Saturday morning dark. Coffee steams in a white cup. A big kitten full of breakfast leans against my shoulder and purrs lustily into my left ear. Outdoors the air is chilly, but in the house dregs of warmth still rise from last night's wood fire.

I have nothing on the calendar, nowhere I have to go. My plan for the weekend is to work in the garden, work in the kitchen, work on Baron's essay, work on my own poems. I'll probably treat Monday like a regular weekday as I'm unsure if Tom has the day off. (His schedule is temporarily weird.)

The living room is shadowy. On the mantle Baron's dahlias are rosy and subdued in the gray light. The kitchen clock ticks. The refrigerator growls. The books on the table are mysterious.

Yesterday afternoon Teresa, Jeannie, and I met on zoom to talk about Baron. For all of us his death has been a blow, not least because he was the one who brought us together. I met Jeannie at his house in Hallowell. I met Teresa at the Frost Place when I was his assistant at the teaching conference. That was the kind of thing he did: he saw who needed each other, and he opened a door.

It's hard to overstate how lonely I was as a writer in Harmony. I had made two friends at poetry retreats; yet though they were real friends (and remain so), neither clung to poetry with my obsessive seriousness. But Baron not only taught me; he led me into a world of real ambition: not for place or prize, but for poetry itself. As a Romantic, I was starry-eyed. This was what being a poet could mean. This was the life I dreamed of.

And in many ways it is the life I have lived, the life that Baron showed me was possible. To make poetry the center of my days. To bring words into conversation with the work of my hands. To become more generous to other people. To take the risk of saying something that is almost impossible to say.

Last October, Ray died, and with him a certain wildness in me died. But Baron's death has left me in a different state of mind. In all the years I knew him, he was constantly working to give me to myself. He strove to keep me from depending on his opinion. He pushed me into teaching situations that I didn't think I was ready for. He gave me friends and then detached himself, let us swim away into our own futures. His goal as a teacher was to teach himself out of a job, and that's a motto I have since shared many times in my own classes and conferences.

Yes, I do feel like an orphan. But also I feel like a poet.