Yesterday was so gorgeous, so warm and sunny; and though I did work at my desk in the morning, I was out and about for a lot of the day--running errands, walking with my neighbor, hanging laundry and planting herbs, riding bikes with T, then sitting by the fire pit in the gloaming. But the day was an anomaly: for the rest of the week we're back to low 50s and periodic rain. Of course I am not complaining: my peas and onions have sprouted; the radishes, arugula, and spinach are up. Clearly the garden is loving this shifty weather, and I love it too. Warm or cold, springtime is magic.

For the past few years I've had a distinct summer editing season. I am regularly assigned to copyedit the press's prize winners for fiction, poetry, and memoir, and I look forward to it. The work is a break from my usual heavy-duty academic editing: far less time-consuming while also more closely linked to my own expertise. I can work for a couple of hours a day on a creative manuscript, and feel useful and employed, but still have unstructured time to spend on my own pursuits. So with the high school sessions over and my summer editing season underway, I am learning to live in spacious time again. I still haven't started writing poems again, but I am not beating myself up. By now I know that I always need time to adjust to a new clock.

I suppose I should consider submitting some of my finished work to journals. I currently have nothing out. Nothing. My publication ambitions seem to have vanished like the passenger pigeon.

I am ambitious to write and read, and to talk to people about writing and reading. But I don't want to judge poetry contests, and I don't want to claw my way into the pages of literary journals. I'd rather mop floors.

There was no rain in yesterday's forecast, and yet there was rain . . . off-and-on showers that wrecked all hope of dry laundry and a cookout. Still, I dodged the drops, or sometimes didn't, and managed to pound in tomato stakes, set bean and cucumber trellises, plant escarole and spinach and cilantro, finish the backyard weeding. I have no complaints about the rain: a young garden adores these regular small downpours. T and I did manage another late-afternoon bike ride together. And then, in the evening, we played cards by the fire, and ate shrimp and macaroni, and watched Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame suffer from the torments of love, as the rain fell and the tulips bloomed.

Today is supposed to be gloriously sunny, temperatures in the mid-sixties, and of course it is Monday and everyone has to go to work and school, even me. I've got a new editing project to start, a manuscript to read, class prep for the weekend . . . but I daresay I'll get outside. I'd like to swing over to the nursery and buy some parsley and thyme plants. I'd like to sit in a sunny spot and purr.

Already the sky is bluing. The air is humid and fresh. Maybe I'll eat my lunch outside. Maybe I'll read the poems of George Herbert while lying in a hammock (actually, probably not: given the delicate condition of that paperback, the poems of George Herbert would scatter like a flock of pigeons). Maybe I'll open the windows and fill the rooms with flowers.

Yesterday was just about perfect--the weather was dreamy, and T and I were outside together in the springtime from morning till night. We started our day at our favorite diner in Biddeford, arriving promptly at 7 a.m. so we'd be sure of a seat. Then we drove down to our favorite marshland, the Wells Estuarine Reserve at Laudholm Farm, and wandered the beach and the trails.

It was a quiet morning, still cool, and the tame waves rippled, and the sandpipers and the plovers busied themselves in the mudflats, and the Canada geese barked warningly from their nests.

We got home by noon, ate leftover homemade pizza for lunch, and then I dealt with laundry, did the mowing, and started weeding in the backyard. Meanwhile, T fixed my busted garden hose and undertook spring fence repair, mending the gash that a tree branch had torn over the winter, propping up various lazy posts. The cat wandered between us, delighted to interfere. I chatted mildly with neighbors. And then, when he was finished, T got our bikes out of the shed, pumped tires and oiled chains, and we took our first spin of the season. I am delighted to announce that my dogged winter exercise drill has paid off: my knees felt great (thank you, squats and lunges!) and my wind felt great (thank you, silly dance routine!), and we sailed around the neighborhood and through the cemetery, and I was extremely pleased with myself.

Afterward I fried lamb chops in parmesan batter, baked Yorkshire pudding, roasted tomatoes and kale. We ate the last of the mango cake, and we played cards, and we listened to the Sox stomp the Cubs. And then the pleasure of physical exhaustion, and then to bed, with an open window and sheets smelling of breeze.

What a day. And today will be another such, I hope . . . no outing to the beach, but open windows, tulips in bloom, garden beds tidied, seeds sowed, a bike ride or a walk, and maybe our first fire-pit meal of the season.

I've got some prep to do for next Sunday's chapbook session. I need to buy Mets-Sox tickets (another adventure: an early September outing to Queens with my NYC kids). But mostly I'll be outside. I hope you are drinking in the spring too.

It's Saturday, and I'm awake too early after a spate of ominous house-repair dreams, but oh well. The coffee is hot and fresh and we were planning an early outing anyway--a diner breakfast in Biddeford and then a walk among the salt marshes to check out the spring bird migration.

Even in near dark, the neighborhood tumbles with bird song: cardinals shrilling in the maples, a white-throated sparrow sam-peabodying, robins chortling on the ragged lawns, and somewhere a small woodpecker drilling out his breakfast.

Yesterday, as I paused between fights with my garden hose, I looked up into the trees and thought, Were those buds open five minutes ago? Spring is unfolding so quickly. The cherry blossoms tremble in a sandpaper breeze, and my heart cracks open at the sight of such pure beauty. 

