For some reason this work week seemed to drag out forever. I am very happy that Saturday has finally stepped through the door, and I intend to do it justice. No editing, no class planning, no thinking about book launches: just Saturday stuff . . . garden puttering, firewood stacking, grocery shopping, playoff-baseball listening, book reading, and a big absorbing cooking project to close out the day.

Last night I made macaroni and cheese, gussied up with wild mushrooms and home-grown red peppers and basil, on the side a sliced heirloom tomato dressed with olive oil and mint, a few spears of roasted eggplant, and an apple flan topped with maple yogurt for dessert. It wasn't a fancy meal, just a weekday one, but it looked so pretty--early autumn coziness on a plate. I do love the beauty of food.

A couple of weeks ago I acquired a red kabocha squash, and today I hope to slowly transform it into gnocchi with fried sage sauce--a slow process but gratifying, especially with the murmur of baseball to support me. I'll probably make a big Greek salad to go with it and warm up a couple of slices of apple flan for dessert. And I've got tiny garden beets to cook and peel, leftover roast lamb to slice and freeze for future meals, more herbs to harvest for drying, and maybe the time has come to pick the remaining peppers.

I know I talk too much about food in these posts, but cooking and contriving are easily the biggest daily events in the non-wordy regions of my life. The growing, the foraging, the acquiring, the making, the presenting, the cleaning, the storing: compared to everything else on that list, eating is a brevity, a flicker. I am fortunate to have a partner who notices and cares, but he would love me just as much if I were a regular slapdash meal maker. I am the only person who expects this level of commitment from myself. I wonder why.

But yesterday evening, as I was wandering from room to room, the sight of the Serrano peppers hanging along the window frames, reddening as they dry . . . the bundles of flowers and herbs and grasses lining the lintel . . . the firewood heaped in its box by the stove: all of this moved me deeply. I don't know why. It is inconsequential, so small. There are plenty of self-righteous homesteaders, people whose "I did it myself" is holier-than-thou braggadocio. I don't feel that way. I'm not trying to prove anything, or push you to imitate me, or live up to parental expectations, or demonstrate my obsessive thriftiness. I just make things. And then I look at what I made. Somehow food and poems have become part of the same project.

I went out to write last night, tired after a long week and not entirely sure I wanted to be social. But as always, it was the best thing to do. Thursdays, as my friend Gretchen says, are a bit like church.

Now there's just one more workday to get through: a morning of editing and class prep, then an afternoon meeting, then another round of firewood stacking as I slide from work into the weekend.

But the floors are washed, and the editing trudges on. I wrote a couple of messy drafts last night, and I slept in clean sheets. The class plans are starting to cohere; and though the book-launch prep is making me nervous, I persist. I'm struggling hard to get out from under the cloud of "who will bother to come," but I understand that this is my own stupid psyche talking, that it's just another manifestation of postpartum book-publishing gloom. I wish I didn't have it, but at least by now I recognize the enemy.

This has been such a crammed week: so much editing tangle, plus Poetry Kitchen/book launch prep, plus dealing with my car, dealing with firewood, squeezing in a moment to get vaccine boosters, plus whipping up meals and going out in the evenings--yesterday to a movie, tonight to write. But at least here in the little northern city by the sea, I can walk the mile to fetch my car from the body shop, walk the half-mile to get vaccinated. In backwoods Harmony such chores would swallow entire days.

But today is all about housework, so I'll step away from the desk, at least for a little while, and give my stressed eyes some relief. All that flickering screen work really takes a toll. It will be a vacation to wash some floors instead.

I hadn't expected these book launches to be so labor-intensive, but getting ready for them has been absorbing quite a bit of time--especially the zoom one, because Jeannie and I are planning to spend the final third of the hour in conversation about one another's books, which means I've been hammering out discussion questions and book descriptions in the midst of all of my other desk tasks. Have you ever tried to write a long paragraph about your own book? It's not so easy. And I haven't even begun to prep for next week's Monson class yet. Oy.

In a way, I was hoping these vaccines might make me comfortably ill so that I could loll on the couch without guilt. However, so far I feel perfectly fine. Kind of a disappointment, really.

Still, here I am, getting paid (sometimes) to do (mostly) interesting stuff. And I don't have to rush out of the house and catch a bus or anything. And my car should now pass inspection. And stacking firewood is more fun than boring exercises on my mat. And I get to go out write tonight with my friends. And I'm actually very happy about how my new book looks and reads. And it's October, and the the light in the maples is heart-soaring.

Thanks to an editing tangle, my deskwork responsibilities have swelled from manageable to hair-raising. I'm juggling two other projects, plus class planning, plus book-launch planning, plus this particular mess, and my eyes feel like they're popping out of my head.

So it was a relief to spend an afternoon hour stacking wood in the modest autumn sunshine, occasionally chatting with passersby, most of whom want to marvel over the magnificent, four-foot-high eggplant in the front bed. Talk about curb appeal! That plant has everything: a plethora of glossy little fruits, broad spreading leaves, stems as sturdy as a small tree's . . .  hands' down, the eggplant wins this year's garden Oscar.

But even though the eggplant is still going strong, the tomato vines are winding down, so I picked a bushel of greens and brought them into the house to redden here. The Romas and cherry tomatoes are small enough to keep ripening outside (at least for the moment), but the big boys are done. This weekend I'll cut down the vines and put away the stakes and say another small farewell to summer.

Today will be sort of like yesterday: a snarl of deskwork, followed by some therapeutic wood stacking, but then I'll walk over to the drugstore and get my flu and Covid shots, and later T and I will go out to a screening of Our Man in Havana. Maybe my car will be released from the hospital today. Maybe I'll listen to some playoff baseball. Maybe I'll do a little writing. It seems unlikely, but one can hope.

My first Poetry Kitchen class of the season is coming up on October 12, so I've been working hard on the syllabus and the reading packet: three pairs of poems, three linked discussions, three big writing prompts. This kind of planning requires so much work: it's not simple to construct an atmosphere that combines ease with concentration, especially on zoom. But the work is interesting and absorbing for its own sake. I read through poems, thinking about how they dovetail, imagining how conversations will open a window into sudden new writing. Teaching can be a kind of negative capability: how can I step aside as manipulator and let the poems themselves rise into power?

Today is the first day of October, my birthday month, the month of playoff baseball and bright blue skies and red maple leaves. This morning a truck will dump a load of firewood in the driveway, and I will spend the next few afternoons trundling the wheelbarrow back and forth to the woodshed, squirreling the logs away for next winter. I'm almost ready for winter. Almost.

But I've got too much to do at my desk. Just thinking about the editing stack makes me want to put my head down and go to sleep. I'd rather trundle firewood. I'd rather fill bushel baskets with green tomatoes. I'd rather rake leaves and roll out pie dough. Alas.

Yesterday, on my walk, I found another small clump of hen-of-woods mushrooms--just enough for dinner. I was already marinating a leg of lamb (in yogurt, mint, coriander, and tangerine zest), so I made a vegetable dish to accompany it: slices of potato layered in a pie dish with sautéed wild mushrooms and diced red peppers from the garden, then baked in milk and butter. On the side was a simple fresh tomato salad, and we had apple crisp for dessert. It was a magnificent meal: organic Vermont lamb grown by a friend, garden produce, local apples, foraging treasures . . . a meal to help me forget my deskwork grumpiness.

Thank goodness I'm a cook. It's a job that almost always makes me feel better.