It's cold in Wellington, with snow expected here tonight, but fortunately I should be able to slip home before the weather starts. At the moment, though, I am still in bed, recovering from an unpleasant teaching dream in which a crowd of "experts" invaded my class while I haplessly fumed and the students sat bewildered. I feel like I've had an abnormal number of teaching-anxiety dreams lately, which is interesting and also annoying because in real life I'm not really that anxious about teaching so I find it unfair that my brain wants to dig up one more way to make me worry. Surely my conscious brain does that well enough on its own.

Still, maybe my brain needs some tough love because it seems to be having trouble remembering how to pack: I almost forgot my toothbrush yesterday, and I definitely forgot my notebook. I'm not sure why I'm so scattered: just chalk it up to the overwhelmingness of the season, I guess. At least I remembered my coat.

Yesterday I finished an editing project, finished working on a friend's manuscript, finished my weekly house chores. Thus, even though I have to head north this afternoon, I will return tomorrow to a mostly clean plate, and one that will stay mostly clean till after the new year.

I don't know if that's good. Since my essay explosion, I haven't written much worth saving, so maybe I would be better off just plowing forward into paying jobs. Still, I can't help but be happy to have a bubble of open time ahead of me. Of course much of it will clog up with Christmas obligations. But some of it won't. Some of it will be mine.

This morning I'll go for a walk with a friend, then do a tiny bit of copyediting for another friend, then head to Wellington to spend the night with still other friends before ending up in Monson tomorrow morning. A friend-filled day: a refreshment.

Our little fat crooked Christmas tree glows in its corner; a few select ornaments perch on mantle and shelves. I am not a fiendish holiday decorator but I am sentimental about the King Kong that Tom bought for me at the top of the Empire State Building, about the paper houses he taught our little boys to make, about the weird styrofoam gingerbread men that my parents bought from the Five 'n Dime in 1962 for their first Christmas together. Every year I'm glad to visit with them again.

I've almost forgotten about holiday baking. No time for Emily Dickinson's black cake this year: Ray's death scuttled that. But maybe I can turn out a few batches of cookies. We'll see if I want to. I refuse to feel obliged.

I set up our little tree yesterday and, by late afternoon, did manage to get lights onto it, though no ornaments yet. Still, even in half-baked splendor it's a cheerful sight in the living room corner. Nothing says early December like tree lights, a wood fire, and the fragrance of slow-cooking stew. 

Today I'll return to editing, then finish up the housework and fill in around the edges with this-and-that obligations. I'll get onto my mat, get outside for a walk, read my book, be plain and unspectacular, be dreamy and inefficient, be whatever happens.

The hours unroll. Juncos skip and peck among the fallen leaves. Far above them a posse of gulls wheels in the restless sky. 

We got home a little after 2 p.m. yesterday. So, after assuaging the cat, we went for a fast walk in the cold air, rediscovering muscles and lungs after days of sitting and rich food, before hunkering down with our books by the newly lit wood stove.

Not a flake of snow in Portland but it's cold: a scarf day, a house day. Today I need to catch up with laundry and housework and groceries, reacquaint myself with routine before pouring myself into next week's duties. Already the washing machine is churning; already I'm trying to remember what's in the freezer, what's on the list, what needs to be scrubbed and soaped.

But for a few more minutes I can sit here quietly with my coffee. I'm almost finished with Nabokov's Pale Fire, looking forward to starting the used novel I picked up in Amherst on Friday: Edmund White's Hotel de Dream. I'll rummage mildly among my household tasks, make a stew, maybe, or a ragu--something fragrant and slow. I'll clean bathrooms and wash sheets and read my books and go for another walk, and maybe after dinner I'll look at the Bills game before I fall asleep.

The little house is an embrace . . . tiny rooms and shabby furniture, Tom's bright photos on the walls, dried garden flowers on the mantle, woodbox piled high, the small and glossy kitchen; upstairs, our desks, our bed, a swish of wind in the eaves.