobs, I forgot to think about the issue, and thus here we are, starting from the beginning. But I'm glad to be thinking about it again. Women writers in Maine are so fortunate to have an archive that wants to house their work, and I'm pleased to have the chance to make my sons' lives easier, to leave them with less to deal with when the time comes while still making sure they have decision-making power if they want it.

So that conversation is on today's docket, and then grocery shopping and probably some housework, and then making something or other for dinner with the poets tonight.

I'm almost finished with Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. It's a brilliant and sorrowful book, one that I can only read in small bursts. She is almost too intelligent for me; it takes me a while to grasp what she is saying about these books I know so well. I am such a non-intellectual reader. I read and reread and reread; I slip into these books like I slip into my shoes, but I am rarely smart about them. Hardwick, though: she is thoroughly smart, but also, often, filled with pity, admiration, frustration for both authors and characters . . . and those are emotions I can share with her. Here's what she has to say about Jane Carlyle, wife of the Victorian biographer and philosopher Thomas Carlyle:

It is sad to think of Jane Carlyle's last years. Neurasthenia accounted for a lot of her torments in the middle of the night. But she has such gaiety and reasonableness that we are scarcely prepared for the devastation that swept over her as a result of feeling undervalued, put-upon, refused the consolations of a grateful husband. Once when she told Carlyle that she had, at a certain moment, thought of leaving him, he replied, "I don't know that I would have missed you. I was very busy just then with Cromwell." The raging productivity of the Victorians shattered nerves and punctured stomachs, but it was a thing noble, glorious, awesome in itself.

Jane Carlyle's subversive irony and her ambivalence make her the most interesting of the wives we know about in this period. It is very risky to think of her as a failed novelist or as a "sacrificed" writer in some other form. All we can look for are the openings she--and Dorothy Wordsworth, also--came upon, the little alleys for self-display, the routes found that are really a way of dominating the emotional material of daily life. [Hardwick was reading a collection of her letters.] The chanciness of it all, the modesty, the intermittent aspect of the production--there is pathos in that. In the end what strikes one as the greatest personal loss of these private writing careers is that the work could not truly build for the women a bulwark against the sufferings of neglect and the humiliations of lovelessness. The Victorian men, perverse as many of them are, were spared these pinches of inadequacy, faltering confidence, and fears of uselessness.

In a flurry to get the boy to the bus this morning, but we had a magnificent class yesterday: so busy and fun, and the kids completely engaged. It couldn't have gone better. 

And now the tearful goodbyes.

"Small towns always remember you when you were young; they seldom believe all the good things they hear you have done later, since you went off somewhere else." This is Elizabeth Hardwick's commentary, in an essay on Ibsen's A Doll's House. When I read it aloud to my son, he shivered, as if he believed it all too well. And it does feel real, though it's not totally. Plenty of people in Harmony and Wellington wish our family well, and believe in us. Still, there is the sensation of truth in Hardwick's statement.

I'm lying here in bed in Monson, listening to wind. Yesterday P did all of the driving, up the highway and then winding north on the secondary roads, the familiar route of his childhood. From the car window, central Maine looked exactly like its spirit self: snowy and grim, desolate and derelict, its beauty hidden in a box in the attic. The question is: why do P and I love it so much?

P arrived last night, right on cue, and much to the cat's delight. Now, on this cold morning, the cat is shuttling back and forth between beds, trying to make the most of a good time.

It's a work day for everyone. Tom is beginning to sigh into his coffee, and soon I'll bustle into my morning chores. This afternoon, P and I will drive north for tomorrow's class. The cat will be lonesome and annoyed.

Thank goodness the weather god has decided to nap a little. Other than cold, there's not much to worry about road-wise. We've got a big packet of surprising play scenes, a bunch of reading and writing prompts, and an energetic mother-and-son comedy team. I'm pretty confident the class will be a splash hit with the kids. P's decided to focus on very recently produced plays, ones that the kids would otherwise not have come across. He thinks it will be exciting for them to spend time with hot new work, to dip into the life of the contemporary theater, and I agree. He'll be bringing New York City to the woods. But of course he's also from those woods, which is the big reason Monson Arts has invited him to teach. He grew up down the road; he attended the same schools. He's a central Maine boy, and he's back.

Another chilblain morning, another small sleep-late, and here I sit, rested and warm, faced with a cup of hot coffee and a disgruntled cat who loves to air his grievances.

