I kept saying to Tom, "I can't believe how much I'm getting done!" It was that kind of day--not only did I pin up laundry, run the hated trimmer, deadhead flowers, transplant spinach, water everything extensively, but I also brought in a big harvest: a bushel of kale, eleven eggplants [!], a colander filled with Serrano peppers, bowls of tomatoes and peppers, plus an armful of ornamental grasses and hydrangeas. I spent the remainder of the day dealing with with the booty. Sauce bubbled on the stove; the kale was stripped, washed, cooked down, bagged, and frozen; the grasses and flowers are now hanging up in the back room to dry for winter bouquets; I cut up the eggplants, brushed the pieces with olive oil and salt, and roasted them for salads. And then I sat in the sunshine with a big needle and a roll of waxed twine and sewed the peppers into strings for drying.

So much richness from this tiny city homestead. On some days it's overwhelming, but yesterday I fell into the rhythm. I especially love sewing peppers. It is such a pleasant, satisfying task, outside on a warm September afternoon.

But, today, back to my desk again. I should finish the editing project this week, and then I will drop suddenly into my teaching year--a professional-development day on Saturday (FREE! in Portland! for all teachers and artists! you should come!) followed by day 1 with my Monson high schoolers next week. I need to realign my brain: I haven't been in a classroom situation since July. Mostly I've been moseying through my days alone, carving out my own schedule, seeing no one during my work hours, and now I have to remember how to build a day amid a crowd. It will be a sudden jolt, but interesting too, and I'm ready for a change of pace.

In the meantime I cast my eyes over the strings of peppers draped along the dining-room windows. I admire the bundles of grass and flowers, hanging upside down in the airy back room. I open the freezer door and count the packages of vegetables I've stored. I walk down into the cellar and lay a hand on a tight stack of firewood. Even in the city I can't step away from my homestead life. Each of these small accomplishments is a window into past and future, a self-definition, part of the story of how I tumbled up through so many seasons, so many years. There is no pride like harvest pride.

Such a nice day yesterday . . . a boat ride to Great Diamond Island, a walk among the old-fashioned shingle-style cottages on one side of the island, then through the old military neighborhood on the other side. A beach, ospreys, bright sunshine and puffy clouds. Lunch, and then a beautiful windy boat ride back to Portland. It is lovely to live so close to these islands--a quick jaunt across the water, and suddenly we're in a different world. This really is a beautiful city.

Today I'll be in the garden--more kale to process, lots of weeding and watering and deadheading, and I should get out the trimmer and deal with the grass. My sunflowers are weary, and the zinnias are beginning to tire as well. Still, they stay bright, and the bees and butterflies are busy.

I've started rereading Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey--such a funny book. Austen is so wry and ironic and eye-rolling about what people expect of novel heroines. I love that every one of her books centers around a different style of young woman: Emma is rich, confident, and bossy, with a pushover dad; Elizabeth is quick-witted and reckless, with trashy family members; Fanny is shy, religious, poor, and obstinate, with unsympathetic family members; Anne is aging on the outside and passionate on the inside, with pompous family members; Elinor and Marianne are too buttoned up and too emotional; Catherine is a naive, unsophisticated devourer of Gothic novels. A whole world of young women, and not one is like the others.

A freshly roasted chicken is one of my favorite meals, and last night's version was particularly good because I decided to make biscuits and wild mushroom gravy to go along with it. Instead of rolling and cutting out the biscuits, as I usually do, I made tiny drop biscuits, very light and dumpling-like. As they were baking, I mixed up a batch of gravy from the fresh giblet stock, tossed in a handful of sautéed foraged maitakes, and ladled it over the biscuits and sliced chicken. On the side was a garden tomato and red onion salad. For dessert was homemade vanilla ice cream topped with wild blueberries. It was a memorable meal.

Working in this kitchen gives me such pleasure. It is the best one I have ever cooked in: everything within reach, everything rationally organized, plenty of storage space yet a sense of compactness. It looks small, but it is mighty. Seven years ago T designed this room for me to cook in, and I don't think I've ever had a better love-gift . . . though the desks he's made for me come close. It is something to be the partner of a master carpenter: that's all I can say.

