The weather yesterday was lovely: sunshine, warmth, daffodils budding, bees humming. Paul decided to have class on the front stoop. I opened a kitchen window and baked Sardinian sheet-music bread (an elaborate name for a  simple olive-oil cracker). Last night Cafe Quarantine served lentil soup with chopped sorrel and fried fennel seed, a cucumber and yogurt salad, and toast. Tonight, we'll have our first cookout: Tom will grill garlic hamburgers over charcoal; I'll make asparagus with fried ginger, a spinach and grapefruit salad.

I finished copying out the first series of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, and today I hope to turn my attention back to Blake. I worked on a poem draft that I don't love, but something is better than nothing. I drew a zany birthday card for my nephew. I am nearing the end of an arduous editing project.

Late in the day Paul and I biked to Rosemont Market to pick up our grocery order. We loaded my basket with lettuce and asparagus and felt very French, cycling through the neighborhoods with our vegetables on display.

Over the phone James and I invented a new trivia method for allowing shoppers into stores. Monday: you must answer questions about 90s bands. Tuesday: you must have detailed knowledge about the geography of Africa. Wednesday: tell us about the 1967 New York Yankees . . .

Paul destroyed me at Scrabble again. The boy is a menace.

Now Tom is making his work lunch, and I am taking a break from writing to throw a load of towels into the washing machine, and our day is lurching onward like a Timex with a clunky second hand. I look back at what I've written in this post, and see that it, too, resembles a cheap watch--the hands clicking ahead, clicking ahead, but never quite matching the clock face. I wonder if narrative is forsaking me. I wonder if blurting out a daily jumble of lists and images is worth anything at all. Maybe yes, maybe no.

Though of course I won't stop. I can't run a mile but I can stack firewood all day long.

Food shopping is becoming increasingly fraught in Portland. Only 75 people at a time are allowed in the large stores, and long lines stretch outside. At Hannaford, curbside pickup appears to be theoretical: I can shop online at its website; but when I try to check out, there are never any pickup times available. Whole Foods reserves home delivery for Amazon Prime members only, which is despicable. The small markets are good at curbside pickup, but they are generally more expensive than the supermarkets and they have fewer items. Still, they are my best option now, and I'm grateful I can walk or ride my bike to fetch a bag of lettuce or a loaf of bread. This morning I ordered 5 pounds of locally roasted coffee beans, and that pleased me as well. But what happens when I run out of cat litter?

Tom is packing his lunch and making his breakfast. It's still unclear how long his job site will stay open, but he presumes he'll be there all week. Paul and I will step back into our "usual" patterns--schoolwork and editing and trying to imagine the future. The day will be bright and warmish, and I'll hang sheets on the line.

I do need to work on a poem draft. I am not writing well, but at least the action of revision will be practice. My state of body and my creativity bear some resemblance to the grief sinkhole I was floundering in during my first year in Portland, when we perched in that apartment by the sea and I burst into tears once every hour. Heavy skin, unexplainable twinges, laborious visions. The garden helps with the body, but the visions continue to plod. And I'm not crying. I haven't cried even once. Maybe I would feel better if I did.

The thing is: we're okay, we're fine, we're even happy. We know how to live solitary lives. We are sufficient unto ourselves. I am good at managing a household. Tom is good at working without panic. Paul is good at school. The anxiety doesn't arise from the situation at hand so much as the miasma of the unknown.

Yesterday was a beauty--blue skies, 50 degrees. Early spring stepped into her glory . . . laundry whipping on the line, neighborhood children shrieking and laughing, walkers stopping by to say hello to my cat and my flowers . . . It was a facsimile of normal, and I was very grateful.

All morning long I worked in the garden. I edged the front flower beds and around the blueberry bushes, and then trundled the cut bits of sod into the backyard, where I used them to fill ruts. I cultivated around emerging bulbs and perennials and weeded out the pushy maple seedlings that are popping up everywhere.

I watched hundreds of honeybees, visitors from a hive up on Stevens Avenue, shimmering among the scylla and crocuses.

Later in the afternoon, my friend Angela called from up north, where the snow is still masking spring--but she was sitting in her 100-degree greenhouse dreaming of summer, and she'd concocted a method for getting transplants from up there to down here--so I will have tomatoes and peppers after all! The two of us crowed and cheered like we'd just rigged the lottery . . .

Oh, the power of growing things . . . the brilliant white and gold of these crocuses, and meanwhile gulls squawk and circle up from the bay, mockingbird spouses flip their sharp tails, a neighbor and I dream of hummingbirds in her lilacs, the cat squints in his patch of sun.

