There's still been no frost in Portland, but the temperatures are finally beginning to drop into the thirties. It will be a brisk and chilly election day.

I've got a schedule filled with this-and-that: fetch my rehaired violin bow, walk with a friend, make a quick doctor's-office visit, figure out where I'm supposed to vote, plus all of the usual editorial stuff. I also need to find something new to read. I'm nearly done with the John Brown bio, and I finished the Elena Ferrante novel my mother gave me for my birthday (capsule review: "mixed feelings, not all that enthusiastic, characters are very irritating, setting is well done"). So maybe I'll add "go to library" to my to-do list.

Dinner with friends last night, and now a lovely damp fog. I'll be back at my desk, with a brief midmorning dash to drop off my bow for rehairing.

At dinner last night no one said a word about the latest mass shooting, the latest corruption revelations, the latest North Korea fears. I don't believe this is indifference. I believe we are all silently dog-paddling in a murk of dread.

Maybe that's why I write about painting and planting garlic. Maybe because I know there are horrible things that you don't need me to tell you. You already know them; you know them too well.

Anyway the rain will be good for the garlic.

I seem to be back to normal this morning, as evidenced by how early I woke up. On a morning when everyone else is wallowing in their extra change-the-clocks hour, I was wide-awake at 4:30, and I can't even blame the cat. So here I am at the kitchen table, in my familiar red bathrobe, with my familiar white cup of delightful black coffee, feeling peppy all by myself.

Yesterday Tom did the first stage of the upstairs-floor sanding. Some idiot homeowner of the past had painted those beautiful fir floors, and then a second idiot painted them again, so the sanding job was slow. But already, even half-done, the difference is glorious.

In the meantime, I finished the dining room touch-ups and removed all the painter's tape, and voila! A sweet little yellow-walled, gray-trimmed, white-closeted room, where someday I will be sitting in my red bathrobe writing to you.

And I also planted my garlic, and finished planting tulips and daffodils and grape hyacinths, and mulched the beds with leaves. And I prepped and taped the back room (aka, room for guests/room for watching TV) for painting. And I did not take any kind of nap at all.

All the while, that poem draft I wrote last week is bubbling in my thoughts, like a secret joy. What a relief and a pleasure it is to be back to my favorite self: dirt-smudged woman with a pocket full of syllables.

Good morning from the person who slept all afternoon and all night as innumerable numbers of television episodes of something-or-other unwound from her laptop.

I am more or less back in the land of the attentive, though I do feel about 10 IQ points dumber than usual. My IV drip was fentanyl, so this experience has given me a small tame view into what that drug does for opioid addicts. Ack, is all I can say.

Over the course of my life I've had surprisingly few procedures involving anesthesia--really, just wisdom teeth removal when I was 17 and the induced birth of my older son when I was 29. So the whole get-an-IV thing was a novelty, and I kept asking questions: What's this for? What's that for? The nurses were probably relieved when I lapsed into unconsciousness.

Anyway, the best thing about today: Eating food! Drinking coffee! Breakfast, how I love thee!

Tom's just left to go sand floors at the Alcott House. I will bumble over there eventually, but my first focus will be on planting my garlic and the rest of my flower bulbs. Then painting, painting, painting . . . unless the residual fentanyl decides that I really ought to go home and take another 12-hour nap.

A taste of rain this morning. Dog-walking women giggling together under my window. A heavyset jogger gamely working his way up the hill. And those Legionnaire seagulls, still making pompous small-talk on the green.

Before me at noon is the excitement of a minor routine medical procedure that will nonetheless leave me drooping on the couch for the rest of the day. I foresee a series of bland television episodes in my future.

In the meantime, it's possible I may get a little work done. Or not.

Yesterday morning I was resigning myself to not writing poems. Yesterday afternoon I wrote the first draft of a poem that might be a keeper. Goes to show I know nothing at all about the workings of my own brain.

In other old news, the gulls are flying and the cars are driving and the cat is scowling at a squirrel. But, hey, my baseball pick won the World Series!

I could give you the lowdown on how I came to write this poem, but really: it's the same old story. Throw some words onto the page for the thousandth time, and suddenly they twitch into life like Frankenstein's monster and then drag you off into a dirty alley and make you fork over your wallet and your keys.

Well, the water's drained out of the basement, so that's one good thing. And the electrician wired up the kitchen, so that's another. And we got a month's extension on our doll-house lease, so that's a relief too.

Today is November 1, and there's still been no frost in Portland. My basil is not exactly thriving, but it's viable, and nasturtiums are blooming in the Alcott House garden. It's so odd, this long mildness; I have no idea if it's normal or not.

I've taken a short break from the John Brown biography, mostly because I've reached the chapter about the Harpers Ferry attack, and it's full of blood and wounds and agony and has become a dreadful book to read over breakfast.  Instead, I've started my first Elena Ferrante novel, which my mother gave me for my birthday. So far I'm not enthralled, but maybe I'll get sucked in soon. I know my reading state of mind is not at its best. I wake in the night worrying about what I've forgotten to spackle or caulk. My hands are constantly streaked with paint. When I'm not frantically rehabbing the house, I'm frantically editing other people's books. My brain just does not have much room for private words now, and that makes me uneasy.

This time last year, we were getting ready to move to Portland. I was in a terrible, and different, state of frenzy. Then, all last winter, I was frozen in homesickness. So I wonder if this shift in the seasons should seem ominous to me. That's how my mind works these days. It occasionally asks, "If I had more leisure to think about myself, how would I feel?" And then it has nightmares about paint.

Meanwhile, the gruesomeness of Washington is like being stuck in front of an awful blaring TV in a hospital waiting room. I can't stop looking, but I hate every second of it.

But there are good things, there are good things. I'm proud of the job we're doing on the house. I'm proud to be an indispensable part of the team. With one tiny exception involving a very high stairwell, I've done every speck of painting on the place. Given the hideous condition of those walls, it's been a ton of work. And Tom and I are doing well together as a couple without children at home. That's a big deal for us, as it is for any parents who have loved and tended their children so intensely.

I've published seven books and written nine. I should be easy on myself; I shouldn't fret because I can't write much now. Words aren't the only important thing in the world.