I cleaned the house yesterday, even polished some furniture, opened a window, argued with some weeds. I hung out sheets and towels, and all day long they shimmied in the windy sunshine. I mixed up bread dough for pizza, I read about Patrick Bronte's peculiar rise from Irish farm boy to Cambridge-educated evangelical, I thought about poems, I received an email with a blurb for my new book that made me cry, "gorgeous echoes of Plath and Celan," it said, and I cried, and I wrote nothing, I ambled among the neighborhood streets, spotting the first spikes of lily-of-the-valley in other people's gardens, I found a milk-white narcissus in my own backyard, I sat on my ugly front stoop with my handsome cat and listened to the empty street, everyone else somewhere else, at work, at school, as I idled with the cat and my hiccupy sentimental tears, because someone had read my book and called it "stupendous," because my mind was a run-on sentence, because this is the springtime of my sixtieth year and, gosh, I've been around for a while, haven't I, so how is it that the world can still feel brand new?

This has been a week of endings: editing project finished, teaching year done, contest judging finalized. I feel as if I'm unpeeling. Today I have nothing--nothing!--written on my calendar. Of course, that doesn't mean I have nothing to do. There's always plenty of housework, yard work, desk work. But I don't have to fit anything around anyone. The day is an open field.

Friday is sheets-and-towels day, so hanging laundry outside is one thing I'll be doing. I'd like to take a look at the new book I've acquired: Juliet Barker's fat biography of the Brontes, which my friend Jeannie is also beginning to read. I've started Margaret Drabble's novel The Sea Lady, and I might start catching up on my George Herbert homework. I could transcribe blurts out of my notebook and see if any of them might be poems. There's much weeding and mowing to be done in the backyard. I might set bread to rise. I might spring-clean a room.

The key word is might. It feels good to shrug; to say, "Maybe. Or maybe not."

Always, my creative life spins up from this swirl of spaciousness and busyness. Even if I don't work on poems today, I'll be working on poems today . . . Household matters are a pedestrian muse, and yet there they are: lifting me into poetry, as they always have.

It's cold this morning--28 degrees--and everything damp from yesterday's rain-spatters has frozen up tight. I was glad to have a wood fire last night, and a warm bed. But today the sun will come out, the frost will melt, and brisk spring will return. I hope to take a long a walk. I hope to hang clothes on the line. I doubt I'll have time to scratch around in the garden, as I've got zoom meetings and housework to juggle, but one never knows.

I went up to Maine Med yesterday morning to visit my friend Jay, who was recovering from open-heart surgery. He looked better than I've seen him in a long time--bright-eyed, good color--and we sat in his room and we walked the halls and we drank the coffee I'd brought and he talked about poems and baseball and cardiologists and the Torah, only two of which I know much about. But I left feeling light-hearted, which is not a usual response to a hospital visit. Jay was so full of gratitude, so full of second-chance glow. And it rubbed off on me. I felt full of second-chance glow as I mulled the offerings of the grocery store, as I fell suddenly in love with two giant purple-and-green artichokes, each as big as a baby's head. Ah, I said to myself, and tucked them into my basket.

As sustenance, they were nonsensical. Tom and I needed 45 extra minutes at the table to finish them, but we did it, dipping each leathery leaf into yogurt sauce as the Red Sox managed to win a game in the background, as the fire ticked in the stove. Eventually we worked our way into the center, scraping out the prickly innards to reveal the massive heart beneath. All of this sounds like a metaphor, but sometimes metaphors are just what happens. I went to visit a friend with a mended heart, and then I fell in love with an artichoke and I ate it.

Well, I've closed (almost) one chapter of this year's schoolwork. Next Friday I'll go up to Monson for the kids' show opening, but I'm done with schoolteaching for the nonce. It was a good year. After what were essentially two pilot seasons (thanks to Covid), I feel as if I finally was able to construct a full, useful, year-long plan that, with tweaks, I'll be able to keep leaning on in the future. And my students were stellar, the Monson Arts administration was hugely supportive, and I managed to figure out some personal solutions to managing my perpetual road trips.

The kids were full of emotion about their last day. There were tears. A year spent with poetry does that people. I, too, felt sad all the way home--the good sort of sad; a welling up of pride in what the students had accomplished; worry, also, about their future struggles. And I was tired. It has been a long, focused year of work--not merely the act of teaching but also the massive project of curriculum creation. Future years will be easier in that regard because I now have a template. But creating the template was an undertaking.

Today will be a this-and-that day. I may do no desk work at all. There's nothing crucial to accomplish, schedule-wise. I finished an editing project on Monday, so I'm on hiatus till the next project shows up. I do have a friend's poetry manuscript to read, and teaching-conference prep to continue, and Poetry Kitchen arrangements to make, and of course my own poems to work on. But I might give myself a day off from thinking. I'll go to the grocery store. I'll visit a friend in the hospital. I'll fidget in the garden, if it doesn't rain. If it does rain, I'll fidget with housework. I'll take a walk.

It's April in Maine, and the tulips are budding, and the radishes and arugula have sprouted, and a rough breeze rides in from the sea. I want to be in this story.