This morning my neighbor and I are headed out on a small island adventure: a ferry ride to Great Diamond Island, a morning walk, and then lunch at the restaurant there. T, who has stuff to do this morning, will take a later ferry and meet us for lunch. I'm looking forward to it--I love boat rides, and have never gotten off at this particular island before. And the weather, though perpetually dry, is lovely for an outing.

This is my last hurrah of summer. Next Saturday I'll be teaching all day. The following week I'll head up to Monson for my first high school session. And the work year piles on.

But these little moments--a perfect meal, late-summer baseball murmuring on the radio, windows open to the mild evening, crickets squeaking in the darkness, the cat threading himself between my ankles, the house around us tidy and lamplit. So unspectacular. So poignant. Just to be happy. It seems so simple. It is not.

Still no rain. It's a sad way to head into autumn, watching my late-summer crops crisp up and die. But other than the terrible dryness, the days have been lovely . . . afternoon sun stretching long fingers through the maples, the first crunch of leaves underfoot. This morning I'll go out to hunt for more hen-of-the-woods mushrooms under the oaks. Later I'll finish moving firewood, roast a chicken for dinner. I'll read and write and edit, and I'll pick tomatoes and kale, and I'll sit out on the stoop with the cat. A quiet ending to a quiet week.

I still have a sense of shiver, of stasis, of something-is-about-to-change, of nothing-has-changed-yet. The moment before a bead of water rolls off a leaf. The moment before a baby wakes from a nap.

Last night I wrote a poem. A Chopin prelude sang low, and the night became a character and time washed up against the sidewalks like the tide coming in.

Time has been slow this week: desk work and housework and firewood moving and garden work. The steady round, the trudge. I haven't left the property, except on foot. I haven't started my car for days. I've barely seen or talked to anyone, other than Tom.

But I've made good progress on the editing project. I'm almost done with the firewood. I've processed tomatoes and green beans and another small batch of maitakes. I've almost finished reading the collection of Abdurraqib essays on Black performance.

Today will be sheets and towels and floors and bathrooms; today will be editing and groceries and firewood; and, in the evening, I will go out to sit among poets, and eat and talk and write. It will be a refreshment to spend an evening with voices, after so many quiet days.

Do you ever feel as if you are living in a suspended moment--something has happened, something will happen, but for now you are a still lake on a windless day?

Went to bed anxious about the debate. Woke up triumphant about the debate. Love that it was punctuated by a Taylor Swift endorsement signed "Childless Cat Lady."

How I hate that man and his evil party.

***

Here in the little northern city by the sea, the temperature hovers at 45 degrees at 5 a.m. I've timed this week's firewood-moving chore well: it's heartening to watch the basement fill with neat stacks; to remember that the chimney has been swept, the roof repaired, the big maples trimmed. The counter overflows with tomatoes, and today I'll make a batch of sauce for the freezer. Ah, winter, I am almost ready for you.

Yesterday I applied for my absentee ballot, I edited a manuscript, I made pappa al pomodoro--a simple Italian tomato and bread soup that has a heavenly flavor and texture. When T came home from work, he announced that he'd just ordered materials so that he can finally finish our kitchen. Cupboard doors this fall! I am thrilled.

There's a mood in this household, for sure. No more languor. It's time to get stuff done.

I wish it would rain. I had big plans to put in a few more trees and shrubs this fall, but with no rain in sight I don't know how I would keep such delicate expensive plantings alive. It feels ridiculous to be watering so steadily at this late date, but such is life.

The tomatoes are coming in fast, and I'll need to make soup or sauce today. Peppers and eggplant are still roaring, though the cucumber is on its last gasp and the beans are beginning to fade.

Yet fall is advancing steadily . . . leaves beginning to turn and fall, and the wheelbarrow crunching over them as I roll loads of firewood from the shed to the basement hatch. Lots more work to do there, but I got a start yesterday afternoon--tossing down a few barrows' worth and then stacking them in the cellar. I love the look of firewood, poised and waiting. I love to be ready for winter: the harvest in, the wood in, and let the storms begin.

Today is my sister's birthday, today I will get onto my mat, today I will walk over to Gretchen's to work on our class plans, today I will edit a manuscript and cook tomatoes and read about Josephine Baker. Today I will fidget over a poem and the dry sun will shine. Still, I feel bereft, as if I've woken up to find something missing. Something I've never seen before. Something I will never see again.

