Monday. T forgot to set his alarm so we are groggy and disoriented. He is making his sandwich. I am making the coffee. Chuck is making googly eyes. I stagger around the kitchen, snuffling, my ears plugged--a combination of my cold and last night's excellent show. Though I rested up well beforehand and had a great time, I could have done with about three more hours of sleep this morning. But Monday will not be stayed.

Now the coffee is doing its work: the grogginess is starting to fade, and I am becoming more resigned to the idea of daylight. I've got a busy week ahead--editing, travel, teaching--and this horrid clingy cold must disappear sometime, don't you think?

**

Okay, I'm back, after a flurry of kitchen cleaning. T has headed out to work, Chuck is crunching up some chow, and I am beginning to feel less zombie-like and want to tell you about Swamp Dogg, a little old man in his mid-eighties, about 5 feet tall and dressed in a bright orange suit and a bright orange hat and a bright orange shirt and bright orange suspenders, and he was dancing and singing and wailing and testifying, and if I have to be groggy today, it was 100 percent worth it to see him at work.

Yesterday, to Chuck's thrilled consternation, I brought up the firewood boxes and the kindling basket from their summer home in the cellar. Now they sit at the ready, piled with logs and sticks. This morning the air is chilly outside, in the low 40s, but it's not cold enough inside the house for me to justify lighting a fire. Upstairs the windows are still open, and sunshine will warm the downstairs soon. So I will curl up under the couch blanket and breathe in the steam rising from my coffee cup, and that will be cozy enough.

Between the two of us (though Tom did way more than I did), we got all of the green firewood out of the driveway and into the woodshed. I filled buckets and boxes with wood chips for kindling, then swept the rest into the flower gardens as mulch. T lugged the air conditioner into the basement. I picked the big tomatoes and carried them into the dining room for ripening. I processed green beans for the freezer. Between times I read Teresa's poems and Baron's poems and thought about them and took notes. I read a few pages of Pride and Prejudice. I meant to also read a few pages of The Waves but somehow never managed to pick up the book. I coughed and snuffled, in a minor-league way. I made an early dinner (roasted mackerel, corn salad with baked feta) so that T could go out and see a band. I sat on the couch with Jane Austen and ate peach pie and listened to the Sox game. I went to bed early.

Today I'm going to tear out the tomato plants, a task that will also include stripping out the remaining immature tomatoes and simmering them down into salsa verde. I'll make oven-fried chicken for dinner, and baked red tomatoes, and maybe an apple Brown Betty. And then tonight we are both going out to see a show: Swamp Dogg, a soul and R&B legend, described on Wikipedia as "one of the great cult figures of 20th century American music."

I hope the snuffling and coughing will dissipate. Really, this is not much of a cold, and I'm sure I'm no longer infectious, though I'm still feeling slow and dumb. Nonetheless, we managed to accomplish a batch of fall chores, and I managed to think about poems. The mule keeps trudging up the hill. 

Saturday morning, 45 degrees. We're nowhere near a frost yet, but the tomatoes seem to have stopped ripening on the vines. So this weekend I'll start filling baskets with tomatoes, start tearing out plants. I haven't yet touched the pile of firewood in the driveway, so that's another chore waiting. Although I did edit yesterday morning, I felt too crappy and cold-ridden to exert myself beyond laundry and cooking and blinking over a Jane Austen novel. But today I do feel somewhat better, and I expect I'll return to my mulish ways soon.

Young Charles allowed me to stay in bed till almost 6, and now I am dawdling over my coffee as he digests his breakfast upstairs alongside sleeping Tom. That little cat has been such a sparkle; we are both smitten, despite his pesty ways. I don't know when the gut issues will be fully resolved, but I try to remember that he is young yet, and babies always have wild intestinal excitement even when they're not recovering from giardia and neglect. Next week will be the first big test: Can Chuck manage alone for most of a day while T and I are both away at work? Or will we be mopping up a terrible mess? Stay tuned for the next thrilling episode of "Kitten Innards."

In addition to my outdoor chores, I've got a stack of friends' poems to read, an essay to start outlining, my Whitman class looming, and now this new editing project to wrestle with. I'm trying not to panic: this is normal, it's the freelance way, I've been in this situation a thousand times. Still, I do sometimes wonder what it would be like to just go to work and come home instead of whipping crazily back and forth between spaciousness and hysteria. Someday, maybe, I'll be able to start saying no to the editing projects. Someday, when I'm 90. Sigh.

