This morning wood stove routine is so pleasant. Sure, it's got its downsides--scraping out ashes at 5 a.m., lugging bundles of logs up the cellar stairs before I've even tasted coffee--but the payoff is magnificent. Nothing is more heartening than a bright ticking wood fire in the dark of the morning. It is one of the greatest of rural luxuries.

Also, all this log lugging is doing wonders for my biceps. Firewood is a number-one reason why I never had to think about exercise when I lived in the country. (Also, I was cutting five acres of grass each summer week with an ancient push mower. Also, I was young.)

I have to teach this morning, but it's just a two-hour class and I'll be done by lunchtime. Then the afternoon will be my own, and I'll probably spend it in the garden, tearing out a few more weary zinnias, bagging up sticks, readying for the hard frost that's headed our way early in the week.

Yesterday I picked the last of the bounty from the mighty eggplant. In the house, the tomato supply is dwindling, the sweet taste of summer vanishing fast. I haven't bought a fresh vegetable from the store (other than local corn) since May, only the crops I can't produce in quantity on this tiny plot: storage crops like potatoes, onions, and squash. I can't produce fruit either, other than a gradually establishing blueberry crop. I dream of raspberries, but space is limited and raspberries sprawl. And there's no place to plant an apple tree that wouldn't shade out the vegetable garden.

Still, I've got my foraging gold--that basket of slowly softening pears in my living room. Maybe by tomorrow they'll be ready to work with. And I've got a freezer full of wild mushrooms. The bounty of the city continues to amaze me.

Reading Olivia Laing's book about gardening reminded me again of the close intersection (for some of us, anyway) between the work of the hands and the work of thought. My poems spring directly from physical action: digging, mopping, walking, hanging laundry, changing the sheets. Sometimes I think I would be no one if I didn't work. But of course eventually my body will say otherwise. I will have to be a different someone.

A couple of weeks ago I was talking with my friend Angela about what our purpose is becoming now that we're aging. We decided we need to be helpful. Useful. Ready to think out problems. Lend an ear, if that's all we have to lend. Doing the small community work: continuing to care, continuing to pay attention.