Yesterday I spread my desk with seed catalogs and last year's seed packets and worked out what I needed to order for this year. I thought about a friend's poem-draft questions. I talked to my kid on the phone, and I did a little cleaning in the basement. I finished Mansfield Park and started Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature. I watched the Ravens game and enjoyed the three raven mascots jumping around under the goal posts. (They're named Edgar, Allan, and Poe, according to my son.) I did not go for a walk, which was lazy, but I guess one Saturday without exercise won't kill me.

All day long, fat snowflakes flurried without accumulating. The cold was deep and the air smelled sharp and clean when I stepped outside to the recycling bin. I read about the Bronte sisters. Hardwick writes:

A study of the Bronte lives leaves one with a disorienting sense of the unexpected and the paradoxical in their existence. In them are combined simplicities and exaggerations, isolation and an attraction to scandalous situations. They are very serious, wounded, longing women, conscious of all the romance of literature and of their own fragility and suffering. They were serious about the threatening character of real life. Romance and deprivation go hand in hand in their novels. Quiet and repressed the sisters may have been, but their readers were immediately aware of a disturbing undercurrent of intense sexual fantasy. Loneliness and melancholy seemed to alternate in their feelings with an unusual energy and ambition.

This seems absolutely accurate to me. In The Vagabond's Bookshelf, I wrote about Charlotte's novel Shirley, how in it her authorial voice lurches back and forth between vaunting pride and tight self-hatred, but also, oddly and uncomfortably, assumes that the reader shares her self-mythology. When I glance back at that essay, I wish I'd written it differently, but still I take my point, and it aligns, I think, with Hardwick's, which I hadn't read at that time. The Brontes were paradoxes. And all these years later, their strange books remain explosive.

I've been writing hard lately, and I've been reading hard. I've been managing a house, and I've been teaching young people. These are exactly the same things that Charlotte, Emily, and Anne tried to do--all of us with varying degrees of success. The lives of obscure literary women cling to a pattern. Yet Charlotte, the last survivor of the three, died in 1855 at age 39 . . . the better part of 200 years ago.

It's very cold outside, just eight degrees, and the air is completely still. Snow quilts roofs and gardens, and the new daylight is as pale as an Arctic hare. Somehow I managed to sleep in till quarter of seven this morning, a rare luxury, and now I am drinking black coffee in a little house with a patched roof, ensconced in the pleasures of being warm.

Yesterday I shipped out an editing project to the press, did house and shopping chores, made orange sorbet, spent the afternoon playing music, then came home to cook dinner (red-bean chili with cornmeal dumplings; a beet and carrot salad; the aforementioned sorbet) and chatter with T. Today I'll spend time with my friend Betsy's poem drafts. I'll get started on my garden-seed orders. I'll fold laundry. I'll do a little more sorting/cleaning/culling in the basement. I might work on a poem. I'll go for a walk and light the wood stove and drink a lot of ginger tea and make parmesan chicken for dinner. It will be an easygoing, this-n-that sort of day, the calm before the storm of P's arrival tomorrow, his infectious angst over playoff football, the flurry of driving north to Monson, and then our big teaching day together.

I can't explain how good it feels to be playing music with familiar people again. Losing my band was one of the giant sadnesses of moving away from Harmony. I could blame the pandemic for stifling my musical life, but the fact is that I am essentially unable to enter the open mic/jam circuit and put myself out to play with strangers. That kind of situation makes me very anxious. The only reason I started playing with Doughty Hill was because I was coaxed into it by a group of local regular central Maine guys who were extraordinarily gentle and patient. They taught me how to use my instrument in this brand-new setting, and they never made me feel embarrassed about my band-skills ignorance or my classical training.

Now we're prepping for one specific performance. I have no idea if I'll be able to keep playing with them after it's over. I hope so; but if not, at least I had this little blip of contentment . . . the uncanny joy of concentrating on sound, a circle of listeners, lines weaving in and among one another, an awareness that transcends mere attention, that rises up from the bones of our hands. It is unlike anything else I do in my life, and it is one of the oldest things I do. I first held a violin when I was six years old. Our relationship may be fraught, but it is also very, very long.

I went out to write last night; brought along a Moroccan carrot salad and a prompt involving coins and Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds. There were eight of us there, everyone excited to visit and to write, everyone producing intense first drafts. I came home all of a buzz, and T, who had just gotten home from developing film at the photo co-op and was heating up leftover chicken, asked about the prompts and the drafts--so I read him my blurts and showed him the prompts and he was intrigued by the oddness and pleasure of capturing one's first clumsy reaction to an unexpected catalyst. So that was enjoyable, as I don't routinely share poems with him. We're not the same sort of artist, and we don't collaborate much, but sometimes we do talk about making. These late evenings, when we go out separately and then meet again afterward, are remarkably pleasant. I think we both like to know that the other is doing something, making something, and in the small stretch before bedtime we ask questions, enjoy listening. It's a good moment in a long day.

Today I'll finish up the editing project, do a pile of laundry, figure out what to cook for dinner, and then midafternoon I'll drive to band practice. The new fat editing project is due to arrive this afternoon; P comes in from NYC on Sunday, and then Monday we'll be on the road; work, work, work, and then I'm supposedly teaching an essay class next weekend, if it fills. My temporarily slow-paced life will return to frenzy. Ah, the freelance lifestyle.

But I wrote a big poem. I conceived a new writing project. I started playing the violin again. I read a mountain of books. I thought I was wasting time, but it turns out that I wasn't.

Thirteen degrees this morning, with a quilt of snow resting quietly over the dark neighborhood. Winter in Maine: I'm glad it's finally decided to stick around.

The house is warm, the coffee is hot, the cat is restless. Today I need to practice the violin, clean bathrooms, work on class plans; maybe finish an editing project; take a walk in the cold; probably go out tonight to write. I'm still waiting for the next big editing project to arrive--supposedly that will happen by tomorrow. Till then I continue to fidget among my small doings.

I've been experimenting with a series of poems that borrow titles from famous works of literature but do not retell those stories. And I've been rediscovering the glories of Austen's Mansfield Park. I know I've written extensively about this book before, but I'm always finding new beauties. For instance:

Too soon did [Fanny] find herself at the drawing-room door, and after pausing a moment for what she knew would not come, for a courage which the outside of no door had ever supplied her, she turned the lock in desperation, and the lights of the drawing-room and all the collected family were before her.

Can there be a more exquisite description of this particular sort of teenage anxiety, of the physical melodrama of nervousness, "turn[ing] the lock in desperation," and that magnificent phrase "for a courage which the outside of no door had ever supplied her"--the hopelessness of her hopes . . . and all of this just to show a girl in the moment before she turns a door handle and enters a room.

It is never a waste of time to reread a Jane Austen novel. Never. Every time I do, I feel like I'm learning just a little bit more about  human nature, about what doesn't matter in a story and what does, about the precision of description.

Reread, people! Reread! This is my bossy advice for the day! Do not pride yourself on rarely going back to a book. If you're a writer, you must study your art. You don't do that by following the advice of craft books. You do it by rereading and rereading and rereading the books that have done what you long to do. For me, Austen and Dickens and George Eliot and Hayden Carruth and James Baldwin and all of their kind are more than favorite authors. They are the bibles I pore over. How do they do it? How do they do it? I read and reread, and each time a little more light comes into my life. I'll never be as great as they are, but I keep trying to learn.

We got more snow than was forecast--maybe six or seven inches of tender fluff--and it's angelic out there in the neighborhood, and also very cold. We're in for a snap this week, temperature dropping down to single digits by the weekend, so the snow is here to stay, at least for a while. Finally, maybe, we're getting our Maine winter.

I made it to the grocery stores early yesterday, before the snow really kicked in; then spent the bulk of the day editing and working on Monson Arts stuff, until midafternoon, when I lit the wood stove, shoveled the driveway, and then whipped up a batch of blackberry sorbet. It came out well: not too grainy, which can be a problem with homemade sorbets. Dinner was braised chicken legs with fennel and lemon, roasted potatoes with sage, and a salad of chioggia beets, toasted pecans and pumpkin seeds, and butter lettuce. I like a bright table on a snowy night.

And now Wednesday has arrived. I sit here, in my warm house, under my pool of lamplight, wondering where my mind will wander today. I've started rereading Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. I'm still swallowing novels like they're quaaludes, and maybe Austen will settle me down . . . her sly undertones, her exquisite Mozart touch. I've got stuff to finish--class prep, editing--and I don't trust myself to be sensible. What I ought to do, I suppose, is read Henry James. He'd bring me back into line, force me to be patient. But I'm not in the mood for patience.

Anyway, enough of this maundering. It's time to start a load of laundry; it's time to make the bed; it's time to wash the breakfast dishes and sweep the kitchen floor and do my exercises and eat oatmeal and type out a syllabus and embody the role of the productive worker. America is not designed for story-drunks.