Late yesterday afternoon I got very bad news about a friend's health, so I'm feeling somewhat blank and stricken this morning. The fact that I seem to be coming down with a cold isn't helping, though I did scribble some decent blurts at my writing group last night, so that's something.

Today I need to get started on a new editing project; I've got a cord of firewood to stack; class and writing and home obligations dangle and sway; but mostly I just feel like putting my head under the covers and waiting for some kind person to bring me tea. That is not going to happen, however, so I will blunder forward.

Meanwhile, Chuck "Mr. Enthusiasm" Van Pelt is bouncing around the house, eyes as big as pennies, making his little conversational chirp noises, occasionally stopping by to lean his cheek against mine, then leaping off again. He woke me at 4 a.m. by way of excessive snuggling. And, yes, he's a dear little good-tempered pest, but losing an hour of sleep was unfortunate.

My friend's bad news is very much darkening the day. But I will go for my walk. I will put clean sheets on the bed. I will make my own cup of tea and I will stand at my desk in my tiny sweet study and listen to the Carolina wren sing in the backyard maples. I will do the work I said I would do.

Everything has arrived simultaneously: a load of firewood, a basket of peaches, and a new editing project. Well, the editing project will have to wait till tomorrow because those peaches will not. I picked out enough for a pie yesterday and could see that the rest would be calling me today. So I may be baking a second pie (for my poetry group) and I'll certainly be scalding, peeling, slicing, and bagging peaches for the freezer.

What a gift, though! Local peaches in northern New England are a rare commodity as the trees are difficult to nurture and often die without warning. Of course, compared to the southern beauties, our northern varieties are lacking. They tend to be small, pale, and tart: no golden globes of sugar here. But they still have a peach's heavenly scent and texture, and the ones I'm dealing with are fairly easy to peel and slice, which is not the case with all.

So peaches are my day, and housework, and maybe I'll start hauling firewood, or maybe that will wait too.

Teresa and I talked about Brigit Kelly's The Orchard yesterday, and it turns out that neither of us liked the collection. Kelly is a revered poet, and many of my favorite people adore her work, so I feel unhappy saying that I just cannot. On the other hand, as Teresa argues, figuring out what doesn't move us clarifies some of the needs in our own work and heart. She and I have both succumbed to Whitman this year; we're both in a chaotic quandary about the direction of our next collections. But wherever we head, it cannot be where Kelly was pointing: that private preciousness, the interiority of the grotesque, an imagination that does not care if mine follows or not.

I spent much of yesterday morning driving around--first, out to Cape Elizabeth, to T's worksite, where I got a tour of the unnerving mansion, met some co-workers, and left with a half-bushel of ripening peaches. Then I drove to mall land and bought new bath towels to replace the old ones that are starting to split. And then I made myself do the grocery shopping, though by this time I was very ready to stop being surrounded by conspicuous consumption. So the afternoon was soothing: I processed beans for the freezer, made fresh pickles, cooked down a big pot of sauce, finished reading The Orchard. Homestead tasks may be demanding, but they also make me feel more humane. 

Today I'll be back at my desk--with luck, finishing an editing project, though that may take longer than I expect. This afternoon I'm meeting with Teresa to discuss The Orchard and no doubt a thousand other things. And somewhere in the midst of all this I'll be scribbling notes about the long-poem class. I don't know how quickly those peaches will ripen, but that's another big job looming. I suppose I'll slice them up for the freezer, though I could can them instead. I guess I'll decide later.

I am looking at poems and beginning to imagine a new collection. Sunlight glitters on clusters of unripened tomatoes. Tomorrow the green firewood arrives. Everything is caught. Everything is in motion.

I like coffee fine, but I'm not devoted to it. I enjoy my small cup each morning, my two small cups on the weekends, but I wouldn't miss it that much if it were gone. I could easily drink tea in the mornings. I could easily skip the caffeine altogether. But every once in a while, a cup of coffee is exactly perfect, and that's the cup I am drinking right now. Dark and bitter and steaming. Luxury, plain style.

Yesterday I walked down to the drugstore and got my Covid and flu shots, so now I'll have some protection before I dive into the public school petrie dish next week. Thank goodness we have a fantastic governor. Last week Janet Mills declared that all Mainers can receive free Covid vaccines, so I no longer need to fret about whether or not I can convince a doctor to give me a prescription.

