I expected to be out straight with my Vermont family this weekend. Instead, I have two unplanned days ahead of me. Tom will be cutting up cabinet materials in the backyard and I will be-- Well, I'll think of something, I'm sure, but it is a treat to know nothing at the moment. Probably I'll work in the garden. I might freeze another bushel of kale. I want to finish reading Jeannie's collection. I'll listen to the penultimate game of the Red Sox season. T and I decided to keep the dinner reservation we'd made for the family, so we'll be eating out tonight.

But essentially this day, this weekend, is an open window, and that's a treat because my autumn work schedule is packed. Yesterday I started a new editing project and began drafting the syllabus for my upcoming Poetry Kitchen class. The Monson high school program is chunking into full gear, weekends are filling with classes and readings . . . all of this is good, and I'm glad to be employed, I'm glad to be doing jobs I know how to do well, that sometimes even feed me as a poet, yet I'm wistful. I suppose that's the human condition: wondering what-if instead of what-is.

I'm sitting here, in my tiny living room--coffee table laden with books, bright zinnias on the mantle, the hush of early morning broken only by the cat noisily crunching chow. This small haven, this little house, shabby in places but neat as a pin [though why are pins neat?] . . . Learning to be a good housekeeper has been one of the stabilizing regularities of my life. It didn't come naturally to me. I am the scion of a family of hoarders, and my mother was never an enthusiastic homemaker. But, for me, reducing visual chaos makes it easier for me to enter into the project of making. I love to begin with a bare counter, a bare desk: I'm eager to begin, I'm longing to.

And, in the end, that's what stamina requires. It means finding a way to consistently, regularly, eagerly enter into the making of the work. My stamina dissolves in chaotic surroundings. It thrives in an orderly setting. So, for me, housework is not a way to procrastinate: it's a way to prepare. Still, sometimes I go too far. I allow the housework to become the focus instead of serving as the canvas on which I sketch out my real concerns: a poem, a meal, a book. I'm learning to be careful, learning to sit down instead of rushing into yet another unnecessary distraction.

It's endlessly difficult to be an artist. We bad-mouth ourselves, steal our own time away, use our so-called responsibilities as scrims and screens. I'm turning 60 in a week, and I don't want to do that shit anymore. I don't have time.