Another cold dark morning, and I had the good fortune to sleep until 6:30, so I am feeling holidayish, sitting here in front of my little lopsided Christmas tree as the furnace mutters and the coffee steams. Now the cat shoots in from outside and starts loudly crunching his chow. He may be twelve years old, but he is full of pep, having dumped over the tree twice this season as well as a glass of red wine. He is swaggering around the place like a petty dictator . . . the king of Maine, as my future daughter-in-law likes to coo at him, despot of all he surveys.

Tomorrow I'll be on the road again, heading north for my final Monson class of the calendar year. So today I'll do a bit of housework--clean bathrooms, wash sheets and towels, maybe catch up on the dusting. I want to put together a ragu, a slow-cooked Italian meat sauce that I'll eventually ladle over bucatini. I might watch some football late in the day. I want to take a walk, and I want to read. Miraculously I have finished all of my Christmas shopping, wrapping, and mailing, so my only prep will center around slowly getting ready for the kids, who will arrive next Sunday. Given how much I usually dread these weeks (oh, how I hate the shop-and-glop), we're in pretty good shape. And the young people are coming! That makes everything shine.

Yesterday afternoon T and I drove into town for a couple of beers and a shared bowl of poutine, then came home and watched a dreadful Barbara Stanwyck flick (Ladies of Leisure, an early Frank Capra film with a beastly romantic hero who makes the girl fall in love with him by deriding her as a cheap floozy) and ate bibimbap, which I'd never made before and now will make all of the time--such a good recipe, with bits of various vegetables (thinly sliced sweet potatoes, kale and wild mushrooms from my freezer, slivers of red onion), all roasted on a sheet pan and served in big bowls with oven-baked rice and eggs and spiced with gochujang, kimchi, and sesame oil.

I also spent time scratching away at my current poem draft, which is beginning to assume a more definite shape. It's arisen from the notion of disappearance, the prompt word that Teresa, Jeannie, and I gave ourselves during last week's zoom confab. This will be our third round of collaborative prompting: the first two words were edge/archway and ledge, and the results were surprising. The words themselves are vague and open-ended, and we don't consult with one another as we write, yet the echoes within the results have been notable. I'm not sure what will eventually happen with these pieces, but I know we are beginning to imagine some sort of collaborative collection or performance. It's exciting.