It's my last morning in Monson for a while. The sun is shining, the sky is clear blue, the air is chilly with the promise of modest warmth. On my walk to the store for coffee I passed the big mail delivery truck, backing into the post office hatch. I passed a man motor-sweeping winter grit in a parking lot. I passed pickup trucks heading north and south toward their labors. Red-winged blackbirds trilled and swooped. The lake water, ice-free now, rippled like a flawed mirror, and a faraway speck that was a loon curved, dove, and disappeared.

Last night I ate dinner with a new batch of travel-weary artists who'd just arrived from far-flung homes around the country, slightly bewildered but game to spend four weeks in Monson trying to make art. Last night, when she saw me, the chef cried, "Dawn! When are you giving me a book of your poems?" And then, this morning, I walked into the store for coffee and was greeted by name. I am a regular up here now. That's one thing I lost when I left Harmony: the feeling of being a regular. Of course it's not 100 percent comfortable to be a regular. It's also a good chance to feel embarrassed and sheepish, to be forced to take sides, to know for sure that people are talking about you behind your back. Still, it's something to not be a stranger.

Every class morning I write a little remark on the whiteboard, to greet the kids as they come in off the bus. Today I'll be writing this:

Time’s up. You’re in the house. I’m through the door. 

It's the last line of a poem by Kim Addonizio; and in this out-of-context setting, I thought it encapsulated some of what it feels like to be a teacher on the last day of school. So many times I've directly said in class settings, "My task here is to teach myself out of a job." That's true whether I'm working with poets, with teachers, with young people, with my own kids. "My job," I say, "is to help you not need me."

It may be a righteous mission, but it's always a poignant one too. What is more sorrowful, more wondrous, than watching a bright-eyed searcher light out for the territories? 

I got so much work done outside yesterday . . . all of the front-yard and some of the side-yard beds cleaned out and weeded, grass mowed and edged, compost bought and spread. I sowed escarole, beets, cilantro, and lettuce. I planted six pots of pansies. I harvested ramps and chives and kale and sage. The backyard still needs attention, but this was a huge bite out of my chore list.

Today I'm back in the saddle--heading north to Monson for my final high school session of the year. I'll see the kids next week too, when I go up for their gallery opening, but tomorrow is the last class. I've got a big collaborative, multi-genre, performance project planned out--a whole day of play. And then it will be over, and the kids will disappear into their own lives. It's always bittersweet, the last day of school.

Well, we're ready. We're all ready. It's been a long school year, and for me it's not over yet; I've got classes scheduled into July. But I'll be glad to take a hiatus from at least one batch of curriculum planning, to pause my constant travels north.

In two weeks I'll be curled up on a seat on a train, heading midwest into the setting sun. I hope to have the yard and garden in good springtime shape before I leave. I hope my editing pile will be thin. I hope to be ready to write. 

Yesterday afternoon's reading turned out to be such fun: a car ride spent getting to know my fellow reader, and then a small but but very engaged audience who asked lots of questions and also bought books. It was very uplifting, really.

This was my only as-advertised National Poetry Month activity. I don't know if less fuss is being made about National Poetry Month than there used to be. Or maybe I'm just doing more poetry-related jobs year round so I no longer notice the dividing line. Certainly I'm busy, and my work balance between freelance editing and poetry-related gigs has shifted. I still need the editing jobs, but I earn more these days from poetry than I ever have before. You couldn't call it a living wage, but it is a palpable contribution to the coffers.

For me, my biggest changes in fortune were (1) the invitation, in 2019, to design a high school writing program at Monson Arts and (2), during the pandemic, the rise of zoom as an independent teaching platform . . . though of course both of these opportunities were direct consequences of my first big gift: the chance to direct the teaching conference at the Frost Place. It's interesting, in retrospect, to track the slow shifts. Because I don't have either an MFA or a teaching certificate, I could not make my way into classrooms via the usual routes. I was not hireable. The side path was slow and it was stony. And yet here I am, dusty and still trudging. My first Poetry Kitchen offerings are completely full. I'm finishing my third year with the high school program and feel as if I've found my groove there. In June I'll be team-teaching two teacher-training sessions for the arts education organization SidexSide. In July I'll be leading the inaugural Conference on Poetry and Learning in Monson. In August I hope I'll be doing nothing but my own work, though that is likely a pipe dream. And then, in September, back to a new batch of high schoolers. It's almost what you could call a career.

***

Yesterday evening, when I got back from my reading, T announced, "I made dinner reservations!" So arm in arm we walked around the corner to our local, Woodford's Food and Beverage, and we ate mussels and drank cold white wine, and then we strolled home and watched an old Peter Gunn episode, leaning into one another on the couch. Every day I miss living in the woods, but I am ready to admit that the delights of the city are intoxicating too. How pleasant it is to walk out to dinner, to sit idly in a restaurant and watch night roll in, to watch the car headlights assume a noir-movie glitter, to listen to voices, to the clatter of plates and clink of glasses, to smile at my dear one across a starched tablecloth.

. . . and, today, to have the good fortune to be home together. I'm going to work in the garden, maybe go out to buy soil and pansies, maybe hang clothes on the line, maybe listen to afternoon baseball, maybe fall asleep on the couch, maybe read a novel, maybe go for a walk . . . 

Concord Street Hymn

 

Dawn Potter

 

Elaine is standing on her stoop with her doddering

chow Teddy, and I am trying to decide if I

can pretend I don’t see her. Elaine has a shout 

like a blue jay’s and she specializes

in the unanswerable. “Dawn!” she hollers now, “I can’t

recognize you if you’re not wearing a hat!”

