One boy home, another to come in five days! The cat is thrilled and the house echoes with loud playlists . . . well, I exaggerate, because currently the boy and the cat are fast asleep together. But in a few hours, they'll be up and loud again.

In the meantime, I will fight my head cold and try to raise myself from the malaise of yesterday's poets' reception, which was crowded and full of people I didn't know. Thus, through no fault of its own, it instantly triggered all of my deer-in-headlights-must-run-now social anxieties and I skedaddled before our governor-elect, Janet Mills, unexpectedly arrived to speak on the importance of poetry and women's words. Imagine: a governor of Maine who loves poetry, and who attends this sort of reception because she thinks that poets are important constituents! This is not what we've been used to in Maine for the past eight years, to say the least.

But I'll get over my malaise, if not my head cold. Today is go-buy-a-tree day . . . the first Christmas tree we've purchased in decades. It will be full and pretty and well balanced and not at all what we're used to. Paul suggested we cut out every other branch and chop the top off, just to make it feel more like our scatty Harmony trees. For some reason, they always looked perfect in the woods. Then, as soon as we got them into the house, they revealed their pitiful scrawniness, weak-branched and pathetically sagging. Not that we didn't love them, but only because no one else could.

I think I'll also make eggnog today, from the recipe I honed a few years ago. Here's a link to it, in case you are decorating your own scatty or elegant tree today.

Tina the Subaru has new rear brakes, the house is clean from stem to stern (if one assumes that the basement, in this metaphor, is the grimy harbor water), the giant Portuguese novel I've been editing is off my desk, and the college boy is coming home today.

This morning I'll be wrapping presents. This afternoon I'll be at a reception at Space Gallery for the poets in Balancing Act 2: An Anthology of 50 Maine Women Poets. This evening I'll be buying bluefish and brussels sprouts for dinner.

For now, I'm drinking black coffee in the dark, reading about Beethoven in The Birth of the Modern, listening to the furnace grind out hot air, and imagining writing poems again.

Seven degrees above zero on this black morning, the coldest so far this season in Portland . . . and one of us inadvertently bumped the thermostat yesterday evening and thereby turned off the heat all night. As a result, waking up in Portland was like waking up in Harmony: frigid floors, ice-cold woodstove, cups of coffee as hand-thawers. Fixing the problem, however, was quicker than it was up north.

I got the good news yesterday that people are actually signing up for my 24PearlStreet essay class! This is thrilling because I was prepared for disappointment, being a faculty newcomer and all. Instead, I'm delighted to say that it will definitely run. Along with that class, I'll be teaching at least three times a week in southern Maine, late January through early March, with more to come as spring arrives. It's almost as if I'm impersonating an adjunct.

Today, I hope to finish the first pass through the novel I'm editing. It's on an extraordinarily tight publishing schedule, so I've had to grind it out at a rattling pace. In the interstices I've been immersed in Johnson's The Birth of the Modern, which is packed with one fascinating anecdote after another. I keep wanting to copy them all out for you. This one alone demonstrates the breathtaking richness of the age:

[When Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from Elba in 1815], he took a peaceful Europe by surprise. Byron had got married . . . and was already repenting at leisure. . . . Jane Austen was writing the final chapters of Emma. . . . Shelley had just deserted his wife and run off with William Godwin's daughter, Mary. J. M. W. Turner was painting his sun-filled arcadian canvas, Crossing the Brook. Gioacchino Rossini was writing The Barber of Seville and Ludwig van Beethoven his piano sonata Opus 101. Humphry Davy was working on the first miner's safety lamp.

And meanwhile Goya. And Hegel. And the death of Tecumseh. And Waterloo on the horizon.

Yesterday was extremely busy: so much editing, and then Frost Place planning and, yes, the squeal came back and Tina the Subaru was diagnosed with worn rear brake pads and will have her procedure on Friday morning. She has become famous at the mechanic's. Open-mouthed stare: "Is this the car that had three transmission replacements in a month?" Modestly down-turned eyes: "Why yes! [slight giggle]." Today, will be much the same, without the car-repair patter, and plus a trip to mall land to find a rug to cover up the plywood that covers up the hole in the bathroom floor. [This would make an excellent boring song along the lines of "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly."] If these sentences sound hectic, then I'm doing my job.

Anyway: Richard III folks: I need to hear from you. Do you want to take a break till after Christmas? Or do you want to plow ahead into the play? I am at your service, either way.

Today: more editing and editing and editing, plus some Frost Place business, and maybe a car-to-the-car-shop if the weird noise comes back. This is the last week before our holiday storm begins, and Tom is fixing so many things. The upstairs bathroom now has a door, a doorknob, a working sink, a piece of plywood over the hole in its floor, and painted trim around the doorway. Soon my study will also have a door and window blinds so that it can morph into an overflow guest bedroom (though only for sturdy young people who like to sleep on the floor). We now have an outside light so that guests and homeowners won't fall off the steps into the dark. Likewise, we have a banister, so no one will tumble down the stairs and have to go to the emergency room on Christmas Day. Tom has repaired the kitchen faucet surround so that the faucet is no longer sinking into the plywood "countertop" like a listing Titanic. [Aren't you glad the previous sentence doesn't include "so that"? You must have been getting tired of that phrase.] He has dug out items belonging to the boys at younger stages of their life and is plotting where to display them to best comic effect. Compared to him, I have done nothing (unless you count shopping for eleven people, baking black cake and assorted batches of cookies, and hand-sewing half a dozen teeny-tiny pillows while watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show).

I wish I had a poem to sum all this up. But alas, I was too busy unpicking a seam to write one.

Richard III responses are are slowly rolling in on last Monday's post, so I'm going to hold off a day or so before moving further into the play. I know this is a hectic time of year for everyone, so it seems better to be patient with ourselves.

Yesterday I made thumbprint cookies, finished my sewing project, painted some trim, wrote out Christmas cards. Today--and the rest of this week--I will be editing editing editing. If at all possible, I want to get this book off my desk before the holiday . . . but even for me a 500-page novel is not a speedy read.

This time next week, the first wave of boys will be in the house! Eating! Sleeping! Cooking! Talking about sports! Showing me cute cow videos! Chattering about Euripides! Taking control of the stereo soundtrack! I can't wait.

Sunday at dawn: cold and still: chimneys silhouetted like blunt paper dolls against the flat sky: bare grassy earth like iron: fringes of ice along the sidewalks: blank windows: a single gull flicking its long pinions, sailing low over the roofs: and now an invisible cacophony of crows: power lines crisscrossing the street like cat's-cradle string: streetlamp a tight ball of light: the slam, somewhere, of a car door: and now a motor cranking, catching, roaring, vanishing: and now silence: now the cold closes its fist: and the day hesitates: