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.