Snow on the way today--just a few inches, but maybe enough to cover the bare ground and the lingering frozen ice lumps. It's cold out there, will be cold all week, and I need to grocery-shop today, need to dig into an editing project, need to wind myself back into the world of work.

My long poem is still reaching out its tentacles. Teresa had some smart revision suggestions, so I spent much of yesterday afternoon re-entangling myself in the poem's coils. It's emotionally exhausting work, as if the poem is bleeding me.

Poem as leech. The metaphor feels apt.

Anyway, I've got to push revision out of my thoughts and let employment and house cares take over. And I need to find something else to read: I have been devouring sprawling novels like boxes of candy. Over the past three days I read All the Light We Cannot See from beginning to end--more than 500 pages. I read while I cooked, while I folded laundry. I have been reading like a 12-year-old, completely gobsmacked. No matter what's been in my hands, I've immersed myself in it, without judgment.

I'm not sure what this reveals about my state of mind, that I'm mainlining novels and bleeding poem. I will say that I feel kind of fragile, liable to burst into tears at any moment. Probably I ought be relieved that duty calls. Probably everyone around me ought to be relieved.

Yesterday morning Simon the chimney sweep showed up with his big ladder, climbed onto the wet roof, diagnosed the problems, and patched our gaps till spring, when he will come back to do a permanent repair job. What a relief. All hail to friendly guys who can do many things.

Afterward T and I took a trip out to his worksite to return the ladder he'd borrowed. It directly overlooks the sea, and even a day after the gale the waves were still wild and crashing and dangerous. I'm not sure why anyone would choose to build a $20 million mansion on an unprotected bluff staring into open ocean at a time when climate change is clearly wreaking havoc via sea level and storms. But rich people are strange.

Afterward, we returned the land of the normal: we stopped at the hardware store and ate free popcorn, and I bought a brush to clean hair out of the bathroom drain, and T bought electrical supplies to fix the lights in the kitchen. Then we came home, and he fixed the lights, and I did not clean anything in the bathroom but lay on the couch reading my Goodwill-purchased copy of Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, which is my friend Ang's current favorite novel so I thought I should find out why.

Today, for the first time ever, T is enjoying MLK Day as a paid holiday. It's a novelty for me too. I've got some work to do--a manuscript back from an author, a zoom meeting--but I probably won't get serious about employment till tomorrow. Slow mornings together are too rare to waste. And then, late afternoon, I'll distance-watch the Bills playoff game with my son. A family weekend, even with the family spread across the country . . . phone chatter with James, three-way exchange of goofy cat photos, playing silly games. For instance, our current one:

Dawn, bringing Tom a cup of coffee: The Baltimore Ravens are doing really well this year. I wonder if that's because they named their team after a poem.

Tom, lying in bed barely awake: The New York Wasteland.

Dawn, texting Paul about this new idea: The Buffalo Howl, the San Francisco Inferno . . .

Paul, winning the game: The Cincinnati Tyger Tygers.

Another wild, wild weather day in Maine. Flash-flood warning alarms blaring from our phones, crazy downpours, an astronomic high tide, the Bayside neighborhood and the docks under water, highway exits closed entirely because of water levels . . . The coast is a mess. 

I'm relieved we live on a hill so the torrents of rain and snowmelt could flow away from our houses and down the street. Nonetheless, water still trickled in through basement window frames and the foundation, and the roof leak is a major concern. But thank goodness for nice guys: this morning our chimney sweep will stop by, with his extra-long ladder and some roof tar, to patch up the situation around the chimney. Here's hoping that does the trick.

After a snowstorm and two winter hurricanes in single week, I am longing for a stretch of long dull chilly days. Plain old January: what a restful idea.

***

As the storm raged yesterday, I spent much of it reading scripts and talking back and forth with my kid. Pretty quickly P and I were able to put together the final packet for our class and frame out our writing prompts. It's been fun to work with him on this backstage planning. He's a teaching natural, I think--really good instincts about experiential approaches, awareness of how his own personality might affect the classroom climate, an eagerness to ask questions about ways to structure lessons, share information, and so on. For teaching artists, it's a good way to learn. I never went to education college: everything I've gleaned about teaching has come from watching how other teachers behave (both those I admire and those I don't) and how students react to teachers, materials, and each other.