The temperature is 51 degrees this morning--maybe our chilliest of the season so far, and not very chilly in the big scheme of the year, but after such a warm summer it feels surprising. I'm glad to be wearing my red bathrobe, glad to be snug behind closed windows and nursing a cup of hot coffee against my cold hands.

Yesterday, before breakfast, I told T I was going to take a walk into Baxter Woods to check on the mushroom situation. He came along and we hunted fruitlessly for a while until suddenly I squealed because there they were, my first gorgeous maitakes of the season--tucked up against the roots of a big oak, just like their common name suggests . . . hen-of-the-woods, a perfect description of these fluffy beauties.

Here you see them arranged on a turkey platter in my kitchen--the middle one as big as a big cabbage, the smaller ones arranged around it. I had my work cut out for me: cleaning 10 pounds of maitakes is a slow business as they have to be broken into small pieces and painstakingly washed and trimmed before being sautéed. But after a couple of hours of labor I had three quart bags ready for the freezer, plus a bowl set aside for pizza. And then I had to process a bushel of kale!

After all that kitchen time, it was refreshing to step out after lunch and wander over to Porchfest, our neighborhood music gala, which features a few professional musicians but also lots of "we've never performed in public before" groups, which are always my favorite . . . the fourteen-year-old and his dad playing "Wipeout" together; the two nine-year-olds lugubriously enacting the White Stripes; the stocky middle-aged guy leaping around screaming into his mic, then lying in the middle of the street, visions of the Sex Pistols dancing in his head. As a combined effort, it's all strangely wholesome--an audience of strollers and kids on bikes and young couples in Bikini Kill shirts and middle-aged women with Kamala buttons and old hippies with regrettable beards, listening patiently, clapping politely, as if there's nothing inherently hilarious in a big dad lying on his back in the street and shrieking unintelligibly into a wireless mic, or in a fourth-grade guitarist decked out in his new school clothes and singing not quite loudly enough about smoking cigarettes and wrestling with the hounds of hell.

This morning, however, all of us will have to shed our personae and return to being schoolkids or accountants or poets. This week I've got that editing stack to chip away at, and classes to plan, and emails to answer, and laundry to pin up, and errands to run, and books to read, and poems to write, and floors to clean, and dishes to wash, and firewood to move, and a pile of tomatoes to deal with. I'd better get to it.

I lolled in bed a bit this morning, and felt great. And when I finally hoisted myself out from under the comforter, I saw that we got a little rain last night, which also feels great. The soil has gotten very dry in the past couple of weeks, so I'm back to daily watering, not something I'm enthusiastic about doing this late in the growing season. But I want to keep my harvest alive.

Yesterday T spent the morning in the kitchen, installing the wooden cabinet dividers he'd built for two cupboards. This addition essentially doubled the cupboards' storage capacity, so all of a sudden my little kitchen is overflowing with spaciousness. It's quite impressive: how compactly T designed the room yet how much it actually holds. He sure is good at his job.

Meanwhile, I harvested my carrot crop, which was sizable; harvested the mature fennel, also sizable; washed them all up and stored them in boxes in the refrigerator. I froze a quart of green beans, picked chard and beet greens to sauté for the evening's quiche, deadheaded flowers and pulled out the disintegrating dill plants. This morning I'll cut a bushel or so of kale and blanch it for the freezer. Then in the afternoon we'll wander out to the neighborhood music festival, maybe I'll check in on the Bills' game, maybe I'll curl up on the couch with my book . . . Sausage and peppers for dinner tonight--I've got so many peppers on my plants. It's been a beautiful year for the garden.

A slow Sunday in September, at home with my beloved, here on our tiny homestead, in our little northern city by the sea. At the moment I have nothing to wish for. For the moment's it's all come true.

Another cool morning, and T is already out taking pictures in first light. Meanwhile, I am idling . . . sipping hot coffee and mulling over my various weekend tasks--mostly garden projects, but also I want to freeze green beans and kale and maybe make a batch of refrigerator dills, and I should shift stuff around in the basement so I can begin moving the seasoned firewood from the shed into the house, and I should empty the compost bins, and I should should should etc. The list is always endless.

