A gale whipped up in the night, and now, at first light, wind is tearing at the water, at the spruce trees, at the sky. The air is a constant roar, and I glimpse whitecaps on the usually serene cove. A thin rain clacks like sleet on the window, though the temperature is warmer than it has been--nearly 50 degrees instead of chill mid-30s. In the storm the cottage feels even more fairy-tale than usual. At any moment a witch or an enchanted swan might tap on the door.

The mood here has taken a turn for the tragic because W's little cat has disappeared. This is deeply unfair of the Fates: given W's so recent loss of her husband, why should they also take her only pet? Tom and I are unsettled and anxious, and W is deeply distressed but trying to hold herself together. The loss of Gracie is a pall over everything.

Still, we are all trying to go about our business. Tom and I hiked Day Mountain yesterday morning--not a particularly tall peak but with a severe and striking vista of the open Atlantic. Then we came back to the cove, and he finished trimming out the window in W's house and I brought her down to the cottage so that we could do a little bit of writing together. Who knows if it helped anything, but at least it was a way to rechannel our perseverations.

Today is my last full day on the island. With this storm Tom and I likely won't be able to do much outside: we'd be blown into the sea. I might work on some manuscripts; he might sort out Curtis's film rolls and do some more odd jobs for W. Meanwhile, the wind howls and buffets; the rain clicks like pellets; the cove churns; the crows screech.

There's been no sunshine here on the island. The sky has been a roil of cloud, constantly reinventing itself in new patterns and hues. On Beech Cliff, yesterday morning, we glimpsed slivers of Somes Sound, of Frenchman's Bay, of Echo Lake pressed between granite and air. The colors of the hills are brilliant, even lurid, though the hardwoods are mostly bare now. Lichens and mosses, scrub and conifers . . . a riot of golds, reds, greens, blacks, browns, whites, caught between the twisting moving sky, the twisting moving sea.

The park is quiet. Yesterday we met only one other hiker on our trail. Maybe tourist life is still in swing over on the Bar Harbor side of the island, what with the cruise ships and all, but the Southwest Harbor side is tucking itself in for winter. Along the shore, Arctic ducks are taking up their seasonal abode in the island's chilly shelter, and the cove outside the cottage periodically erupts with honking and splashing. This morning the water is a broad glassy ripple, tide running in, sky striped like a baby's blanket--pink and lemon and blue and white. A single lobster boat idles. Spruce trees crowd up against the cobbles.

Inside the cottage kindling crackles in the wood stove. The coffeemaker gurgles and mutters. I am sitting in a big chair, staring through the glass door into a thicket of sumac. Through the kitchen window I can glimpse the top of a church spire. There is a sensation of fairy tale, despite the prosaic coffeemaker and the boat motor in the cove.

I am still not entirely well, but I am significantly more well than I was. Certainly my energy is returning, even if I'm still coughing and hoarse. We climbed the cliffs yesterday, then worked outside in the afternoon--planting daffodil and tulip bulbs on Curtis's gravesite, harvesting celery and a giant pumpkin, planting garlic. Tom began trimming out a window in W's house. I made garlic bread; I made tomato soup with black bean salsa.

At night I dreamed what I cannot remember in daylight. 

Tamaracks are the codas of autumn--a last beat of color before winter grays and whites and greens and browns assume preeminence. Just after the last deciduous leaves shrivel, the green tamarack bursts into brilliant gold, preening for a week or so before dropping its needles and becoming that strange being: a naked conifer that is not dead.

We arrived in West Tremont at about noon, unpacked, lit a fire in the stove, and I sat still, staring out into the cove, dipping into a book, while T made grilled cheese sandwiches. He'd driven the three hours up; he was making lunch; he was coddling me, and I liked it. Already I could feel the tension and illness leaching away. We lingered over our sandwiches, then wandered up through the long grass to see W at her house, and sat with her for an hour, talking idly, mourning Curtis but also laughing a little about this and that . . . being alive, as people are: helplessly alive.

And then T and I drove out to a small local trailhead, the Ship Harbor walk--not at all a demanding hike but through a gorgeous mixture of spruce forest, glassy cove, and open crashing sea, with cobble beaches of pink granite and broad cliffs dotted with tide pools, such as this one.

We watched loons and guillemots and what I think were mergansers bobbing along the line between the choppy surf and the sleek cove. I lay on my back on the rocks and stared into a sky that had no color at all.

And then we drove back to the cottage, and read beside the fire, and then I made chicken curry and W came down from her house, and we had a little red-wine wake for Curtis, and W told stories of her folksinger past, the days of hanging out with Jean Ritchie and Dave Van Ronk and running into a rude Bob Dylan at a record store in the days before he was Bob Dylan. . . .

And then bed, and the sound of the sea.

 It's cold and quiet this morning. I slept till 6:30, thank goodness, and now I am briefly idling with coffee and you before I push myself forward into packing chores. I still feel dumb as a stump: yesterday I drove past the grocery store without remembering that I needed to buy groceries; this morning I forgot to finish making the coffee. This cold has bitten a giant hole in my brain.  I've been sick for the better part of two weeks now, and I haven't taken a day off from work, including the weekend, and apparently my intelligence has reached the end of its rope.

I still have much packing to do--food hampers, clothes, books--plus dealing with laundry, houseplants, cat care, etc. So I won't linger with you long. My plan is to carry along manuscripts to read, plus John Donne, plus Zadie Smith, plus my own notebook. Maybe my brain will revive and I will actually get to all of this. I know T wants to hike, and I hope I'll want to as well, though for the moment I can't imagine dragging myself to the top of a mountain. 

