I am up way too early for a Sunday morning because my body believes that it's 6 a.m. even though my phone says it's 5 a.m. Oh, well. I do have a lot to get done today, so maybe getting up too early will turn out to be a good idea. It's black cake day, and also grocery shopping day and house cleaning day and ciabatta-baking day, but at least it's not yard work day too. I managed to get all of that done yesterday. I dug up dahlias, and tore out all of the frosted annuals, and cut down the peonies and spurge and other tired perennials, and reorganized the shed, and put away stakes and hoses and garden decorations, and carried the freezable garden supplies into the basement, and planted wood hyacinths in the Hill Country, and raked leaves, and probably I did something else I can't remember: but the upshot is, let it snow. I am ready for you now.

Thus, today I can turn my attention to house and oven. I'll be teaching all of next weekend so I cannot procrastinate with the black cake. And I'd like to get the housework under control so that I can focus on my desk work tomorrow morning . . . that whole other kettle of obligation-fish.

Yes, I am feeling kind of breathless, but not overwhelmed exactly. I was thinking yesterday, as I was hoicking hoses into the shed and heaving dahlia roots into baskets and otherwise doing the grunt jobs of late autumn, about those exercise classes I've been torturing myself with: all that arm and leg and core work . . . really, they are keeping me in training for my own life. It is good to be 57 years old and still able to spend an entire day lifting and lugging, without any particular after-effects. I don't care if I ever run a mile, but I want to be able to shovel and rake forever.

In that way, I'm very like my father, who turns 81 today, and who still shovels and rakes and digs and plants and harvests, and scares us all to death by chainsawing and climbing ladders. But that is his life, his life's work, his daily rite. He wants to stay in harness.

Saturday morning: another dark and chilly start outside, but I am lolling here in my couch corner, bathrobed and hot-coffeed and exceedingly comfortable. You're probably bored stiff by my endless marvel over all mod cons, but after Harmony I never can seem to take them for granted. Yesterday, as I was washing a batch of very dirty carrot tops before making pesto with them, I was thinking about how wonderful it is to have a constant stream of clean water (hot and cold!) bursting conveniently from taps around the house. No breaking the ice on an outside pump! No lugging pails! No heating up boilers on the stove! And as much as I want of it, day or night!

Of course I had running water and electricity in Harmony, but something was always going wrong with them for days on end; and I also got very used to the issues of my off-the-grid friends and of my shallow-dug-well friends--it was a regular thing for elderly widows to have no running water to their trailers during the dry summer months; for woods people to deal with frozen water lines in their spring-fed systems. So many people were wrestling with busted generators and no indoor plumbing, and here I am now, in the city, with my furnace and my enthusiastic water pressure. I'm sorry, but I can't stop being amazed. I think I will always be a rube.

By the way, that carrot-top pesto came out very well. I don't generally bother using the carrot tops during high summer; there's so much basil then, and the flavor of carrot tops is much less sparkly. But this time of year, after frost, when every green thing is precious, carrot-top pesto is a treat. I mixed it into a fricassee of chicken legs, onions, garlic, peppers, and a couple of house-ripened tomatoes, then stirred in a bit of parmesan as an emulsifier, and the result was a beautiful bright creamy sauce that I served over couscous and alongside a salad of kale, carrots, and radishes. Here it is November, and I am still pulling together these kinds of meals from my little kitchen garden. It seems miraculous, everything seems miraculous, I mean, look at that running water! (Feel free to kick me.)

This weekend I've got to focus on digging up my frosted dahlias, tearing out the dead annuals, raking leaves, and such. I've also got to make black cake . . . yes, the time has arrived, yet again, for me to resurrect Emily Dickinson's recipe. It is my family duty. They would be very disappointed without it.

I'm also going to start digging into a book I found in one of those free little libraries I haunt: Fanny Burney's The Wanderer; or Female Difficulties, a fat and sprawling Gothic romance published in 1814 that may turn out to be unreadable, but I could not resist the title.

I've just come inside, after dragging bins to the curb on this black and frosty morning--walking back up the driveway toward the lamplit windows, opening the door to a burst of heated air. I will never stop marveling at the wonders of light and warmth. Lots of people complain about winter, and possibly I will too, in a month or so, but I so far I am loving this November chill, the creeping darkness of evenings and mornings, sweaters and tea and wood fires at night.

My friend Sue and I spent yesterday tramping through Viles Arboretum in Augusta, losing and finding ourselves among the badly marked paths, admiring tamaracks and gingkoes, eating our lunches on a cold stone bench, chattering nonstop. It was such a good afternoon. Sue and I have known each other since Harmony playgroup days, when our older sons were best friends, and we love each other dearly. I woke up this morning thinking of the deep, deep pleasure I take in these long friendships, these women who have known me since I was a callow young mother; how glad I am that they haven't faded away, how grateful I am that we all work hard to keep our affections alive.