I think I'm ready for my high schoolers, and I'm almost ready to talk to Teresa tomorrow afternoon about Kelly's The Orchard, and now a fresh stack of editing has appeared in my inbox. Still, though I've got plenty to keep myself busy at home, I may take a field trip to Tom's worksite today to check out the final manifestation of the massive house project he's been engaged on for more than two years now. Rumor has it that one of his co-workers is trying to give away some of her peach crop, which could add foraging excitement to my outing. The drought has made it a tough year for foraging. I will likely get no wild mushrooms at all (sob), so a peach windfall would be a thrill.

What else? I should get onto my mat. I should simmer another batch of sauce. I should make refrigerator pickles. I should read The Waves. I should mess around with my long-poem class plans.

Last night for dinner we had maple-miso baked salmon, potatoes roasted with sage, a chard tian, a tomato and green bean salad, apple cake . . . nothing fancy, nothing difficult, but it all tasted so good together. Tonight, maybe sauce and noodles, cucumber and red onion, another slice of apple cake . . .

Here's a bit of excitement, at least between my younger son and me. The Minnesota Twins have just called up the relief pitcher Cody Laweryson from the minors. Cody's a kid from Bingham, Maine, population 600-something, who used to play against Harmony's middle school basketball and soccer teams. P was pretty friendly with him, as these kids from the sticks can be: seeing each other season after season in one another's school cafeteria-gyms, watching each other suddenly sprout from kid to gangly teen. Cody went to UMaine, then was drafted into the Twins system, but at age 27 had never yet pitched in the majors. This week he finally got his chance, and he pitched two excellent innings against the Diamondbacks. Now the Twins are playing the Yankees, and P and I are so thrilled to imagine a kid from Bingham facing the great Aaron Judge. It is just the sort of story we love.

Yesterday was a fine day for driving down to the wharf--window open, singing along to Springsteen's Rosalita, paddling my left arm in the breeze. And it was a fine day for finding a parking place, a fine day for bringing home a treat. I spent just over $50 on four meals (three with leftovers) for two people. Whole Atlantic mackerel, as always, is a fabulous deal, and I also bought a pound of chowder mix--bits of cod, sole, flounder, hake. I stowed both in the freezer for later. But for tonight I bought Scottish salmon (not cheap but not ridiculous), and for last night I bought two soft-shell lobsters on sale. So we enjoyed a big Sunday-night feast: boiled lobster, melted butter, freshly baked bread, a green bean and cherry tomato salad, apple cake for dessert.

During the day I spent some time working on an essay for Poetry Lab Notes, the (maybe) name of the future Substack journal I'm designing with Jeannie and Teresa. I picked beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers. I watered the backyard gardens. I kept track of the Bills score. I read Arundel. I baked a couple of loaves of bread. It was a mild puttery day, and I'm sorry it ended so soon.

This week will be busy. I need to buckle down and get myself prepped for next week's high school opener. We've got a load of green firewood arriving, so I'll be back to wood hauling soon. I have to finish reading Brigit Kelly's The Orchard. I should start reading Baron's manuscript. Probably my calendar is scribbled with a passel of other obligations that I'm not instantly remembering.

For me, this is the last week of summer. The rest of the teachers have long been back in school, but I've had this extra month, and it's been sweet. So despite whatever is yammering at me on my calendar, I want to cling to that ease, even if only to stand idly at a window, to walk idly through the woods.

In unheard-of news, young Charles has allowed me to sleep past 5 a.m. two days in a row . . . well, not really sleep, though he I did let me lie on my back in a semi-dozy state while he sat purring on my sternum, now and then leaning forward to press his cheek romantically against mine.

But all semi-tolerable positions come to an end, and at this moment Chuck is crunching up his breakfast chow and I am drinking black coffee in my couch corner, and gray flat dawnlight is carving seams into the neighbors' vinyl siding. A robin bursts into complaint, then hushes. Crickets squeak squeak squeak squeak, without cease, without variation.

Yesterday I tore out one of my tomato plants, which was yellowing, and pruned the rest so that the remaining green fruit might have a better chance of ripening on the vines. But probably this year will be like all the others, and I'll soon be decorating the dining and living rooms with bushel baskets of green tomatoes. I did make a batch of sauce yesterday, and a batch of pesto, all of which went into the freezer. I also baked a caramelized apple cake, which we never ended up tasting because we decided to go out for German food and overstuffed ourselves with sauerbraten and potatoes and spaetzle.