I work in a discipline that can be a hard sell in schools. As a general rule, administrators and teachers are suspicious of poetry, and they transmit that uneasiness to students. Everyone is prepared to hate what I'm bringing to them. Moreover, certain teachers--often those who wield departmental power, control the AP or honors programs, or otherwise cultivate an elitist approach to literature--see me as a threat: someone who will show them up in front of the kids. It's a drag.

So to be an effective teaching artist, I've had to learn to ignore the shadows in the room; to build lessons that immediately tap into student thought and experiment; to use my cheerful, earnest, scattershot persona as a tool. It's hard work, but it's interesting work, and it's endlessly challenging.

Another massive windstorm is brewing this morning, and Tom couldn't get the roof leak fixed yesterday (borrowed ladder was too short), so I've got a dishpan under the wet spot and am hoping for the best. At least we won't have snowmelt exacerbating the situation this time. But these storms are worrisome. Last Tuesday's really tore up the coastline, and this one may be even rougher.

I had a busy day yesterday: bustling up Route 95 for a morning band practice, then hurrying home for an afternoon zoom meeting with my poetry lab friends. Teresa, Jeannie, and I had all been reading the same book, Dayswork, by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Haber. Set during the pandemic lockdown, it centers around a woman who becomes obsessed with penetrating into the mysteries of Herman Melville's life. It's a fine book--an amalgam of novel, poem, and research notes--and the three of us were very excited about it, given that we're all constantly succumbing to the lure of obsessive mysterious discovery. 

So it was a good day, very social, but in different ways . . . the morning spent with musicians working out multipart backup harmonies, a strict and concentrated focus, the exactitudes of pitch and breath; the afternoon spent chattering wildly with poets about whatever was popping into our heads.

Today, hunkered down during the storm, I'll need to spend some time reading play scripts and talking with my son about how best to present them to the Monson Arts kids. The two of us will be team-teaching the next class, and it will be an odd but I think fun situation for both of us. He'll be the featured guest artist, the expert sharing knowledge, and I'll be mentoring him as a teacher, offering guidance about planning and class management. But of course we are also mother and son, and we can't avoid that dynamic. We've got to play it up to our advantage . . . and also not annoy each other. I'm not too worried: we have an easy relationship, and we can say what we think to each other. Still, as a teaching situation, it will be complex. And it's a big deal for him: to be stepping into a role as a paid teaching artist at a prestigious arts center. He's got the jitters for sure.

Except for the storm, it will be a quiet day: reading, studying, napping, folding laundry; maybe doing a little more organizing/cleaning/shedding-of-possessions in the basement; concocting a casserole of leftover chicken, wild mushrooms, and wild rice for dinner. Wish us luck with the leak.

Yesterday afternoon I tried to use the printer, but for some reason it wouldn't work. Out of paper, I thought, and opened the drawer, only to discover that the paper was soaking wet. Looked up, and saw a damp patch in the ceiling in T's study. A leak. So that was one more fret to load onto his shoulders: fix the roof before the next round of storms comes in on Saturday morning. But one amazing thing about T is how calm he stays. Having grown up in a highly anxious household, I appreciate hanging around with someone who doesn't get all wound up. T shrugs, and then he figures out how to solve the problem, and then he quietly sits down on the couch and eats some pretzels and works on a crossword puzzle.

This morning I'll drive a half-hour north to band practice, then hustle back to Portland for a zoom meeting at 1. Lots of music talk, lots of poem talk: that will be my day . . . and the sun will shine, and I'll have a Friday night at home with my dear one, and here's hoping he figures out how fix the leak before the sun goes down. I have every confidence in him.

Last night T went out to an art opening and I went out to write, and then, before bedtime, we hung out together, talking about our evenings, sharing funny conversations, being cheerful. I told him I like these nights when we separate and come back together, and he agreed. Both of us with private lives; both of us happy to be home again.

The storm blew itself out, and the day became watery and mild. In the weak sunlight I walked in the cemetery with a friend. At home I emptied stove ashes into the outdoor can; I hauled groceries into the kitchen; I watched the cat prowl among the wet leaves.

And now it's Thursday. The week is trickling to a close, and I sit here, with a cup of coffee and a small headache, considering housework, desk work, violin practice, my checklist of duties. Tonight I'll go out to write, so I'll need to bake for that--probably banana bread. I'll definitely need to get the violin out of the case as I've got a band rehearsal tomorrow morning.

Enthusiasm is hard with a headache, but probably it'll fade and I'll transform back into myself. I'm also feeling a little bereft--that post-poem feeling, when I've finished a big undertaking but don't yet have a new draft under construction. I'm pleased with what I made, but it's done now. The work is over. The poem and I no longer have a common purpose, and I'm lonely for it.