I'm also starting to piece together my fall and winter reading projects. Teresa and I are going to read Wordsworth and Coleridge's original Lyrical Ballads together; my son and his partner and I are going to read Lear together. I'm excited, anticipatory. I love reading complicated books with other people. It's so encouraging and exciting to struggle into them together.

I always feel as if the end of summer is the beginning of thought-season. As the garden wanes and my homesteading responsibilities shift, I turn again to the big stories on the shelves. Winter brings me closer to my books . . . though of course that statement can be seen as specious, given that I read non-stop, day in and day out, week upon week, year upon year. I cook dinner with a book splayed on the counter. I cannot be without one. They live with me everywhere. I am greedy.

But the winter projects are deliberate in a way my daily inhale is not. They make me feel less crazy, more purposeful. I become a student of sorts: granted, a scatty, un-learned, academically ridiculous student, but nonetheless one who is wrestling. And I have fellow students, and we can whisper together and emote and roll our eyes, but we have to get our homework done on time.

Morning chill has become a pattern, and so I close the downstairs windows now, before I go to bed. It's a loss, after a summer of early-morning breeze and birdsong, but snug also, to sit quietly in the small solid house as darkness leans against the panes.

It was good to go out to write last night. I haven't been doing much writing on my own lately, what with editing and travel and the reading of proofs, so I hope last night's scrawls will help bring me back into the world. I have to do some editing today, as well as laundry and exercise and such, but I'll have space for my own words too, and I need to find them.

It's been such a week. The news of my son's engagement has sent tremors . . . of happiness, of course, but elegy is inevitable. Thirty years ago I was weeping with fear and exhaustion, overwhelmed by the demands of the tiny life in my arms. And now here we are.

I am still having a hard time waking up at 5 a.m. Just a few brief days on bartender time and my sleeping schedule has been ruined. However, here I am, groggy but upright, doing my part in the early-riser club, drinking the coffee, trying to pretend that construction-worker time is really the way to live.

I caught up with housework yesterday, and with most of the laundry, so today I'll turn my attention to errands and to the new editing project that showed up in my email yesterday afternoon. I guess I'll probably go out to write tonight, though I'm feeling a bit scattershot about social plans. NYC is always intensely busy, and now that I'm home my introvert self is re-exerting its supremacy. But I'll try to talk it down.

After a flurry of final corrections, the Calendar proofs went to the printer yesterday morning. So the book is on its way, and anyone interested in pre-orders can begin contacting Deerbrook Editions. I've got a Portland book launch planned for October 17, and Jeanne Marie Beaumont and I are going to share a combined online launch at some point this fall, as she also has a new book in press. I'll keep you posted on that.

By the way, there are only two spaces left in my November "Revision Intensive" class via the Poetry Kitchen, so grab one soon if you've been on the fence.

Meanwhile, autumn is creeping forward . . . cool mornings, weary garden, and I, too, am ready to lay aside the hoe and the mower, though I will regret the summer dresses. One evening soon I'll be lighting the wood stove again. 

Home again, and it is downright chilly in the north: 52 degrees at the moment, a far cry from balmy NYC. Still, I'm glad to be here, though I can't say I'm glad to be up at 5 a.m. My sleep schedule was all thrown off in the city, as it always is, so I expect I'll be drowsy for the next few days as my body figures out how to readjust from bartender time to construction-worker time. Also my typing is terrible this morning. I believe I've had to correct every single word in this post.

But it is nice to be back in my own nest. I know I'll be spending the day with laundry and housework, and that's okay--it will be a way to ease myself back into routine after my dramatic few days away . . . big fancy dinner, big fancy baseball game, big fancy museum, big fancy bookstore, big fancy family news.

In the city I bought a pair of earrings for myself, and I bought two books for Tom and me. One is Pekka Hamalainen's Indigenous Continent, which I found at the storied Strand bookstore, and which I hope will be the continental history of Native America that T and I have been wanting to read. It starts pre-contact and covers all of North America, so it is a tome for sure, but seems to be reasonably well written and organized. The other book is Hanif Abdurraqib's A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance, which I bought at my friends' hopping new record store on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn. Abdurraqib is both a poet and an essayist, and I loved the book's opening salvo and am hoping it will all be as good.

