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.