I told you about the terrible grocery store/"I hate you" dream I had on Friday night. That same night Tom and Paul also had nightmares. Tom was in the middle of an art opening when he suddenly realized he wasn't supposed to be so close to people, but he couldn't get away from them. Paul was stuck in a dreadful Zoom conference vortex. By daylight we could all laugh ruefully about how the crisis is manipulating us. But the dread is inescapable.

In the face of such terrors, a morning in the garden, a bike ride, a game of cards feel like a kind of exquisite oxygen . . . which is a terrible metaphor, but I can't think of another way to describe my heightened awareness of everyday gestures. A woman walks by with her dog and tells me what a relief it is to see me back outside, working among the plants. And I believe her. I believe that she is deeply relieved. We barely know each other, but that doesn't matter. This is a time when people say such things to strangers.

Last Saturday, the cat was gracious enough to let me sleep till almost 7. But the honeymoon is over: this morning he started bouncing me at 4:30. I hid under the blankets for another half-hour but finally gave in at 5 and got up. Bed wasn't being that enjoyable anyhow. I'd had a night full of dreams about grocery shopping among empty shelves while talking on the phone to a friend who'd decided to hate me. So relaxing. Hot coffee and a quiet couch are way better than that.

My constant headache is still constant, but my sinus congestion feels some better. Tom will be home for two whole days. This afternoon, if the ground isn't too sodden, I plan to start edging flower beds and weeding out the maple saplings that are starting to sprout in the soft soil. For dinner we'll have either leftover-beef tacos with the genuine Chicago-made corn tortillas I've been hoarding in the freezer or noodle bowls with marinated tofu, blackened cabbage, and pot-au-feu broth. I'll let the boy decide.

Last night I finished rereading Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale. Martha Ballard, the diarist that Ulrich studied, has many charms for me. Though I am not a caregiver in the way she was, I so admire her pertinacity: an aging woman falling off her horse, for the hundredth time, as she muddles down a wet lane in the middle of the night, on her way to help a neighbor in labor. How many times did she cross the unruly Kennebec in a canoe and immediately tumble into the mud? Her physical clumsiness and her skilled grace are endearing. And she loved her garden. In May 1809:

Clear part of the day. Showers afternoon. I have dug ground west of the hous. Planted squash, Cucumbers, musk and water mellons East side house. Began and finish a Large wash after 3 O Clock. Feel fatagued. Son Jonathan ploughing our field. My husband workt with him.

Two hundred years later, in Portland, Maine, a day's voyage down the watery lanes from Martha's vanished farm, I dig ground and sow seeds and finish a large wash, as a son and a husband wrestle with their own thorny chores. The contiguity pleases me.

Martha's chaotic spelling is also a charm of the diary. Her own sister was illiterate, but somehow Martha not only learned to read and write but also used those skills to enshrine a private life . . . a very rare action for a woman of her class, in her time and place. Her erratic spelling feels like part of that bravery: a way of stabbing over and over again at language, determined to make it do her bidding. And sometimes it is also very funny. In March 1809:

Son Jonathan sent for his Father & I to dine with him. We had moos meet stakes.

The diary has been a fine choice for pandemic reading . . . close enough to evoke a shared life; distant enough to allow a detachment that is not available to me in our present crisis. But now that I've finished it, I'm turning back to familiar fiction: yet another rereading of E. M. Forster's A Room with a View. Published in 1908, a hundred years after Martha ate moose meat with her family, it will certainly clash in my thoughts with Mrs. Ballard's frontier diary. But I like its farcical prewar English-in-Italy hoohah, especially the misunderstandings: the impossibility of actually saying what one means. No matter when or where we live, we still seem to struggle with our words.

It rained all day yesterday, and it's still raining now--a glorious ticking and dripping and running--and meanwhile the world is greening. Arugula has sprouted; tulips are budding; a sea of scylla flows across the side yard.

Inside, our lives are assuming a pattern. I had a 9 a.m. yoga class in our teeny zoom room. Then Paul took it over and spent much of the rest of the day in class and rehearsal. While he was busy, I was busy too--upstairs in my bedroom editing manuscripts, down on the couch in front of the fire to work on Frost Place stuff, back upstairs copying out Rilke. It's not like being alone in the house, but we are figuring out how to structure a productive life. There's no ignoring the crowd in this little domain, but at least we have rooms and doors. And we like each other.

Cafe Quarantine is soldiering on. For dinner last night I made bacala alla Vesuviana--salt cod simmered in a piquant tomato sauce: capers, onions, lots of red pepper flakes. On the side: Yorkshire pudding and a salad of steamed broccoli, fried garlic, and greens. Tonight we'll have pot au feu--French boiled beef--and maybe a potato salad with coarse mustard, and a tossed salad of cucumber, tomato, and romaine. The chunk of beef is huge; it should last well into the weekend for tacos and such.