During the day I worked for a few hours on Substack formatting, and now I know how to basically manage the platform and have drafted some sample entries to share with Teresa and Jeannie. I read Kenneth Roberts's Arundel, and I listened to the Sox lose to the Yankees. I watered the garden and harvested hydrangeas for drying. I did laundry and dealt with a kitten litterbox mistake and won a game of cribbage and lost a game of Yahtzee. I whipped through a couple of New York Times Sunday crossword puzzles. I was constantly busy with something or other, but in a desultory, semi-vacation, semi-homesteader, semi-bellelettrist sort of way. There are worse ways to spend a Saturday.

Today will likely be more of the same. I want to take a trip to the fish market so I can restock our freezer. I might bake bread. I should prune the faded blooms on the dahlias, coneflowers, and marigolds. Maybe I should run the trimmer along the edges of the browning grass. I'd like to cut fresh bouquets for the mantle. Little chores, none of them crucial . . . and yet as Angela and Carlene suggested in their comments on yesterday's post, our small busyness is life's embrace.

As always, an afternoon with Jeannie and Teresa makes me feel as if, maybe, possibly, I am doing the work I ought to be doing. What a gift it is to have such minds in my life, not to mention the model of their commitment, their persistence, the sheer hard work they do, day in and out. Of course, they can still (inadvertently) make me feel like a dilettante. Oh, Dawn, she's the one rereading Kidnapped and watching Mary Tyler Moore reruns. Meanwhile, Teresa and Jeannie discuss brain chemistry and Thomas Mann.

We are beginning to cogitate about bringing some of the work we've been doing privately into a more public sphere, possibly through a shared Substack journal that would include commentary about our conversations and readings as well as poems we've written under one another's influence. So that's another thing to add to my to-do list: figure out the details of the platform and discover if it might possibly work for us.

One interesting element of yesterday's conversation concerned publishing. We discovered that all of us, over the past few years, have significantly reduced our engagement in journal submissions. In some cases, that's because journals that once reliably took our work no longer publish (Gettysburg Review, Scoundrel Time). Sometimes new editors have changed a journal's focus and our work is no longer of interest (Sewanee Review). Print-only journals have almost no circulation, so publishing in them can feel like graveyard work.

But as Jeannie also pointed out, at this stage in our lives, the three of us don't need journal publication to pad our resumes or comfort our egos. It's only purpose is to give us a public voice, so why not create a place where we can do that for ourselves, in our own way?

It's okay if you tell me I need another unwieldy project like I need a kick in the head. I know I'm already overloaded. Soon I'll be on the road teaching high schoolers. I've got an online class on the long poem to design. I'm editing academic texts. I'm writing my own poems. I'm researching for a big collaborative performance with the Monson Arts conference faculty. I'm mulling a new collection. I've got to write a giant critical essay about Baron's oeuvre. I have homestead chores. I have fragile parents who live five hours away from me. I'm raising a lively kitten with gastrointestinal trouble. My kid is getting married next summer. I'm turning 61 in less than a month.

All I can say in my defense is that being around brilliant, curious, fire-hearted people is energizing. I spent my apprentice years largely alone as a writer, and now I am basking in a community of poets and other artists. I scrabbled across an ice floe and fell into a warm bright sea. 

Yesterday was a surprisingly warm day, and this morning the mildness lingers, though today's temperatures aren't supposed to rise out of the mid-sixties. Little Chuck sits next to me beside the open window, washing his face. Last night he and Tom enjoyed boy time together, while I was out writing, and then both beamed at me when I walked through the door. How he worms his way into our affections, despite our broken Ruckus hearts. Oh, these little souls.

I wrote two poem-blurts last night: one a hideous mess that I won't revisit, but the other might be real. This morning, after I deal with recycling and dishes and laundry and my mat exercises, I'll see what daylight says about it. I do hope it's a poem. Writing has been so hard for me lately.

This afternoon Teresa and Jeannie and I will meet to talk about To the Lighthouse and Nevermore and Ruden's I Am the Arrow. We always share a recent draft or two, and I think maybe one of the ones I'll be sharing is all right. But writing has been so difficult for me that I barely trust myself.

