Welcome home, shiny expensive machine. May you hold up your end of the bargain. Tom, no doubt light-headed from lack of cash, has already suggested street racing and decorating you with polka-dots. I, in more traditional fashion, am scrupulously wiping off every speck of dirt, a project I will keep up for maybe another 36 hours before I allow you to lapse into pollen and clutter. 

Now that the deed is done, I might as well turn off the dread faucet and try to enjoy myself. This is the sportiest car I've ever owned, so maybe I will learn to love driving, which would be convenient, given how much of it I have to do. She's peppy on the highway and swoops through curves and corners with aplomb--a surprise to me, who's spent more than a decade driving the car version of a couch cushion.

I realize that poets aren't actually supposed to have nice cars, but every once in a while mistakes are made.

Today is forecast to be warm and at least partly sunny. So I'll get sheets onto the lines, take an early walk, maybe spot another cache of mushrooms. Yesterday I scored a tote bag full of chicken-of-the-woods: enough for dinner plus three quarts in the freezer. I haven't yet spotted any chanterelles in my usual haunts, but I'm keeping an eye peeled. 

People like to stop and talk to me when they see me cutting mushrooms or carrying around a batch in my hat or otherwise being peculiar. The other day a woman stopped me in Baxter Woods to exclaim over what I'd found. She herself was carrying a camera with a telephoto lens, the usual sign of a birder, so I asked what she was looking for. She responded, "Oh, I'm a raccoon nut."

The woods are full of us weirdos.