Still, I'm tired . . . not just because of the stress you're enduring too, but also because my spring allergies are terrible this year and I've run out of allergy medicine until the drugstore finds time to ship me some more. In the interim, I'm Advil-managing a permanent headache and clogged sinuses. My skull feels like an over-inflated soccer ball; I'm coughing and sneezing; and since I don't have coronavirus, I feel like a public nuisance: not dangerous but alarming.

But it's Friday: Tom will be home all weekend: rain is transforming the earth. What else can I share with you? Maybe you would like to look at this Facebook poetry-month reading series, which includes an awkward video of me reading poems on my bed? I certainly don't want to look at it, though I am reluctantly coming to terms with my new video-based work life.

But I prefer the sixteenth-century song that is always true--

Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow,
The small raine down can raine.
Cryst, if my love were in my armes
And I in my bedde again!

When my boys were young, we listened to the Fountains of Wayne a lot. Like the Ramones, they were one of our family bands: music we played on car trips, music that made all of us cheerful. The Fountains of Wayne wrote sugar-pop hooks about lonely office guys in New Jersey, about a young quarterback imagining his dad watching him on TV, about a kid falling in calf love with his friend's mom. The harmonies were tight; the lyrics were both comic and sad. I taught Fountains of Wayne songs to school kids, back in the days when I was an elementary school music teacher, and my students loved them.

Yesterday coronavirus killed Adam Schlesinger, one of the band's founders and songwriters, who had since made a career as a songwriter on Broadway. He was 52. In his honor, Paul played the Fountains of Wayne album Welcome Interstate Managers as we ate dinner. We sang along with our mouths full. We knew all of the words.

I bought that album at the Borders in Bangor, in about 2004. The boys would have been 7 and 10 years old. Both were with me, and we were excited. When we got back to the car, James unwrapped the CD and stuck it into the stereo, and the song "Mexican Wine" came on . . . a slow ballad intro, the surprising lamenting lyrics: "He was killed in a cellular phone explosion. . . . " And then the intro dropped into a sudden grind of guitar, the song exploded, and all three of us instantly went crazy. We'd been sucked into that old irresistible rock-and-roll joy, and we played the CD over and over again, at top volume, for the hour-plus ride home.

I would never list the Fountains of Wayne among my top bands of all time. I reserve that for the Clash, for Bruce Springsteen, for the Band, for the Pretenders, for James Brown (this is an impossible list to finish). But every time I hear their songs, I'm dialed back into moments of pure sweetness: when being with my boys transcended "I'm your mother/you're my children" . . . when we were just friends soaked in a shared rainstorm of delight. We were singing the songs. We were waiting for the bridge.

Yesterday I had to announce to faculty and applicants that we would be moving the Frost Place Conference on Poetry & Teaching online. This was a really painful decision as the place itself--Frost's barn in Franconia, the vision of the White Mountains--is such an integral element of the experience. But with the world as it is, we can't count on being back to normal by June. And moving online now means we'll have adequate time to figure out tech issues and to completely redesign the curriculum.

So far no applicants have dropped out!  Everyone seems game to try this new venture. The hope is that we'll get even more applicants, now that people know for sure that the conference will be running in this new way. It will be cheaper (no lodging, no catering); you won't need to leave home or family; and we've even got thoughts of extending it into a couple of school-year master classes. As Maudelle, our executive director, crowed: "This is an opportunity, Potter! We're going to make this great!"

Still, writing that announcement cast a miasma of sadness over my day. The Frost Place is one of my places on earth; and since my move from Harmony, when I gave up my land, I have found comfort in remembering that I have a small annual right to Robert's patch of mountainside.

Next year, next year. And in the meantime, something is better than nothing. Something could even be wonderful. I'll do my best to make it so.

In happy news, I had my first online yoga class yesterday, which went really well. Fortunately, I wasn't wearing my glasses so I couldn't perseverate on my appearance. The college student and I have transformed the little back room, home of the TV and record collection and futon couch, into what we're now calling the Zoom Room--our household center for classes, rehearsals, meetings. Those of you who've signed up for the conference will get to visit me there this summer. I'll show you the portrait of one of my cranky ancestors and the elderly deer antlers where I dry fresh herbs. Probably you'll get to meet the famous Ruckus as well. He is quite pushy about attending classes.

Today: no grocery shopping, thank god. That, too, was yesterday's burden. Instead, I'll edit, work on a poem draft, read Rilke, ride my bike, hang clothes on the line, talk to my parents, talk to my Chicago boy. Cafe Quarantine will be serving chicken curry.

And my thoughts will be brushing, again and again, against the final lines of Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo":

                                           For there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.