I know this will pass; it always does. And I am dogged. I always plow straight through my dry fields, kicking up dust. 

In the cemetery, one of my favorite gravestones reads Homemaker. Drummer. Maybe on mine someone will etch Mule. Poet.

Yesterday I did a thing I've never done before: I signed us up for an autumn farm share--six weeks' worth of local organic vegetables, which I can pick up at a delivery point on my own street. As a recovering homesteader, I of course feel weird about this. But my garden was wretched, I won't have much to process for the freezer, and it turns out that the cost of the CSA is probably less than I would spend at the grocery store. It's certainly no more, and we'll be supporting a local farmer and eating interesting food. If we like it, I'll sign us up for a winter share.

I'm trying to think of the CSA as I think of the freezer lamb we buy every winter: a sensible way to acquire high-quality food, support farmers, and save a little money by buying in bulk. But for a gardener, it does feel like a come-down. Ah, well. You'd think after a nearly a decade in this city, I'd have conquered my woodsy snobberies. But they linger.

Today is housework day, and going-out-to-write evening, and this afternoon I've got a zoom meeting with Monson staff about the conference scholarship program. Here's hoping we can come up with a good plan for filling that hole. If you can donate, in any amount, we'd so appreciate that. But we're also trying to figure out ways to guarantee a regular and predictable scholarship fund, given the implosion of public support.

I drove to mall land yesterday, not a favorite activity, and bought new pillows for our bed as ours had reached lump stage and I kept waking up with a stiff neck. And I bought another pair of jeans in the new smaller size I now magically seem to be. Yes, it's school-clothes season: new jeans, new boots, new Goodwill leather jacket. Add loud earrings and maybe some lipstick, and I am all ready to put on my high school show. I might as well be cheerful and vivid because, no matter what, I'm still going to look like I'm 60 years old.

[You notice I haven't mentioned yesterday's assassination yet? You notice how impossible it's becoming to condemn violence while also noting that the man who was killed encouraged this exact same violence as long as it was inflicted on people he didn't care about? You notice how we can't talk about irony? You notice how we can't talk about truth?]

Another morning in the 40s, with highs not forecast to get out of the low 60s. It really is fall; and though I'm often elegiac about summer, this year I'm ready for a new season. We had such terrible wrong weather this spring and summer, not to mention a groundhog infestation and of course losing Ruckus, which greatly affected my pleasure in being outside in the garden. I'm ready to turn my thoughts to brisk walks and cool air and lighting an evening fire. I haven't filled the upstairs woodbox yet, but that time is coming.

Yesterday was ridiculously busy. I went for a walk with Gretchen, then lugged Chuck to the vet, then came home for an unexpected visit from my homeland friends Angela and Steve, then rushed off for a haircut, then rushed home for an emotional phone meeting with Teresa about a new writing project that I didn't even know I was conceiving until we started talking . . . and then I made chicken chili with cornmeal dumplings for dinner, alongside a cucumber and yogurt salad and apple crisp with cream, all the while feeling kind of hung over from my overemotions with Teresa. I'm grateful for friends who can exist in that world with me, but it shakes me, too.

Anyway, the upshot is that Teresa and I and possibly some other poets may be collaborating on a collection together, or maybe not. We don't have anything yet, except feelings and landscapes and scattered thoughts.

Good news about Chuck, though. He now weighs six pounds, and the vet staff is so pleased. Clearly he's starting to absorb his meals better. Yet there are still lingering gut issues, so now he's on a probiotic that we hope will solve them. The poor guy has been so cheerful throughout this ordeal, but you know how bad an intestinal problem feels.

Today is my dear sister Heather's 59th birthday. And this morning the furnace guy is supposed to show up, for real this time. In the afternoon I'm being zoom-interviewed by a high school student, and in between I'll probably run errands and make a batch of sauce and start looking at poems, keeping my conversation with Teresa in mind. I'm also in the midst of a Beethoven listening project with Betsy, and it, too, may or may not turn into some sort of collaboration. Teresa and I are reading Brigit Kelly's The Orchard together and now we want to read Virginia Woolf's The Waves as well. I've got to start thinking about that daunting essay on Baron's oeuvre. I've been copying out "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." There's so much to do! Yet I'm also feeling fairy-tale frozen. Some spell has been cast. What will break it?

