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.