On the bright side the friend I walked with in the cemetery asked me to co-lead a day-long class for teachers in which the two of us would figure out some way to meld poetry (my specialty) with theater and dance (her specialty). This will be an absorbing project as I very much admire her classroom artistry; plus, she's just fun to hang out with.

Anyway, today will unfold, and I'll unfold with it, and the headache will go away, and fresh air and a few cups of ginger tea will do their fancy work, and, before you know it, I'll be making things again.

I slipped home just in time, between storms, and thank goodness, because last night's was a doozy--high winds, battering rain, and it's still brawling this morning. Creeks trickle through the basement; Sunday's beautiful thick snow is a swamp of slush. It's an ugly sight, but at least our power has stayed on, and the basement creeks haven't become a lake--yet.

The storm is supposed to wind down mid-morning, but the flooding will likely continue for a while. So much sudden snow melt: it's a mess, and today is Tom's birthday, and we have dinner reservations tonight . . . but if I have to suddenly change plans and make stone soup, so be it.

Yesterday's class went well, though I didn't have much to do other than hang out with the kids because we had a young journalist with us all day as a presenter. For the next session, though, P will be up from NYC, and he and I will concoct a big scriptwriting lollapalooza. And then the kids will enter the land of revision, which will carry us into the spring.

One thing I learned when I was up in Monson is that our new Conference on Poetry & Learning is starting to fill. That is making us all happy. Do let me know if you've got questions about it, or if you'd like to be considered for a scholarship.

 Here in the north it is very dark. Seven degrees out there, and silence. Not even an owl.

 Monday morning and a driveway full of snow. T and I did shovel yesterday afternoon, though the snow kept coming down and we've got more to do this morning. But let's hear it for the neighbors on this block: early in the morning, Andrew did a first-pass snow-blow of everyone's sidewalks; and last night, after the snow had ended, Jon snow-blowed our sidewalk and our driveway cut. People are so nice around here.

The snowfall was significant--we definitely got more than a foot--and it was beautiful coming down, if blustery and sharp to the face. It wasn't a good day to be wearing glasses.

I don't have to hit the road home till afternoon. I think the north got much less snow than Portland did, so the drive to Wellington should be okay. My big poem is more or less finished . . . a bit of fiddling but not much more. Betsy, who read it yesterday, was encouraging, so that settled my nerves a bit. The Bills managed to beat the Dolphins while I was sleeping--a surprise, as they were losing at halftime. Various small jangly annoying daily-life things have ironed themselves out, at least temporarily. I guess I'm ready to go back to work.

The snow is falling thick and fast. The snow is a glint under streetlight, a bustle of flake, a coat of new paint. No plow has passed. The street is as white as grass, as white as roofs, and the morning dark rises from the snow like smoke.

I am prepared to be happy today. Neither Tom nor I has to drive to work in the storm. Our house is snug, the wood boxes are filled, and soon chicken stock will be simmering on the stove. I have stacks of books to pore through. The pantry shelves are stocked with the fruits of the Italian market, which for some reason gives me special delight: pappardelle and vialone nano rice, a can of Partana olive oil, an edge of Serrano ham, a chunk of gorgonzola dolce, sourdough studded with black olives. And we stopped at the fish market too: fresh salmon for dinner last night, and now a pound of local cod in the freezer.

It was a productive morning. We unloaded a trunkload of stuff at the Goodwill, went for a windy walk on Mackworth Island, did our pre-storm shopping far away from the grocery-store rush, and now, on a new morning, we are tucked into our little house like babies.

Once we got our chores out of the way, I spent much of the afternoon revising my poem. Then, finally, overwhelmed by either amazement or despair, I sent the draft to a friend and asked for a clear-eyed comment on it. I hope she'll bring me back to earth.

In the meantime, I'll talk to you about Daniel Mason's The North Woods. To begin: the book is set in western Massachusetts, so for those of you who live in northern New England, the title will be irritating. I suggest you get over this because the notion of north woods that arises over the course of the book transcends the specifics of geography. The book is set on a plot of land in the Berkshires, near the Vermont border, and it follows the laminations of time--human, animal, plant, ghost--as they thicken over this very specific physical place. From the Puritans to the present day and beyond into a shadowy future, the book considers how each inhabitant affects the next, how past and present intersect, how magic and science entwine. The book is tragic and hopeful and melodramatic and silly and at times very funny (e.g., anthropomorphic elm-beetle romance). The author is also very good at embodying language shifts over time . . . which is not easy, as I learned when I was working on Chestnut Ridge. 