It's cold this morning! . . . 46 degrees: no wonder Chuck slept curled underneath my chin and I spent the entire night trying to warm my bare feet on Tom. The sad days of sock time are upon us.

Well, I have just bought myself a new pair of boots, so perhaps the sock transition will be more enjoyable this year. I do always feel sad when sandal season is over. On the other hand, lighting the wood stove is a celebration, and if this weather keeps up, I'll be hauling firewood upstairs before you know it.

Yesterday morning, as soon as Tom backed out of the driveway and left for work, the washing machine hose separated from the drain and began spewing water all over the basement. Fortunately I quickly repaired the breach, but I was not sorry to then get a call from the oil company telling me that the furnace cleaning guy was out sick and would have to reschedule. I did not want to picture him kneeling in the flood.

So I ended up with a quieter-than-expected day--did the grocery shopping, finished Cat's Eye, then began copying out "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" so that I can carefully study the transitions between sections. If you're taking my upcoming Poetry Kitchen class, you might consider doing the same: I won't assign that task to you, but in my experience copying out long poems is hugely helpful when I'm trying to figure out how they work and what I might borrow from them. It's also a great way to sideswipe writer's block.

This morning I'm going for a walk with Gretchen, then hauling Chuck off to the vet, getting my hair cut, phone-meeting with Teresa about her current writing obsession . . . a tap-dancing-up-the-walls-and-across-the-ceiling kind of day: I don't know exactly what I mean by that comparison, but certainly it evokes split-second timing and splintery, sparking concentration . . . also, so much talking: the overexcitement of poems mixed in with hairdresser small talk and cat digestion. I might need a nap afterwards.

And here we are at Monday again. I've got a busy week ahead: furnace cleaning (aka kitten wrangling), vet appointment (ditto), four zoom meetings (yikes), and whatever else is scrawled on the calendar that I'm not recalling at the moment.

None of that is paying work, but soon editing projects will start reappearing. I'm on the countdown to my Monson classes. And yesterday I was asked to write a big critical retrospective of Baron Wormser's work--an almost overwhelming assignment. Of course I can't turn it down, and I wouldn't dream of doing so. Nonetheless, nerves kept me awake last night. Writing essays, especially review essays, always exhausts me, and writing essays about my teacher's work is particularly grueling. Even though I've written about Baron's books several times already, I'm still anxious about getting things wrong. Yet it's an honor to be asked, and I know I'm probably the right person to do the job . . . Anyway, whatever the case, I said yes, and now I have to figure out what the task will require of me.

We got more than an inch of rain over the weekend, thank goodness. The grass is still brown and burnt, the shrubs still tatty and shabby, but the air is cloaked in the scent of wet leaves and earth, and there is a sense of ease in the garden after months of tightness and stress. On my walk I'll keep an eye out for mushrooms--it was a terrible summer for chanterelles but maybe the autumn maitakes will have a chance.

I've been reading Atwood's Cat's Eye, such a painful book about childhood, and thinking about how it echoes and diverges from Elizabeth Bowen's The Little Girls. I wonder if Atwood read that novel before she wrote her own.

Childhood is such a wilderness.

A two-day rainstorm is a magnificent gift. So far, close to an inch has fallen, and the shrubs and garden plants look drunk. No wonder: after a two-month drought, I feel kind of drunk too.

I managed to soothe Chuck into letting me sleep in a little this morning, and now the two of us are cozily curled up together in our couch corner, listening to the slow click and tap of raindrops. Sunday morning. Rain, hot coffee, a bowl of kitten chow, and a pal. What could be more luxurious?

Yesterday's lunch at the seafood warehouse was delicious and also very amusing. The company is Japanese-owned and specializes in processing urchins (uni) and sea cucumbers for the Asian market. But they are also open daily for lunch. We bought trays of sashimi, whelk, some cooked rice, some nori, and carried them all upstairs to the employee break room. The price was reasonable, the fish was off-the-boat fresh, and most of the other diners appeared to be Japanese. A sign on the wall informed us: "Do Not Drinking." I can't wait to go back.

Look how wonderful it is to spend time with the gifts of other cultures. Yet while I'm peacefully eating Japanese food in Maine, the residents of Pilsen, my son's Chicago neighborhood, are petrified. The area is majority Mexican American, and people know that Trump is targeting them--these modest families, pushing their grocery carts through the aisles, walking their children to school. I love that neighborhood so much, and I am sick over the thought of ICE agents and National Guard troops terrorizing it. And of course I am scared for my son and future daughter-in-law, who are white American citizens but also highly likely to intervene in any wickedness they see.

