Yesterday was one of those snow-globe days: flakes sifting from the sky all day long, pretending to be flurries, but in the end we got three inches of un-forecast accumulation. I worked on cards, finished my Christmas shopping, watched parts of a weird football game, shoveled snow, made rice and beans for dinner, read some A. S. Byatt stories. And now here we are at Monday again, and I'll be heading north to the homeland this afternoon, then teaching my last class of the season tomorrow.

The coffee table is loaded with new-to-us books. That's because Saturday was the Portland Public Library's annual book sale, a favorite event because we get to drive out to the library warehouse on the edge of town and wander among disorganized tables overflowing with surprises. We always come home with piles, of course. This year I snared the aforementioned Byatt story collection, plus The Major Works of John Clare, The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas (in a beautiful old edition), Seamus Heaney's Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996, Anita Brookner's Strangers, another copy of Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel's Dayswork because somebody I know will surely need this book, and a fine little volume of annals titled Marvels of 1924.

Of course in order to make room for the new, I had to weed out the old, so another of yesterday's chores was to lug a bag of castoffs to the local little free library. I used to feel sadder about that than I do these days. I've gotten better at releasing myself from the tyranny of print. Not a lot better, but a little bit.