Meekly I halt and admire her daffodils.

“I dug them up by mistake,” she barks.

“Now I don’t have a-one.”

 

Next door, at the LBRSTMN’s ranch house,

there is no shouting. The license plate on his pickup

is the only information available. Otherwise: shades

drawn tight, a note to the mailman taped to the door,

a needle on the front sidewalk, and daffodils

bobbing along the foundation:

yes, there will be

 

daffodils in every stanza of this poem

because it is spring in Maine, and all people

except for teenagers are still wearing

their winter coats, and the maples

in the backyards are bare-armed wrestlers,

and the gutters are scarred with sand

and cigarette butts, and the breeze

 

kicking up from the ocean makes us

lift our muzzles like hounds.

O wind and salt!

Daffodils tremble in the yard

of the pro bono lawyer, tremble

among the faded plastic shovels of her children.

A woodpecker shouts among the bald maples

 

and Elaine maligns me: “I don’t know why you’re

outside so much. You don’t even have a dog.”

She makes me feel like dirt but that’s not

so bad. A swirl of sea-gale buffets the chimneys, 

twigs clatter onto Subarus. Daffodils, yellow as eyes,

breast the wind. Earth is thawing, they

shout, they shout, and I, on this half-

green bank, unfurl.

[from Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, 2022)]

Woke up to a mild rain, just what the newly planted seeds are longing for. And now I am sitting here quietly, enjoying my first weekend morning at home for a while. Midday I will need to head out for a reading, but for the moment I am unhurried and unperturbed.

Yesterday afternoon Delle, Teresa, Jeannie, and I ended up in a two-hour zoom confab that mostly centered around Anne Carson's long poem "The Glass Essay," which we'd all read beforehand and, unbeknownst to one another, all deeply disliked. So that was interesting: discovering, unexpectedly, that the four of us had meshed over a poem that is generally treated as exemplary. To me, it felt imaginatively untrustworthy, among other things. But of course I was worried about saying so, assuming that others had read it "better" than I had. It was surprisingly cathartic to discover that my admired friends also mistrusted the poem.

Otherwise, I had a plain day. I walked. I edited. I did laundry and mopped floors. I made chicken stock and then chicken and rice soup. I played cribbage and lit a fire and drank a beer and listened to a peppy baseball game. I read a history of the Comanches and I read a novel about the Maine coast. I felt sad about my neighbor, who died in his house two days ago so can no longer love the daffodils that bob brightly in his front-yard grass.

This afternoon I'll be reading at the Gibbs Memorial Library in Washington, Maine, at 3 p.m., alongside the poet and archivist Jefferson Navicky. He and I will also be carpooling together, and I'm looking forward to some conversation with him beforehand. The venue is a small library in a small town, and the reading will undoubtedly have a small audience, but what's new. Small is the story of poetry. 

I went out to write last night, for the first time in two weeks, and I guess it was the right thing to do because all three drafts poured out of me, a rush of words, a swirl of geography, bits and pieces of my reading, of my days, floating like jetsam in the torrent of lines.

It's possible that next week I might have a chance to work on some of the material in my notebook. There's a lot to comb through: I haven't had revision space for weeks, and I won't have it today. I need to finish the editing project; I need to prep for tomorrow's reading; I need to meet with my Poetry Lab compadres; I need to clean the downstairs rooms and wash sheets and towels; I need to make chicken stock and weed the gardens. There's not enough time in the day, some days, most days . . . especially in spring.

But there's happiness: the alarm didn't go off at 4:30 this morning, and I slept hard all night long. I've drunk my one small cup of coffee, and a dark blue sky is unfolding behind the silhouetted maples. This morning, before breakfast, I'll take a long walk; I'll amble toward my slate of obligations and keep watch for hawks and mockingbirds and woodpeckers and bobbing daffodils.

What a fancy world I live in, gilded with poems and clothespins and packets of seeds. 

Alarm went off at 4:30 this morning as we have to bring T's truck out of town to get a brake-line job, and then he has to bring me home and then borrow my car to go to work, and all of this driving around cuts into his get-ready-for-work time, so voila. 4:30. Blah.

At least I got the coffee made. And I have a couple of seconds to sit here on the couch with it, before I have to clump up the stairs to get dressed.

Yesterday I wrote up some class plans and did some editing. I went for a walk with my neighbor, and I worked outside, cleaning up the stick pile, weeding the vegetable-garden beds. And then I noticed that, two houses up, there were police cars parked outside, a crime-scene van, a firetruck. Something was going on at Ray's house. Turns out he was dead.

So that was an unsettling end to the day. Apparently he'd died in the house, and not very recently. He lived alone, and I saw him often, tinkering with his cars. But I didn't see him every day, certainly not since we'd been on vacation. He could have been in there a while.

Sign of spring on the Alcott House homestead: the lenten roses in full glory. I love these flowers (also known as hellebore). The buds begin to show in March and open alongside the crocuses, but they often last into the heat of the summer--sturdy and elegant and unperturbed.

You may or may not remember that, during the pandemic, my son gave names to all of the micro-sections of our micro-property. This is what he calls the Hill Country, the slope between our driveway and our neighbors', and right now it is a sea of sky-blue scylla. Note the new arch that I've just installed, to replace the one that blew over in a storm. Soon it will be covered with roses and clematis.

