When it wasn't raining yesterday, it was drizzling, and when it wasn't drizzling, it was misting, but I had no choice: the day was my only chance to get some big garden jobs done. So I spent the day wet--wet sneakers, wet work gloves, jeans smeared with mud--and moved twenty or so wheelbarrow loads of semi-rotted maple leaves to a corner of the front yard that I'm working to reclaim to flowerbed. Once, many owners ago, someone planted that section, but subsequent owners neglected it and eventually someone feebly attempted to return the plot to grass. But there are so many tree roots in the area that I can't dig up the so-called sod or the long-embedded weeds. The only choice is to smother it with mulch. So I weeded, and deep-mulched, and transplanted some lilies and creeping phlox, and now the corner looks so much neater and, fingers crossed, I'll never have to mow that dumb thin patch of grass again.

The fatal flaw of gardener logic: "I don't like mowing so I'm going to turn the grass into garden and give myself exponentially more work."

After I finished the mulching project and took a tea break to talk on the phone to my sons, I dragged out the reel mower and hacked my way through the grass I am not turning into garden--a thick, green, sodden job, but rain is forecast for the rest of the week, so if not now, when? And then I did a bit of shrub pruning and weeded out another round of maple seedlings. There's still lots more weeding to do, but that's always the case in spring. At least the big jobs are done. The place is looking pretty good, and I'm not even a bit achy this morning. Thank you, winter exercise regimen. You may be dull but you keep me chugging.

Late in the day, after I'd cleaned myself up, I took part in a zoom meeting, an invitation from the poet Patricia Smith, who has proposed organizing a collective of older women writers. I got onto this invitation list because I worked with Patricia at the Frost Place, when she taught at one of our virtual conferences during the pandemic. It was interesting, sitting in on this first conversation among more than thirty aging women writers from around the country, most of them strangers to one another. Some names I recognized; others were new to me. Some were poets; many worked in other genres. Several spoke of extreme loneliness, the sense of marginalization, the need to find other women writers with whom they could share non-writing-centered conversations about their lives.

I've been lucky in that regard. I have an existing cadre of women friends--from central Maine, from Portland, from my broader writing life--who regularly have these kinds of conversations. But the women on this zoom call were from all over the United States. A few are quite well known. And all are hyper-aware of the intersections between their creative longings, their aging bodies, and the ways in which they are perceived or overlooked in the world. I found the conversation extremely moving: the eagerness, the desperation to find solace in one another.

I'm not sure where this collective is headed, or whether I'll stay involved over the long term, but I'm interested in what might happen. I'll keep you posted.