Yesterday we had grim snow-rain, and tomorrow we're forecast to get more grim snow-rain, but today is supposed to be a sunny window between storms, and I am hoping to be outside in it. Already the air feels gentler, though everything is still sodden from the downpour. Maybe by the afternoon I'll be able to get my hands into the dirt and leaves again.

This morning, after a few more tweaks, I'll should be able to ship my editing project off to the author. Afterward I'll have a couple of other small desk jobs to do, and I'll need to make a run to the fish market, but then the day will be my own. I scribbled three new raw drafts at my writing group last night, and one of them might be worth looking at again. I'll keep beetling into the James novel, keep coiling among the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge. I'll listen to a bit of afternoon baseball. I'll prep for tomorrow's reading.

Last night's dream involved a forced exercise class proscribed by the government--just as distressing and dread-inducing as you'd expect. It is a relief to be awake. It is a relief to gather my small affairs, tuck them into my pockets, fidget with them as comfort.

We got another little burst of snow overnight, no more than a coating, but still it's hard to be enthusiastic.

Cold, grim, gray . . . this has been a classic Maine April. It's a good thing I love my wood stove so much, or I might be a little downhearted. But the crocuses are doughty, the scilla is blue, the songbirds insist. If they can hack the lousy weather, so can I.

Yesterday I finished annotating student poems, prepped teaching plans for next week, copyedited a chapter,  burrowed into The Wings of the Dove. Today, more editing, then errands to run, then my evening writing group. I feel and sound boring but such is quotidian life.

If you happen to be in southern Maine on Saturday, I'll be reading at the South Portland Library at 2 p.m. with Marita O'Neill and David Stankiewicz. If you happen not to be in southern Maine, I've still got a few spaces open in my May 3 zoom class: only $75 for a full day of writing and conversation, which I'm realizing is dirt cheap compared to what other venues are charging. I recently saw a class advertised at $200 for two hours, which honestly I find a little shocking. Who can afford that? And how can you possibly get $200's worth of writing done in two hours?

Apparently this is why I stay poor.

I've always struggled with the late novels of Henry James. His early and midcareer novels are old friends: What Maisie Knew, for instance, and especially Portrait of a Lady. But the three massive novels at the end of his career--The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl--have always beaten me. I try one or the other of them, and within twenty pages I give up in bewilderment.

Until this week. This morning I am thrilled to report that finally, at the age of sixty, I appear to have learned how to read a late James novel. I have been working away at The Wings of the Dove for two days now, and I'm following the plot, I can tell all of the players apart, I'm impressed and moved by the depth of the characterization, and I am easily unwinding the circuitry of the sentences. All I can think is that my years of training on Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Henry Green, Iris Murdoch, and Ivy Compton-Burnett has finally paid off.

Yesterday I got a big chunk of my student annotations done, and maybe I'll be able to finish the rest today, or maybe not. I've got to work on class plans, too, and copyedit, of course . . . the day spills over with obligation. But I'll go for a long walk first and try to clear my head of the Henry James wool. He is a great writer, but also an insinuating one. His sentences invade.

I think I might make a homemade Greek pizza for dinner tonight. I think I might do some dusting this afternoon. I think I might reread Coleridge's "Lime-Tree Bower" and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" to try to figure out why they sort of sound like the same poem. I think I'll carry up some firewood from the basement, and fold laundry, and mutter over the poem drafts I wrote this weekend.

Descriptions of my days always sound like nothing and everything. I can never decide if I'm lazy or overzealous. 

Robins are twittering hysterically in the wet darkness. If April equals 40 degrees and snowmelt, so be it. A Maine songbird does her best with what she has to work with.

Today I'm going to take a small hiatus from editing and turn my thoughts to student work--annotating my high schoolers' final projects and visiting my friend Gretchen's third-grade physical theater class. Then, in the afternoon, I'll turn my thoughts to Wordsworth and Coleridge. Over the weekend I finished rereading Roth's American Pastoral, then took a small breather with Penelope Fitzgerald's At Freddie's, and now I have plunged into Henry James's The Wings of the Dove--though my old paperback turns out to be so dangerously fragile that I fear I may have to buy an emergency replacement.

I wrote four new poems over the weekend, along with those writers' essays I inflicted on you, and my brain is pinging with images and words. Meanwhile, I mop and vacuum and wander among the cemetery alleys and fold towels and stack dishes and play cribbage and stare out the window and talk to a son on the phone and listen to baseball and.

In the midst of life my friend Angela texts me, "Fucking shit, girlfriend, we haven’t shied away from the abyss." I text back, "No we haven’t! I call that success."