Talk to you tomorrow--

Finally, this cold is starting to fade. I got through an entire poetry reading last night without coughing: a miracle! I had a busy social afternoon and evening and didn't feel as if I needed to be wrapped in mummy gauze and propped up in a dusty corner. I stayed up late and did city stuff like eat dinner at a restaurant at 9 p.m. and yet I enjoyed myself.

I'm still not 100 percent well, but I am definitely getting better, and maybe a few days of ocean wind and no alarm clock will complete the task. Today will be the transition to getting there: desk work and housework and maybe yard work and definitely errands errands errands. And then another restorative night in my own bed, and then we'll head off to the lands of the east.

I'll be carrying along work with me. I've got stacks of reading to do--other people's manuscripts, an editing project. I've also got a notebook full of my own scrawls, which I've had almost no time to transcribe or ponder. I'll be working for my friend, probably mostly in her garden, and T and I will go on some hikes in Acadia together, and my friend wants to do some generative writing together, and of course we'll all be cooking and socializing and mourning Curtis. So our days will not be lounging and television. But they will be unstructured and quiet . . . wood stove and ocean, slow light and slow waking.

Yesterday was a bit of a prologue to that . . . time spent with Baron, my oldest friend in poetry, my first teacher, the person who looked me in the eye and said, "You could be a poet"; and Baron's wife Janet, beloved for nearly as long as I have known him; and Betsy, friend of all of us, a humble and scintillating seer, heart of the society of poets that has welcomed me to Portland. All of them older than I am: in their presence I still feel like a raw youth, and yet, still, the years have marked us all; we have a history that criss-crosses and tangles and straggles away into lint and thread.

Betsy was musing, after Baron's reading, about poets who write within history and poets who do not. These days, I don't know how not to write within history. Big or small . . . mostly small, I guess. The small stories. Love and despair. The consequences. 

Portland had a light frost on Tuesday night, while I was in Monson, and another one last night. I guess that's it for my flowers, but I don't know when I'll get a chance to clean them out of the garden. I've got to work this morning, and then I'm meeting my friends Baron and Janet and Betsy for lunch, then getting a haircut, then going to Baron's reading this evening . . . and tomorrow will be work plus crazy errand-running-and-pulling-things-together so that we can leave for Mount Desert Island in the morning.

I really, really hope I'll be able to rest at the cottage because I am exhausted. This cold still hasn't released me from its grip, and I haven't been sleeping well, and I've had so many obligations, and the atmosphere in Maine has been stressful, to say the least. But I'm trudging onward. Class went well yesterday; the weather  was clear for driving; I lit a fire in the wood stove as soon as I got home and made an easy dinner of shrimp and macaroni. I'm doing the best I can.

Now I've started reading another new-to-me novel: Zadie Smith's On Beauty, which I plucked from a free-book pile at a Brooklyn breakfast joint. And I'm drinking my small cup of coffee, and I'm sitting in my couch corner, and heat is pouring sweetly from the furnace vents, and I have nothing to complain about. I'm meeting friends for lunch, and then I'm going a cottage by the sea. The messy interstices will work themselves out.

[The dinner party]

Twenty-six degrees in Monson, with a crunch of snow on walkways and roofs. Last night I had dinner with the artists-in-residence, who were gathering for a sit-down dinner at Lulu's restaurant. Usually Lulu fixes box dinners for everyone so that they don't interrupt their work if they don't want to, but periodically they get a restaurant meal, and I lucked in on that last night. Lulu is a magnificent cook--originally from the Philippines but married into a central Maine family--and she won a James Beard Award this year. She insists she's not a chef. "I'm just a cook," she says. Whatever she calls herself, her meals are a delight, and she was especially excited last night because she'd just learned that her daughter had shot a deer for the freezer. As the token central Mainer at the meal, I found myself having to explain what tagging a deer means, how hunting season works in Maine, how to tell a doe from a buck, what people do with the meat, etc.--a somewhat fraudulent position as I have never fired a gun.

[Trigger warning: I ate some of that deer.]

But I enjoyed the bustle of Lulu's orange-clad husband and daughter, striding in and out of the front door among the trick-or-treaters with tubs of this and that for Lulu. And then, to my pleasure, I got invited back into the kitchen to check out those tubs, which turned out to contain heart, liver, and stomach caul. Within minutes Lulu had seared the heart, whipped up a bourbon glaze, and was offering around slices. I've eaten venison often, but I'd never eaten such fresh meat before. I do love trying new foods, and this was spectacular good fortune in that regard: a wild harvest cooked quickly, simply, and skillfully.

[Thinking about the buffalo hunters]

I'd brought Zesch's The Captured with me for my overnight in Monson, imagining I might spend the evening looking through the notes, but the lighting in this apartment is terrible, and the notes are in teeny-tiny type and my eyes are rotting in my head, so I didn't make much headway with that. Instead, I turned on the baseball game, and I sent texts to my family regaling them with the tale of my exciting deer-heart experience, and I found myself thinking about the book's descriptions of how the captured children became immersed in the central ancient business of buffalo hunting, the communal intensity of that work . . . how afterward, when "rescued," some of the children shot their parents' poultry full of arrows or refused to eat cooked meat. I had no conclusions to draw; merely, I was thinking in parallel. I had accidentally stepped into a then-and-now, here-and-there time warp, via historical narrative and my own unexpected present tense. I think such moments are worth orbiting. I think it's dangerous to make easy pronouncements.