 And no photo gallery is complete without a portrait of Ruckus sleeping in a fire pit.

***

Yesterday afternoon's yard work was prosaic: breaking up sticks for kindling; retrieving the hose from the basement and setting it up outside. Today I hope to do some weeding and cultivating. Our plot is little, but there's still much to be done, and I only have an hour or so in the afternoons to devote to it. But gradually I'm making progress.

This morning I need to work on class planning; I need to put in some editing time; I need to deal with emails and hang laundry and do my exercises. I don't know when I'm going to find time to revise poems, or even to go back and look at the notes I made during the eclipse. And the spring air is glorious. It's hard to stay inside. 

I did get outside yesterday afternoon, and I did get many things planted: peas, potatoes, onions, arugula, radishes. It felt so good to be scratching around in the dirt and then afterward, from the house windows, to glimpse the black earth rows, fluffy and soft from the cultivator, so tidy and full of promise.

Today, in and among my desk and grocery responsibilities, I'll get outside again. I want to do some weeding; I want to bag up sticks. I want to hang clothes on the line. The cat, who is loath to let me out of his sight, will be delighted. There's nothing he likes better than hanging around in his own yard with his own people.

I've been reading a history of the Comanches, S. C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon. I've been working with student poems, getting them ready for display. I've been making risotto with the last of my foraged maitake mushrooms. I've been editing a book about mothering during the pandemic. I've been discovering a leaky pipe in the basement.

Other stuff: On Saturday I've got a reading at the Gibbs Library in Washington, Maine. And DeLuge Journal has just published an issue featuring the members of my Thursday night writing group, the May Street Writers. All of our poems in the issue are responses to the same prompt, so reading them will give you an idea of how rich and varied this process can be.

Greetings from the old familiar couch corner. Greetings from little Alcott House on its little blooming plot. Greetings from the little neighborhood, quieted by school-vacation week but still rife with singing cardinals. Greetings from the cat, who is so, so happy we're home; who follows us up and down the stairs and in and out through the doors like a devoted little terrier.

We arrived home in the early afternoon, which gave me time to hang clean clothes on the outdoor lines, to open the windows, to pick up sticks from the most recent storms, to set up the new rose arch and the pea trellis, to fill a dishpan with baby kale. Last year's wintered-over crop has recovered spectacularly. It's a treat to have such bountiful early greens, enough to harvest in quantity for salad and for roasting.

The weather this week will be glorious--highs in the sixties and no significant rain in the forecast. I'm longing to rush out into the garden today, but I know I have to work: editing mostly, and I need to get my high schoolers' final pieces ready for the printer. I also need to return to some sense of routine: exercise, food, walking, etc. But probably I'll find a way to snag an hour this afternoon to plant my peas, and maybe sow some lettuce and radishes too, maybe even dig in potatoes and onion sets. I am so eager to get my hands into the dirt. 

And today we will wander back to Portland.

It's been a good week--the eclipse, the rain and wind, the peepers, the meals and wine and conversation, and yesterday, finally, the hike up Flying Mountain, picking our way up a stony trail that was, in places a running stream, looking out over hazy Somes Sound, hearing the loons wail, feeling earth and water stretch beneath our shoes.

Back at the cottage I cleaned out flowerbeds while T cut down a tree that was threatening our friend's house, and then the three of us lugged logs to the woodpile, and meanwhile the crows screeched and daffodils winked in the weeds and spring is here; at long last spring has arrived.

This week my thoughts will turn toward planting peas in my own garden. This week I'll open my own windows and let the stale winter air dissipate in the breeze. This week I'll hang a first load of laundry on the lines.

In a few weeks, we'll be back on the island, briefly, for Curtis's memorial service. Sorrow and a big party and a bright wind off the sea. That feels about right.

Two days of wind and rain, and now, this morning, a limpid cloudy blue, pale as an old shirt, stains sea and sky. Last night, even as the storm tore at the cottage, I could tell that the weather was spring-softening, gusts spinning from nor'easter to westerly, and the peepers and frogs knew it too.

Tom returned from his trip, brisk and cheerful. Our friend walked down from her house, and we ate macaroni and cheese and Brussels sprouts and talked about spy novels and car-chase movies.

I did manage to finish large chunks of various jobs yesterday, and today I intend to do no desk work at all. Maybe we'll be able to hike, but I have my doubts. There are puddles and ponds and mud holes everywhere. The earth is a leaking sponge.

But the birds are singing after rain, and the sea ripples outside my window.

Tomorrow we go home.

The weather on Mount Desert Island has been lousy, at least for anyone who is desperate to climb a mountain. Yesterday, it rained all day--sometimes drizzle, sometimes downpour--and this morning I woke to wind whipping rain spatters against the window. Outside, fog lingers over the mudflats; sea and sky are milky pale, horizon line invisible.

I worked yesterday morning; then my friend and I went to Northeast Harbor to look at an art show in the library and eat lunch. She drove us along the edge of Somes Sound, the broad fjord that cuts into the center of the island. Under rain the ocean rocked choppily against its granite walls, back and forth, back and forth, like a massive cradle.

And then afterward, back at the cottage, I fell asleep, hard, till after 5. If I can't hike on this vacation, at least I can sleep. The shush of rain, the shush of tides, gulls crying, wind swirling in the spruce trees, tick of wood stove and gas heater . . . all of it conspires toward sleep, and I am capitulating.