Today I'll be back to the grind--that same-old circle of editing, class planning, and reading contest mss, spiked with housework. Maybe in the afternoon I can get outside and start digging up the frost-killed dahlias, or I'll go for a gloaming walk in the cemetery. At the moment I feel happy just to be sitting here,  warm and alive.

29 degrees at the Alcott House. Welcome to frost country.

It's about time, really. I'm used to frost by my birthday, and that was a month ago. The garden is clearly ready to sleep, but winter-kill has played hard to get, and the tender annuals have droopily hung onto life. Now, finally, they'll get some rest, the leaves will finish falling from the trees, and those annoying caterpillars will disappear from the kale.

Yesterday I began my painful blurb quest, and it actually went far better than expected: a very well known poet has kindly agreed to write one for me, and I am blushing and relieved. And I've secured cover-art permission and inserted a few missing pieces into the ms. I am not a natural procrastinator, but book production makes me shuffle and worry and itch, and I am always trying to avoid it.

Overall, though, I've been doing pretty well at getting stuff done. I've caught up with the contest reading, made steady progress with the editing stack, finished the writing prompts for the Homer class, did some deciding about teaching-conference faculty, and tackled those pesky manuscript chores. This morning I'll do some more editing, and maybe start setting up the Homer class website, and then by midday I'll be driving north to Augusta to meet a Harmony friend at Viles Arboretum. We're going to eat a picnic lunch and then wander around among the trees together and gossip about this and that, and I can hardly wait. It's been ages since I've seen her, though we've been trying to get together for months. I do miss my old friends.

Plus, Tom's going to be out with photographers tonight, so possibly I'll go to that Thursday-night writing session again. Look at us being so sociable. Who knew we had it in us?

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise 

(That last infirmity of noble mind) 

To scorn delights and live laborious days; 

But the fair guerdon when we hope to find, 

And think to burst out into sudden blaze, 

Comes the blind Fury with th'abhorred shears, 

And slits the thin-spun life. 

--John Milton, "Lycidas"

It's publication week around here, I guess: because here's another new poem, "Island Weather," just released in Vox Populi. This is one of those pieces that did not begin in rhyme but somehow, after many revisions, turned into a formal poem. I'm always interested when that happens . . . when the form emerges late rather than being part of a draft's initial impetus.

It's cold this morning--not quite frost but we're very close. Baseball season has finally ended. My backyard is glowing gold, and squirrels potter busily among the bright little shrubs. Today I'll edit, and then work on Frost Place stuff, and then in the afternoon walk up into the cemetery. For dinner, autumn fare: leek soup, fennel salad, apple crisp.

I've got my new Deerbrook manuscript on my mind: working on cover permissions, fretting about blurbs. I hate and despise asking people to write blurbs for me. But it must be done.

Excellent car news: $48 for repairing a loose heat shield, not the $1,000 for a new exhaust system that I was dreading. But, gosh, those loose heat shields sure do make alarming noises. 

So the day went according to plan: garage visiting, copyediting, ms reading, Iliad talking, prompt writing. Today, more of the same, except with garage visiting erased and voting and a zoom meeting penciled in. 

I'm still keeping my dream record, and I'm noticing that I really don't seem to dream about being a writer or reading books. I often have to drive in bad situations, I visit many different places, I am responsible for feeding people and/or animals and solving crimes, and I seem to socialize with a wide variety of people (Obama, Uncle Bob, my children as babies, mysterious Germans). But no books.

Perhaps dreams are more like being a character in a book. Maybe I don't need stories because I'm always inside one.

I have to say that I'm relieved to have finished the Iliad. It was massive and shattering and marvelous and terrible; but as Teresa and I decided yesterday, its main character is Slaughter, and he is hard to face.

So now I'm retrenching into more human fare: a Margaret Drabble novel, Alice Oswald's poems. Strange how that almost feels cowardly, but why?

Yesterday turned out to be exactly the day I was hoping for. I got the floors finished before 9:30, then yakked with Donna for an hour about our Nancy Drew reading project, then made bread and grocery-shopped and dealt with many layers of laundry, and eventually made my way into the garden, where I pulled out the eggplant, basil, and pepper plants as well as (sadly) all of the zinnias, which were looking pretty wretched after the giant rainstorm. Tom even coaxed me into a bike ride. In between, I finished a Du Maurier novel and started a Drabble novel, and I did not read anyone else's manuscript, and it was so refreshing.

So today, I am ready to reengage with my desk . . . that is, after I bring the car to the garage and battle my way back home through the street construction. Editing, manuscript reviews, and then a phone call with Teresa about the Iliad, and then I'll turn my attention to prepping for the Homer class. Skate cheeks for dinner (if you haven't had these, you should try them: they taste kind of like fluffy scallops). I feel ready to deal with it all.

P.S. Just learned I have a new poem out today,"the bog is multitudes," in Hole in the Head Review. It's a revised version of an exercise Teresa invented for last summer's Writing Intensive, and I'm excited to see it in print.