My son gave me this book because, of course, north woods; plot of land; never leaving; always leaving. Sounds perfect for Dawn, doesn't it? But it could have been a box of candy, a Michener- or Dallas-like sweeping soap opera of one family's fight to hold onto its belongings. It isn't. The climate shifts, the house falls into disrepair, the property changes hands, trees are cut; a giant ghost catamount drags dead sheep into the kitchen . . . and, throughout, the authorial tone remains curious, nonjudgmental, watching time pass, change happen. It's a sad and happy and terrible and wonderful tale.

Two days ago I was still harvesting bits of kale, parsley, and green onions from the garden. But finally, tonight, our first snowstorm of the season will blanket the beds. It's supposed to snow all day tomorrow, dropping about 10 inches, and I am longing for it. Winter Maine without snow is a sad sight.

Yesterday was busy: phone meetings morning and afternoon, swaths of housework, but I did get a chance to spend time with the poem draft, and I think it has arrived at an ending. What an odd beast: pastiche and memory, time leaps and invention . . . I loved making it, but don't know what to make of it.

All night it rested, in paper clothes, on my new desk, mulling over itself, ripening into something, or rotting away. I wonder what it will say to me when I turn on the light, when I sit down to read.

Shifting from first-writing to first-revision requires separation, a shift from living inside to living outside. Now I no longer inhabit the draft. Now the draft is its own small planet, whirling through space.

* * *

Today I'll run errands--go to the fish market, go to the Italian market, haul a load to the Goodwill--but at some point I'll find myself at my desk, looking down, considering, wondering what I've made and what it's become. For me, revision is both very obvious (certain sounds, certain words, certain images ring false, clutter, paraphrase, mislead) and very mysterious (this must be; this cannot be). I do not think in terms of craft. Maybe that's because I was never trained. I've never jumped through any MFA fires; I've never written an annotation or an analysis; I've never wriggled under a graduate professor's thumb. All I do is read and write, and talk a little, and call that talk teaching or friendship. It's not much of an artist's statement, but it's all I've got.

We slept a bit late this morning, as T doesn't have to be on the job today till 9. It's cold out there, and shortly I've got to gird myself to haul the recycling and compost bins to the curb and then begin my usual Friday sheets-and-towels-and-floors cleaning routine. Oy, the amount of time I spend keeping this little household shipshape. But I know bad things would happen to my state of mind if I didn't.

Snow is forecast for Saturday night and Sunday, then again for Tuesday night into Wednesday. Within that tiny window of no-snow I'll be on the road, so wish me luck.

Thus, today is my last day of freedom, such as it is, with this load of housework to do and then a weekend of chores and shoveling. And I've got two phone meetings and various conference-publicity chores to deal with, so maybe "last day of freedom" isn't even a pertinent phrase. But that giant poem draft is still fizzing, my desks are still splayed with dictionaries; I still one have one last day of not being beholden to a paystub.

I finished Mason's The North Woods, which I hope to write about this weekend, and immediately began rereading John Fowles's novella The Ebony Tower. For now I need to stay with books that construct versions of enchantment . . . this seems to have been an important impetus for my current poem draft.  Byatt's The Children's Book, Fowles's The Magus and The Ebony Tower, Mason's The North Woods, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series: everything I've been reading lately has apparently been cutting a window in my mind, though each of these works is very different from the others . . . and all make clear that enchantment is not necessarily safe or good.

And today I'll talk to Teresa about Donne's "Batter my heart, three-personed God." The words are overwhelming me, really. My reading is a sea.

Which is why my house needs to be clean and neat. Otherwise, I would drown.

Better late than never. After two weeks of opportunity in which I barely wrote, I have, in these last few days of freedom, fallen straight down the rabbit hole. Books are splayed open all over my desk . . . the poems of Tennyson, the poems of Dickinson, the OED. On my laptop I've got tabs open to Britannia's 1911 explications of archaic bird names such as "throstle-cock" and "lintwhite"; to The Exeter Book, a codex of Old English poetry; to the biography of Marguerite Henry, author of Misty of Chincoteague . . . The poem is five pages long and just beginning . . . the poem is a miscellany and a pastiche and an invention and a memoir. It is very exciting. It is a giant mess.