Now, after waking late, I sit in the big shabby chair, drinking coffee from a cup named Ernie, watching the stove wood catch flame, listening to the endless rattle of wind. In a few minutes I'll take a shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, buckle down to work. T will be back from his journey later today. My friend and I will do something or other together after lunch. Meanwhile, there is sea and there is rain.

 By 4 a.m. T was up and gone--away on his photo journey--and I, who thought I would not fall asleep again, fell asleep into a complex dream about a bus journey, a town meeting, and interchanged identities, and I woke up late and groggy and dream-hungover. So here I sit, watching the fire catch in the stove, acquainting myself with the pallid light of morning.

The moon has coaxed away the sea, and the mudflats, specked with boulders, draped with kelp, stretch along the foot of the bluff. Color has been washed away. There is no brilliance. Two Canada geese fly west.

In a little while I'll get dressed and walk up to my friend's house, and we'll have coffee and probably do a zoom exercise class together and then I will feel like a normal awake person. But for now I am liminal, still barely myself, breathing slowly into slow fog. I ask myself, What does bleak mean? and I do not have an explanation. 

 

First light through a window screen. Low tide, tipped-over chairs, frost on grass. On the horizon a long low island.

In the cottage coffee burbles. The wood stove heats. On the kitchen table a spray of forsythia, buds still tightly closed, parts the air. The sky and the sea are streaked with pink. Somewhere outside, in the tangles of raspberry canes and old apple trees, a goldfinch is chattering.

The sweetness of this cottage, this quiet cove . . . last night, as T and I walked down the driveway from our friend's house to our own, the cries of peepers and bullfrogs pulsed under a sky packed with stars.

I took detailed field notes about the events of yesterday, and I hope to find space this week to sit down and begin to untangle my experiences. I can't do that for you this morning as I'm getting ready for work and also trying to recover from a couple of nights of poor sleep. But the entire day was intense--first as a massive human influx . . . rural roads jammed with cars, town streets overrun with excited people, the air filled with anticipation--and then the eclipse itself, which, as the moon advanced over the sun, began to alter the human tone into a strange and poignant lonesomeness . . . and then totality, which was such a massive physical shock, like coming face to face with the gods. Both Tom and I spoke afterward of our reactions-- for him uneasy, like he'd just had an upsetting confrontation; for me, like being drawn into some terrifying ceremony. The moment was beautiful, like nothing else I'd ever seen, but it was also deeply unsettling.

And then, as the moon shifted, that brocaded world returned to simple strangeness, and then, soon, to its everyday self.

As we ate dinner last night--a gorgeous prix fixe meal featuring lamb and scallops and a pineapple sorbet palate cleanser and delicate pea soup and an egg and strawberry salad and a coconut creme brulee I had to bring home to eat later--T and I began to bat around the idea of making a common project of our eclipse experience. I wrote all day, he photographed all day, and we were both wound up by the situation. We don't generally attempt artistic collaborations with one another; we're very different in our work. But here something drew us into a parallel stream. Time will tell if we make anything of it.

An intense orange sunrise spreads over the dismantled gas station. Welcome to eclipse day in the Path of Totality. Tom loves that phrase and keeps muttering it to himself as he takes photos of giant dirty snow piles and pink brooms sticking out of dumpsters. He is on the prowl, and I am amused to watch him at work.

So far, Monson is fairly quiet--just a couple of RVs parked behind the post office--but I expect the place will start hopping soon.

We got into town by late afternoon, hauled our pile of food into the house, then went for a walk up to the quarry. Patty melts, caramelized onions, roasted potatoes, and a tomato salad for dinner, to the tune of Beyonce's first solo album. As we cooked, I read Wolf Hall, and Tom took photos of the gas pumps. Occasionally we interrupted each other to discuss Jay-Z or decide whether or not an item could go in the dishwasher. (Note: We have decided that in a vacation house all items can go in the dishwasher. We hope that Jay-Z and Beyonce's relationship is nothing like Ike and Tina Turner's.)

This morning we are going to drive to a yard sale we saw advertised on a poster stapled to a telephone pole. It is our only plan, beyond drinking coffee and eavesdropping among the eclipse crowd. The yard sale sign advertised many esoteric items, including what I read as "badger" and what Tom read as "badges." I hope I am right but I think I am not. In any case, our car is very full. We don't have room for a badger, unless we strap it to the roof.

I think I will plan to carry a Path of Totality notebook with me all day.  T will be too busy with his camera to enjoy my bons mots. We can share our notes while we are Fine Dining this evening.

First light spreads its grey cloak behind the etched trees. Everything is sodden with snowmelt, but already soil and grass are visible again, and the mud smells of rivers.

Today we embark, but not too early. There's no rush. Our plan is to stop in Waterville to see the Louise Nevelson show at the Colby College Museum before going on to Monson. We're hoping that the crazy traffic forecasts won't come true. But if they do, we'll finagle our way north via the backroad route.

This morning I'll wash a last load of laundry. I'll pack food into coolers and bags. I'll apologize to the already-suspicious cat. I'll go for a walk. I'll make a final decision on how many books to bring . . . undoubtedly too many, but winnowing them down is a struggle.