As for the earrings, T admired them right away, a good sign.

It has been a whirlwind twenty-four hours. Yesterday morning my older son called to announce that he and his partner have gotten engaged. So family and friends have been in an uproar of delight, and my younger son, in particular, is full of happiness. Just last week a close family friend got engaged, and now this week J. We are bubbling over with young-person excitement.

Amid all of that I've been stumping around the boroughs--from coffee with a friend in Brooklyn to Citi Field in Queens, where the Sox lost, but the atmosphere was so cheerful and the weather so perfect that so we hardly cared. And then back to Brooklyn to stay up late and watch Clash concert footage from 1980.

I'm catching an early afternoon bus back to Maine today, worn out from this eventful weekend. So much good food, and talking, and walking, and high emotion. It will be strange to be back in the old world tomorrow.

Another morning in Brooklyn, and I am tired. Even though we all went to bed decorously before midnight, I could not fall asleep for hours--possibly because of the giant meal I'd eaten. The five of us had gone out for an extravagant steak dinner in Manhattan, and we spent way, way too much money, but it was a joyous night, so I am refusing to regret.

The kids and I were in town all afternoon: looking at an irritating show at the Guggenheim, eating Israeli falafel on a Central Park bench, marveling at the massive Strand bookstore, whose secrets I barely began to unlock. The weather has been glorious--yes, a brief spot of rain, but otherwise balmy. The city is packed with overflow crowds from the U.S. Open, which meant that the museum was filled with unusually athletic-looking art starers.

Now I am sitting here sleepily in the darkened apartment, a late riser to myself but still the only person awake in this household. Downstairs a program about Caligula is muttering on the forgotten TV. Praetorian guard murmurs the suave English narrator. Scandal he sighs.

In a few minutes I'll pull myself together and walk out into the world; I'll meet a friend for coffee and reenter the noisy clanking shrieking life of the city. Wonders everywhere, and secrets, and old gum stuck to the sidewalk.

I just sent you yesterday's post, which I wrote on the bus and thought I had posted, but I guess the bus wifi said no.

It is now almost 8 a.m. in Brooklyn and I have just woken up. Oh, these crazy Brooklyn hours. I didn't even actually stay up all that late last night, only till midnight, but for some reason I really needed to sleep.

And it was a long day--first the bus trip, then a trek down to the Village for lunch, then out to Brooklyn to P's apartment to meet his cats, followed by a trek to our friend's new record store, and then a walk to the bar, and then to the Salvadoran restaurant, and then the walk back to the apartment. Some of this involved public transportation, but a lot of it was on foot, and that is a thing I love about New York--all of the walking.

This morning I'll make my way to P's apartment again for breakfast, and then we'll head into Manhattan to wander around the Met and eventually meet up with Ray and Steve for a big dinner. Visiting NY always means walking a lot and spending a ridiculous amount of money on meals--but that is part of the good time we all look forward to.

I began my morning at 4:45 a.m., after restless dreams in which my husband and a son splashed flour everywhere in someone's kitchen. At 6 a.m. I was standing in line at the bus station ostentatiously reading literary criticism while everyone else looked at their phones. And now, at 6:39 a.m., I am ensconced in my single-aisle seat, heading south down the Maine Turnpike, as cute polar bear cubs roll around on the bus's movie screens and my stomach barks at the slice of toast I forced myself to eat before I left home. Travel always makes my stomach weird. However, the Dramamine will kick in shortly, and all will be well.

Still, as travel goes, this bus is pretty mild-mannered. The single-aisle seats have plenty of leg room and  are comfortably distant from the other passengers'. There's no airport angst or transfer bustle--just six hours on the road with someone else doing the driving. And I am looking forward to a long weekend and zero work obligations--nothing to do but mosey around the big town with my kid and my friends. I' m going to meet P in the Village for lunch, at our favorite Ukrainian diner. And then we'll idle over to Brooklyn and see what's up at our friends' bar. And eventually we'll wander out for dinner. That is the extent of our planning for today.

Of course I miss my kids every single day, but I have to say: it is fun that they live in big, busy, but very different cities. It adds a bit of sparkle to my life--these adventures into the metropolis.