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.