These transitions between home and away are always poignant. I feel a little sad to be leaving my garden on what will be the first warmish week of the season. But in truth the soil is far too wet to plant or even to prep. It is a fine week not to be gardening. And T is so glad to be heading into a week of photographing and free space.

I spent yesterday afternoon baking brownies and a orange-flavored loaf cake (advertised in the cookbook as "excellent for traveling"), simmering a béchamel sauce to be used in a spectacular macaroni-and-cheese later this week, mixing up gorp, packing my bags for work, packing dry goods into a picnic basket--potatoes, rice, onions, garlic, tea and coffee--packing olive oil and balsamic vinegar and wine and an apron. And already we have embarked on our Beyonce project: starting with a Destiny's Child album last night so we can follow her crossover to solo.

But now the sky has brightened . . . a sudden azure: glory. 

 Today is "figure out what the hell we're packing" day. We will be cooking for ourselves and/or our friend all week, except for one dinner out on Monday night, so we have to menu-plan and then fill coolers, bags, and baskets . . . and this includes bringing our own good knife and olive oil, etc., because we do not travel light when it comes to vacation meals. Nor do we travel light when it comes to books and cameras. I've got a laptop, a notebook, and a stack of volumes for teaching and class planning and reading. Tom's bringing five different cameras, including his giant view camera, which lives in a case the size of a small trunk. Let me not forget the rest: assorted tripods, suitcases, backpacks, snow boots, hiking boots, water bottles, speaker for listening to music and baseball, cribbage board, wine, possibly snowshoes, garden gloves, maybe some tools, and undoubtedly something else I've forgotten. All of this will be crammed, somehow, into my tiny Subaru hatchback. Wish us luck.

But we are in high spirits. Last night, as I was making dinner, I decided to play Beyonce's new album, Cowboy Carter (which is pretty good, by the way). Tom idled into the kitchen to find out what I was listening to, and before long he'd proposed a vacation project: should we listen to all of Beyonce's catalog in order? "Oh, yes!" I said, because this sort of thing is exactly what entertains us: a little invented undertaking, with sociable commentary.

So, a week with Beyonce, in the snowy north, along the muddy coast. A week with this guy I really like. A week of cooking good food in awkward kitchens, and teaching kids and editing books, and tramping around in the mud, and not waking up to an alarm, and reading and reading, and scribbling in my notebook, and wandering up to my friend's house, and trying to identify strange-looking seabirds, and stoking a big wood stove, and gathering with townspeople to see an eclipse, and forgetting to pack something important, like toothpaste. Our typical messy sort of holiday. Apron strings flying, laughing at each other, making a soundtrack, missing the cat.

It was an ugly storm--snow and rain and wind for more than 24 hours straight. The gale kept whipping clots of snow into the house--bam, bam. Tom said the noise was like hippos on the roof, and I said it was like hippos playing basketball on the roof. As you've gathered, T did not end up driving to work yesterday, and a good thing too, as there were trees in the roads and cars overturning on the highway and anyway no power at his worksite. So we stayed home together and listened to the hippos. I edited for most of the day, and he mucked around with his own desk stuff, and the power flickered but did not fizzle, and the wind howled in the chimney, and we were snug.

This morning the neighborhood is smeared in slush, though  I expect it will melt rapidly. People living just a little further inland got much higher snow totals, but ours was half rain. As far as I can tell, there's not significant local tree damage, just six inches of slithery muck. I've seen worse spring storms . . . or at least more depressing aftermaths. This one will be history soon.

Today, after I figure out how to drag the recycling bin through the slush, I'll be back at my desk, trying to finish at least one editing project before we embark on our holiday. I've got my plans set for the high schoolers, and now I need to pull together my various vacation obligations: reading through outlines for the teaching conference sessions, working on a new editing project, copyediting the Monson kids' finished pieces . . . What is the definition of vacation anyway? Maybe just "sleeping in a different bed and not waking up to an alarm."

Well, we will have fun. Our trips to the cottage are always sociable--sharing dinners every night with our friend, plenty of ocean air, bird watching and cloud watching and drinking slightly too much red wine. The eclipse scene in Monson will be entertaining, and we've got dinner reservations at the Quarry for afterward--our first time eating Lulu's food in its James Beard Award-winning glory. All of the hiking trails will be snow and slush and mud, but maybe the sun will shine, maybe the loons will wail. Something will beg for our attention.

I woke at 3 to hear the thump of snow clots on the roof, scrape of branches, clack of sleet. It was unsettling; it was hard to get back to sleep, and maybe I did or maybe I didn't. When alarm rang at 5, I got up and stood at the bedroom window. The air was filled with whipping snow; the windows were running with water. No plows have cut open our little street yet, and why should they? Why should anyone be going anywhere?

Tom is supposed to drive to work today, and already I am urging him to stay home. The weather is abysmal, and it's supposed to go on like this all day. I do not want to imagine him fishtailing down unplowed city hills or slithering into the winds that tear across the Casco Bay Bridge. And now our power is flickering . . . 

Well, at least I've already made coffee. For the moment the furnace is rumbling, and the refrigerator is growling. We've got plenty of firewood; and as far as I can tell, no big branches have fallen in the yard . . . yet.

But I'm tired of being so tense about the weather. I'm tired of these terrifying gales, one after another, all winter long.