Well, what can a parent do but quietly stand back and say, I raised a righteous child. And now his righteousness is being put to the test.

The morning is dark and mild. Through the open windows I hear crickets creak and, beyond them, the low growl of the highway.

I am up far too early on a Saturday morning, but Chuck is irrepressible. He is four months old now, and we are firmly in toddler land. I wail, "Can you deal with the cat? He's trying to climb me while I'm peeling potatoes," and T, like a good partner, swoops up the pest and takes him away. The living room floor is covered with cardboard boxes. We're woken at 3 by a joyous monster. Our conversation is dominated by discussions of bodily functions. We've both found ourselves automatically doing the baby-joggle when we hold him.

Of course, now that he's forked me out of bed, Hasty Stan himself has gone back to sleep. He's curled up next to me on the couch, little bat ears nestled against my hip, a portrait of Good Boy. Hah.

We're supposed to get some solid rain this weekend, starting midafternoon. T and I have plans to go out to lunch with our neighbor, at a seafood wholesaler she's learned about: apparently you can get platters of fresh sashimi and uni and eat them in the company breakroom, and we are eager to check it out. Then, if the rain holds off,  the three of us might mosey along Congress Street . . . look at a book fair, go to some vintage stores, investigate the flea market.

I'm still reading Ozick's Trust, recommended by my novelist friend Tom. I'm also looking again at Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, and I need to get started on Brigit Kelly's collection The Orchard, which Teresa and I will be rereading together. With Betsy, I've starting a listening project: Beethoven's late string quartets. Valerie and I are watching the new season of the British baking show together. Gretchen and I go for walks and imagine performances centered around slate and ice. T and I are team-raising yet another crazy little boy. Hey, friends, it's so good to know you all.

It's raining!

Chuck, confused by the unfamiliar tap and click, has been wandering wide-eyed around the house. Now he has settled on the back of the couch, perplexed but lulled, staring into the dark maw of the window.

We're supposed to have off-and-on rain for the next few days, and I fervently hope for more on than off. How beautiful it would be to enjoy a weekend of wet. 

Yesterday I chipped away at five different poem drafts, read a chunk of Ozick's novel Trust, got the house cleaned, went out to write. Today is recycling day, sheet-washing day, probably errand-running day; but then I can turn my thoughts back to the drafts. I can't tell what I think of the Ozick yet: it seems to be too aware of its own irony, but it was a young person's novel so that's forgivable. It is vast and messy and surprising and exuberant; also judgmental; also ridiculous, especially in its figurative language and its stock characters: "lawyers," "poets," "society girls," "rich people." Reading it feels like living inside the head of an imperfectly observant but very opinionated, ambitious, performative, and overreaching 1960s-era young woman novelist, so in that way it is a complete success.

Shopping

Yesterday, after unloading a few bags of things at the Goodwill, I went inside to see if I might want to bring home any previously owned stuff to fill the gap left by the removal of my own previously owned stuff. Ah, the vicious Goodwill circle . . . Though I am not in general very tempted by shopping, I do enjoy moseying through the crazy disorder of the books and housewares, and yesterday I found the complete poems of James Wright and two sturdy plain drinking glasses of the sort that Tom had recently broken. Success! So then I thought I'd take a look at the clothes--these days almost always a waste of time at the Goodwill, now that the vintage buyers skim everything off first. But magically I found a beautiful red suede jacket that fits me like a glove and will look grand with the jeans I bought a few weeks ago . . . and get this: they are jeans in a size smaller than my usual one. I mean, what's with that? I'm almost 61 and I've dropped a size? What is this miracle?

Names

As you know, Little Chuck's full name is Charles Snowball Dirtball Van Pelt. But naturally he's acquired a few more, to be deployed in special circumstances. When he sits around sweetly, Tom pats him on the head and says, Aw, Charles. When he is his everyday spunky self, he is Hey, Chuck, stop that. But during periods of hysteria, when he is pushing silverware on the floor and climbing on the counters and worming his way into the open dishwasher and galloping up and down the stairs like a lunatic, he is Hasty Stan Stanwood, star player for the Black Sox. We had some serious Hasty Stan action last night, when he dumped a water glass all over the dining room table, just as I was getting ready to serve dinner. My son refers to this as velociraptor behavior: those moments when a kitten almost seems to become airborne. Put Hasty Stan on first and he'll steal third in the blink of an eye. It makes for an exciting mealtime.

