Pea trellis up, peas in the ground, and strips of hardware cloth laid to discourage the enthusiasms of the Neighborhood Brats (otherwise known as Ruckus and Jack), who just can't resist digging up a freshly planted row. On the other side of the trellis, I planted four short rows of arugula, lettuce, spinach, and radishes. Tom is working on final placement of the new garden boxes, and as soon as I get soil delivered I'll start planting in them. I hung laundry, pondered yard design, read some Iris Murdoch, split chunks of two-by-fours for burning, yanked out baby maple trees, started seedlings in the house (lupines, yarrow, kohlrabi, fennel), cut two hyacinths for the dining-room table, coughed and sneezed, watched a basketball game, and invented a delicious salad of beets, roasted asparagus, and pumpkin seeds. It was a good day, and I'm hoping for another one before the rains arrive tomorrow.

For various reasons yesterday's class felt like an adventure in improvisation, but I think it went well enough: participants wrote three drafts in two hours, read and talked about poems from China and Burundi, thought about sound and time and transitions and structure and geography and memory. Afterward I did eat an entire bag of potato chips in the car, but fortunately that kind of lapse only happens about once a year.

Today Tom is still sick, I'm still coughing up crud. Although there's a shimmer of snow on the ground, temperatures are forecast to rise into the mid-50s today, and I will be planting peas and greens.

It feels good to have a sunshiny weekend at home ahead of me. On most afternoons this past week, I've spent an hour or so in the windy cold, moving stones, laying paths, raking leaves, pruning herbs and roses, piling sticks-- all for the sake of sun and warmth and finally getting seeds into dirt.

                            O love
open. Show me
my country. Take me home. 

--from Wendell Berry's "Homecoming"

Well, the aforementioned sloppy little draft found its footing and became a poem that surprised me very much. This week, in my online poetry class, students are focusing on readings and prompts around the topic of "Framing Emotion," and that, coincidentally, is what I figured out in this new piece. Perhaps their drafts and conversations gave me a push toward the unexpected in my own thoughts.

Sometimes teaching can be really helpful creatively.

I'm on the road again today, this time to the Plunkett Poetry Festival in Augusta, where I'll be leading a two-hour session on place and on using words as transferrable power. And then I'm coming straight home to make dinner for poor Tom, who is now trapped in the throes of the monster cold.

It looks like I might be planting peas this weekend. Hurray!

Yesterday, for the first time in months, I was able to spend a bit of time with my own poetry projects. I copied out some of Dante's Inferno. I stirred a sloppy little draft. I didn't accomplish much, but I felt awkward and refreshed. Afterward I went for two long walks and finished raking mulch off the garden beds. I had the sense that someone had poured a batch of new blood into my veins--garden-wise, poetry-wise. Everything was bare and muddy; the wind whipped and sang, and I lifted my nose into it like a bird dog.

Finally I have shifted into that most delightful of illness phases, convalescence. Yesterday morning I feared I might have a head cold forever, but this morning I feel hopeful, rested, unclogged, and delicate. My husband no longer shakes his head ruefully when he looks at me, but I still feel the vague aura of sickness, something akin to the scent of an occasional breeze blowing in from a cow pasture. Anyway, barring the lingering coughs and chokes, I'm on the mend.

I spent yesterday trying to catch up on chores that required neither intelligence nor stamina--e.g., buying storage bins at Target and pressing the button on the doctor's portal that signs me up for a shingles vaccine. Somehow I also managed to take a non-blurry photo of the cluster of scylla blooming so brightly in my front garden. Happy cold early spring from the coast of Maine, dear friends . . . where clumps of aged snow fade alongside a few bright-faced flowers, and the wind cuts like a dull kitchen knife, and eider families bounce and bob in the ripples on the bay.

I'm still sick. Yesterday I did manage to rake some leaves and hang some laundry. I made chicken stock and sewed on my dress and ran some errands, but I did it all at half-speed, amid coughing and sneezing and sighing and squinting and blowing my nose. I feel like I'm half-human, half-slime mold. On the bright side, the timing is good: I've got a slight respite, work-wise, so can enjoy my life as a rotting mushroom without guilt.

Ugh.

Anyway, I've got time to read, if I could understand what I was reading. Last night Tom asked if I'd like to play cribbage, and I told him I couldn't pay attention long enough to get through the game. I'm significantly dumber than usual, and all I wanted to do last night was sit on the couch and watch cartoons.

Thus, I will turn to my far more intelligent children for news and comedy. Believe it or not, my younger son has managed to pick all four teams in the NCAA men's final four. Among the millions of people who make brackets on the ESPN site, he is in the top .046%. Did I mention he also goes to art school?

And my older son pulled off an extremely fine April Fool's prank. My phone rings, the ID comes up as "Unknown Caller," and I of course let it go to voice mail. Later, when I check the voice mail before deleting it, I hear a grainy version of a song . . . and wait, it's my least favorite song of all, the Eagles's "Hotel California," and now it's turning into a clip from The Big Lebowski, the moment when the Dude asks the cab driver to change the station because "I hate the fucking Eagles" and then he gets tossed out of the car . . . and now I know this has got to be a son playing a joke on me. It was a good one, and cheered me up considerably in my mushroom gloom.

My day in Bangor went well: a full class, very engaged; and then an evening with a dear Harmony friend. But this head cold has been less charming. I thought I was getting better, and now this morning I feel as if I spent last night under a street sweeper. It's amazing how bad a cold can make a person feel, and yet it's such a minor illness.

Ah well. I'm glad to be home moping on my own couch.

Tom spent yesterday building garden boxes for me, which of course are far more beautiful than most garden boxes because that's the kind of person he is. Now we can't decide where to put them. Originally we'd planned on the front yard, but then we accidentally discovered that they improve one of the cesspit areas of the property considerably. There's a strip of ex-driveway--broken asphalt, lingering gravel--that we haven't known how to handle. But if you cover it up with garden boxes. . . .

Today I'd hoped to hang laundry on the new lines, and to rake out the rest of the gardens, and to take a trip to the store for soil. But my head is going to have to be a new head if I'm going to accomplish such things. Perhaps, with another cup of coffee, it will be.