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.