I had a bunch of out-of-the-house stuff scheduled for today, yet suddenly they've dwindled to just one. Sally, who cuts my hair, texted to ask about moving my appointment to tomorrow. Zanne, who hosts our writing group, decided to postpone our gathering until next week. Snow is supposed to arrive midday and last into the evening commute, and everyone is getting ready for a mess.

So my jaunts are reduced to an early morning trip to the medical lab for bloodwork, a boring chore that I have been forgetting to do since I had my last doctor's appointment. But I should get there and back well before the storm begins; maybe I'll even fit in a walk before the snow starts accumulating, and then I can settle down in the house and get my work done.

I didn't quite finish the editing project yesterday, so that's job number one. And then I'll get my high school plans set, and then I'll turn my attention to poems. This will be my second week in a row without my Thursday poetry group, and I'm itchy to write. Partly that's because of yesterday's phone call with Teresa. Mostly we talked about Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and that conversation has worked me into a tizzy, in the best possible way. Among other things, I discovered as we were talking how deeply I know that poem--by sound, by image . . . though I have never tried to memorize it, never studied it any deep academic way. Merely I've read and reread it a hundred times, so often that it has lodged itself into the coils of my brain. I have been changed by the Rime, but I didn't realize that until we started talking about what we were seeing and hearing and feeling this time around.

Meanwhile, Teresa, who is devoted to Moby-Dick, was awash in the joyous discovery that Melville, too, must have known the poem well . . . "Look at this, listen to this!" The two of us were like 12-year-olds with a new boy-band poster.

O reading, the great love affair.

And how thrilling it is to be with readers who read like I do. That is one of the great and stunning delights of my collaborations with Teresa and Jeannie Beaumont: all three of us are fiendishly devoted readers and rereaders, wallowers in fat books, old books, unfashionable books; shameless, overexcited, greedy; with nobody but each other to chatter to about our passion.