***

Last night, before the storm kicked in, T and I went out to a showing of Hitchcock's Suspicion--the tale of an untrustworthy husband, or is he? The ending of the film is sort of happy and sort of gaslighty and mostly creepy and unnerving, and I am relieved to not be living that life. Better to have a tree fall on the house in an ugly spring storm. At least I share troubles with someone I trust.

***

Today, if the power stays on, I'll be editing, finishing class plans, cleaning the upstairs rooms, arguing with the cat, who is already blaming me for the weather. Usually I'd be planning to go out to write tonight, but I expect the gathering will be canceled.

If the power doesn't stay on, I'll be sitting by the fire reading and figuring out how to cook on a stove not designed for it.

Wherever you are, I hope you are warm and dry.

 A robin is singing and singing in the darkness.

There's no snow yet; no rain, no wind yet. But the storm is coming. Yesterday afternoon I cut a couple of wood hyacinths and a daffodil so I'd have a bit of spring to remember during the gale, and now the kitchen is filled with fragrance.

It's Wednesday, another day at my desk, another day of pinning up laundry and carrying firewood, another day of cooking dinner. Yesterday I made a batch of pita and we had Greek-style sandwiches: tzatziki, fresh tomato and lettuce, and leftover Easter lamb. Tonight will be baked haddock and a roasted vegetable salad. Every night is a new canvas. Cooking dinner is a life's work.

But so is everything else, I guess, and I am the queen of chores.

I've just finished reading John Le Carre's The Night Manager, and now I am back to Hilary Mantel: just starting to reread Bring Up the Bodies. This afternoon Teresa and I will have a phone confab about the poems of George Herbert, and I've been wandering through Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the poems of Julia de Burgos. I need to work out a plan for next week's Monson class, and I need to edit two fat academic manuscripts, and I need to sort through faculty outlines for the teaching conference, and I need to write some poems myself.

It's odd getting ready to go away for a week, with the knowledge that I won't actually be on vacation. I suppose I need to think of it as a work retreat, with fun around the edges. But at least Tom will be on vacation, and I'll have the pleasure of watching him muck around with his little projects and distractions. And we will have the ocean and the mountains and a dear friend at our doorstep. And the cottage is a shabby fairytale house.

A Maine spring is alluring and unsettling, and sometimes barely spring at all.

Yesterday afternoon I walked with poets through the neighborhood streets and the woods and the cemetery. A chickadee sang, and I half-unzipped my winter coat in the modest sunshine, and crocuses and scylla and hyacinths trembled brightly under the breeze. I imagined planting, but it was only imagination, for even in these daylit evenings I light a fire in the wood stove; I push back against the chill that creeps under the door. I wait for snow, and the first honeybees shake the strong little blossoms, and how can this be the same story, but in Maine it is.

This morning I'll go out to walk again. I'll work at my desk again, and in the afternoon I'll run errands again, and then I'll make dinner again and fall asleep again. The waning moon will be a thumbprint blur under the gathering clouds.

Somewhere, in the darkness of now, a robin carols . . . a long liquid song, repeating, repeating. I wish I had time today to write poems.

Today, tomorrow, and on and on . . . the guests arrive, the snowflakes and the mockingbirds, the sharp red spears of the peonies and cold rain etching trails along the windowpanes. All of them long to be here. All of them fight to stay.

***

On another note: I've got two spaces left in my upcoming zoom class, "From Draft to Dream." In this one-day session, you'll carry one of your previously existing poems through a series of revisions so that, by the end of the day, you'll have a set of unexpected versions to ponder. The class will take place on June 2, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. ET, which I've found to be a good window for drawing people from multiple time zones. And it's cheap--only $75. If you've been thinking about trying out one of my classes, this would be a great place to start. You can be working at any level, in any style, with any amount of experience. Everyone is welcome.

Happy April! . . . and here we are again, waiting for another snowstorm to arrive. Maine weather is so obstinate. It's not clear how much accumulation we'll get in Portland--I've seen claims of six inches; I've seen claims of a foot. Whatever happens will be midweek and sloppy; and, in the meantime, the crocuses will pretend they know nothing about it.

I'll be swamped with editing this week. Though I have hopes of getting one of those manuscript projects off my desk before we depart on our travels, I may end up lugging it along with me. Ah, well: I already knew this wouldn't be a vacation, merely work in a different setting. That's how my trip to Chicago will be in May too; I'll have to zoom-teach one afternoon from my kid's apartment, and I'll probably be working on the train as well. Such is the romantic life of the freelancer, dragging her snail-shell behind her.

In addition to all of the editing, I've got lots of teaching prep to juggle: for the high schoolers, for an upcoming zoom class, for the teaching conference. Sometimes I wonder how I keep anything straight in my head. It's like an ant nest in there.

But we had a calm weekend . . . a special meal, with lamb from our friend's Vermont farm and some remarkable lemon custards: very simple--just cream delicately thickened with lemon juice, topped with fresh raspberry sauce; in the morning, a brisk and muddy walk around Mackworth Island; in the afternoon, the springtime music of baseball on the radio.

So I will gird myself for my exercise regimen, my laundry pile, my stacks of computer files, my litany of poems and prompts. It's Monday, and it's April Fool's Day, and my Chicago kid will probably send me a joke, and the cat will claw at the furniture, and crows will quarrel in the maples, and a breeze will kick up road grit and the scent of sea salt, and here I am alive, and I'd better make the most of it.