Patchy frost this morning in Monson, and the sun is a blurred orange behind the eastern trees. Branches are still mostly bare up here, though fields have greened, though daffodils nod and quiver in the dooryards. Spring is riotous in Portland, but here it is more like a thought.

This is my last morning in town until high summer and the conference, when I'll be living by the lake for a week, not alongside the main street, gritty with winter sand, log trucks coasting through at 3 a.m., dump truck roaring past by 4 . . .

*

I'd written a much longer note to you, but something went wrong with the platform and very little of it saved when I tried to publish it. So you'll just have to imagine my thoughts moseying among fiddleheads and last-day-of-school feelings, because I don't think I can resurrect exactly what I was saying.

Ah, well. But you already know all about last-day-of-school feelings. You can fill in the blank.