Books

I finished rereading Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, one of the great book loves of my life. And then I finished reading Sarah Ruden's I Am the Arrow, in which she uses six Plath poems as a way to talk about Plath's writing and life. I've already read a great deal about Plath, and I've already spent a lot of time with Plath's poems. Is it wrong to say that I've reached the stage when I no longer care about anyone else's close readings?

This is the apple pie I baked yesterday afternoon, the first apple pastry of the season, and I have to say that I am smug about its good looks. For reasons best known to itself, the crust behaved beautifully--no rips, no sticking--and the filling was tender but not soggy. (I dislike a gluey, flour-packed filling but I do like a pie I can slice.) Now, if I only knew how to center a photograph. . . .

It was a big kitchen day: in addition to the pie, I roasted a chicken and made gravy and a big corn and vegetable salad. Now we'll have cooked chicken to work with for a few days, and today I've got another round of tomatoes to simmer down into sauce, chard to prep for a tian, and lots of leftover apple pie. Seems like a reasonable start to September.

I need to run a few errands today, and I need to get back to my desk and look hard at some poems. Yesterday my friend Betsy dropped by with a present she'd bought for me as thanks for reading her manuscript . . . though all I had said to her afterward was "This is a great poetry collection! I have nothing to recommend! It's wonderful!" So I do feel as if I wasn't in fact all that helpful, though maybe praise is good enough on its own. It was a manuscript that didn't need me in the slightest. But Betsy brought me a present anyway.

The task did remind me that I ought to gird my loins and start looking at my own piles of uncollected poems. Do I want to make another book? I guess I do. Right now I just don't know how to get myself ready to start. Eventually, if the past is any indicator, I'll be seized with a sudden organizational idea and then I'll tear into the project. For now, though, submit submit is too weighty a chant. Ugh. 

Yesterday's ferry hop out to the islands was perfect--beautiful soft weather, no crowds, and we timed our trip for low tide so we could walk across the sandbar from Little Diamond to Great Diamond. We ate a picnic lunch in the shade, we picked our way over a beach where the only other visitors were three women reading books, we wandered gravel roads and paths, and we got home in time for an afternoon nap.

It's sad that the work week returns so quickly, but thus is time and here we are again. Little Chuck, who had a spurt of badness yesterday evening (pushing silverware off the dining room table, sneaking onto the counter in pursuit of cheese), is curled up on my shoulder in the guise of a good little boy. But such laziness cannot continue. I need to grocery-shop today, and send in my passport renewal, and deal with a pile of laundry. I ought to start thinking about high school class plans. I have two poem drafts smoldering and a box of stuff to cart to the Goodwill.

Yesterday I finished reading Toibin's The South, and for the moment I'm passing the time with Stevenson's Kidnapped till I step back into serious concentration.

Today is the first day of school in Portland, and my walk will be crowded with parents and children. A few leaves are changing color; a few are beginning to fall. My Poetry Kitchen class is full (actually too full, amazingly). I've got so much work looming. But for the moment I will idle, watching the families hurry by, watching the songbirds strip the last of the berries from the bushes. I feel invisible. It is not so bad.

I've just woken up from a very disturbing dream-visitation featuring a Harmony friend who was murdered more than a decade ago. In my dream I had no recollection of her actual fate: we were just two people walking sociably around a fair together (the fairground was my Harmony land), talking and laughing and watching our neighbors bustle among rides and buildings. But as soon as I woke, I was appalled.

So now I am sitting here in my couch corner with a weight on my heart. Poor tragic Amy. Her children were also murdered, but in my dream there were no children, neither hers nor mine. It was just the two of us and, far off, a glimpse of her father talking to Tom. "Let's go see your dad," I remember suggesting. We tried to make our way through the crowd. But we never got there before I woke up.

I should write to her mother about this visitation. If Amy has come back from the dead, even so fleetingly, her mother must be told.

Well, that dream will color the day, no question. Tom is going to take our photos this morning so that we can send in our passports for renewal. We are planning a midday picnic and stroll on the Diamond Islands. But in the meantime Amy will walk beside me across my lost land, and her father will never get to see her.