Yesterday's class was fun: also hard work. I ended up with 12 pages of new writing from the prompts that Teresa and I cooked up around notions of personification, synesthesia, bibliomancy, and an old learn-to-speak-Esperanto schoolbook. I hope the participants' notebooks are equivalently fat and that they're excited by what they've uncovered.

Tomorrow I'll be on the road again, away from home for two nights so I can teach a day in Milo and another in Monson. Then working at home for a couple of days, and then on the road again, to Vermont and a weekend of family matters.

So today is my only day off for quite a while, and I intend to treat it as such. A walk, a movie, a nap . . . who knows what comfortable unexciting adventures lie ahead? I eagerly await them. Of course I won't laze around every second. I've been dipping into Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf. I need to spend time with my friend Betsy's poem draft. I need to go to the grocery store and I need to do some laundry. I'll make Sunday dinner: probably oven-fried chicken alongside a fennel and cherry tomato salad, maybe mashed potatoes with garlic and parsley, and then fresh raspberry sorbet for dessert.

But I'll get started slowly.

Sunlight is streaking the houses now, and above them the sky is as blue as baby's shirt.

I am tired, and I have worries that I am slotting away into rational pigeonholes. This is necessary and useful and allows me to go on, but the effort adds to the weariness. It can be hard to be sensible, hard to be reasonable, hard to be patient. You know what I mean.

Still, the sky is as blue as a baby's shirt, fresh from the drawer, smelling of trees and wind.