Rain poured all night, and is still pouring, and the temperature is 46 degrees, and I am eager, eager for daylight so I can see what's happening out there in the melting, waking-up world. Is the garlic sprouting? Are the maples budding? Will robins be hustling across the bare brown grass?

Today is Thursday, my writing-group night, and I have been writing all week, though mostly not poems, mostly introductions, discussion starters, and prompts for my poetry-as-resistance class, a task that always takes a long time, with the syllabus becoming a sort of personal essay for the release of my own thoughts. I don't lecture in class, but I do lecture myself into understanding how a class might unfold, and that all ends up on paper. I doubt this is an efficient approach to class planning, but it is the only way I know how to do it.

In the meantime I finished Villette and have taken a small breather with a thin Barbara Pym novel before I start the next big one--most likely Thomas Hardy. Still, I opened the Pym yesterday evening and this is what I found:

The small things of life were so often so much bigger than the great things, she decided, . . . the trivial pleasures like cooking, one's home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.

I was jolted. It is always unnerving when a book suddenly turns on me and says, "Hey, I've been watching you."