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.