I'm trying to keep up with other things too--notably, spreading the word about the Conference on Poetry and Learning at Monson Arts. If you know teachers or other community builders who would benefit from this close, collegial week, please spread the word. Scholarships are available, and you don't have to be a teacher to qualify. Need and eagerness are good-enough reasons. We want you there.

Today I'll have to tear myself away from my desk--do some grocery shopping, do some housework. I'll probably go out to write tonight, not that I need any prompting at the moment but it will be nice to see people.

I am so relieved to be a writer again.

New neighbors moved in yesterday, so all day long three burly guys lumbered back and forth among storage pods, a moving truck, the rental house, hauling confused sofas and wide-eyed boxes through the frosty air.

Meanwhile, I was upstairs in my study working on a poem that seemed to be channeling an imaginary Tennyson, an imaginary Dickinson. It's complete rubble so far, but the oddity is keeping me going.  A few pages in, I realized, for instance, that Dickinson has written my biography. I can't wait to see what she's said. That alone is a reason to keep forging ahead with this sloppy creation.

Midday I walked out into the small streets, the small woods, the broad cemetery. The poem draft rattled in my head. Crows perched on the tip-top twigs of the pines. Small dogs in small jackets scuttled past like caterpillars. The sea was out of sight, not out of mind. The sea is always around the corner in this town.

Dürer would have seen a reason for living
     in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house
on a fine day, from water etched
     with waves as formal as the scales
on a fish.

That's Marianne Moore, from "The Steeple-Jack" (1932). It is the only Moore poem I love, but I love it hard.

Sometimes visions arrive like sun-glitter on a bay. I squint against the bright. There's no possibility of seeing. Only sparks and shadows.

Five a.m., 18 degrees. It's the first working day of the new year. The house is warm; the furnace is rumbling; the coffee is fresh and strong.

I have things to do today: marketing for the teaching conference, planning for upcoming classes, working on web copy, answering stacks of emails. I expect my next editing project to arrive this week. I need to run errands. Our driveway will host a new neighbor's moving pod for a few days. I'm not in the classroom again till next week, but I've got plenty to keep me busy till then.

My son James gave me Daniel Mason's novel North Woods for Christmas, and I dug into it yesterday, in between making Julia Child's Reine de Saba cake and her porc roti. I'm amazed by it thus far; it is a surprising and magical fictional history of a single homesite, featuring a multitude of characters--human, animal, plant, corpse. Somehow I'd never heard of it before, so thank goodness my son had. The book is shaking me up, in a good way.

It's lovely to start the new year with an excellent novel, a French chocolate cake, a brisk walk with my boyfriend, a good night's sleep. This morning I feel lively and cheerful, ready to trudge back into my desk chores, to gird myself for the next round of travel and teaching, to consider the new poem draft unrolling on my laptop, to hang laundry and wash dishes and sweep floors and soak beans (tonight's meal: moros y cristianos--Caribbean black beans and rice--a family favorite).

Cheers to you all, as you slide back into the dance.

I'm feeling a little tongue-tied on this first morning of the long slog into the rest of winter. Still, it's nice to have a holiday that celebrates "Take down the decorations and go back to work. It's time to be cold and lonely till spring." New Year's Day is the plaintive Sunday night of the holiday season.

Maybe that's why I find it impossible to play the New Year's resolution game. "Today I resolve to catch up on laundry and make sure there's enough bread for Tom's work lunches" is typical of the Sunday-style plans I make on New Year's Day. I don't need to waste it on podunk "keep exercising, don't eat stupid food" promises. I can make those any old day, and I do.

So, on this New Year's Day, I've decided to speculate about what I don't know, what I have no plans for, what I've never seen or worn, what probably won't happen or will happen unrecognizably. Feel free to add to the list.

Tap shoes

Edwardian hats

Snails on plates

Mesas

Spelunking

Genghis Khan

Condors' eggs

Singing Monteverdi

Breaking a Tiffany lamp

Understanding Kant

Twerking

Shopping at Burger King

Gold ingots

Ivory-billed woodpecker

Ferrets in the living room

Pepsi

Watching Survivor

Heated toilet seat

Water polo

Calculus

Boxing

Cake mix

Go-go boots

Licking a frozen fence post

Botox

Shipwreck 

 

Happy New Year! I'm so glad you're bumbling around on this planet with me.

The remnants of the Howard W. Middleton, wrecked on Higgins Beach in Scarborough, Maine, in 1897; walked on by Tom and Dawn, New Year's Eve 2023