1. I'm reading tomorrow at DelRossi's on Route 137N in Dublin, New Hampshire, which, according to the map, is in the middle of the southern part of the state, not far from the Massachusetts border. I'm not exactly sure what time I'll start reading, but I need to be there by 3 p.m., so presumably I'll be on shortly thereafter. The afternoon includes an open mic and a second reader, Gary Lenhart, whom I've never met but whom the Internet tells me teaches at Darmouth. Here's a link to one of his poems.

2. Poets and teachers: the Frost Place still has scholarships available for all three of its summer conferences. Applications are due by May 10, so, as H. E. Rey remarked in regards to Curious George and fire emergencies, hurry, hurry, hurry.

3. It is a generally acknowledged truth that, when the princesses on a float are smoking and texting while waiting for the parade to start, they are not real princesses. Also, when you can see their tattoos through their dresses, you should start getting suspicious.

4. One week from today, I will not be waking up early and driving to the high school gym to take the SAT. I'm so happy about this.

5. One week from tomorrow, I will be waking up early and driving to Boston, where for the first time in 25 years or so, I will be in the stands at a Red Sox game. So what if they lose? So what if one of our seats is "obstructed"? All I'm worried about is sunburn, windy rain, getting hit by a baseball, and the prospect of having to run the bases because it's Mother's Day. Here's hoping the Fenway execs have given up on that idea.

One moving result of my western Pennsylvania research has been the notes I've received from friends and acquaintances who also have family links to the region or to coal mining. My friend Jean has kindly allowed me to share what she has learned about her own ancestry.

The two places we can trace my grandmother's family to in southeastern Pennsylvania are Homer City and Lucernemines. By the time my grandmother was there (in the mid-1910s), her mother had left her father back in the Wilkes-Barre area and was living with the man she would marry next.

My grandmother came to the U.S. on a boat through Ellis Island with her parents when she was 6 months old. I think it was January 1906. They settled in the Sugar Notch/Warrior Run area, and her father became a coal miner. Seems he became an alcoholic as well. Apparently he would recite and sometimes sing poetry. It's unclear how much of the poetry was original (or lucid). She knows that much of it was Dante since both her parents were from the region of Italy where Dante had achieved virtual sainthood.

My grandmother was young when her mother took her and the two younger children (both boys) and left the father. It appears they left with the future step-father, but I know that more from census records than from family stories. Her dad died in 1926, three weeks after my grandmother gave birth to her second child. She was in Cleveland and didn't travel at that time to the funeral. Her mother had a child with the stepfather, but didn't formally marry him until her first husband died. Clearly, they never divorced.

At some time in the 1950s, my grandmother, her brother, and her sister-in-law (who designed tombstones) traveled to Pennsylvania to put a stone on the father's grave. It had been about 30 years since his death. By the time I was 19, all of these people were dead. I'd taken enough interest in family history to be able to piece together some of their locations. I wanted to find my grandfather's grave, but still didn't know where in the great state of Pennsylvania he was buried. I did as much as I could in the early 1990s by letters and phone but found no record of his burial anywhere. Finally got in a car and drove to Wilkes-Barre and started looking around. Went 3-4 times in the next couple years and walked up and down rows and rows of cemeteries without finding him at all.

Took my mother with me in the late 1990s. We walked a few of the same cemeteries--including one that I always considered the most likely location. When I was with my mom, I discovered that the cemetery extended well beyond a wrought-iron fence that seemed to cut it off from a wooded area. Just beyond, we found many more graves. Mom and I split up and began walking and reading names. We met in the middle having found nothing--only to discover that his grave was right between us. Compared to the graves of the same age around him, his gravestone was in remarkable condition because of its relative youth.

Picked up some coal (anthracite) from the hill just a few yards from where he was buried. The largest piece is in my herb garden. Only after finding his grave did we discover his death certificate, which listed the cause of death as "black lung." Always knew he died at 42. My grandmother cited his young age often.

This morning, after paging through my father-in-law's New Yorker, I found myself, without much foreknowledge of the subject, puttering through Claudia Roth Pierpont's essay about British explorer and travel writer Freya Stark, whose books about the Middle East were popular in the 1930s and 40s. I haven't read very far into this essay, but I may have gotten as far as I'm going to get--not because it's uninteresting but because I ran across a remark so deeply dismaying yet true that I may not have the heart to venture beyond it. Here's the paragraph in which Pierpont leads up to Stark's comment:

Stark could talk her way into any situation and, most of the time, out again, in a remarkable number of languages. [In April 1941] she had just talked her way back to Baghdad from Tehran, when . . . she was stopped by Iraqi police at the frontier. All British citizens were barred from proceeding further, and she was officially in custody; others, she learned, had been put in prison camps. Yet she cajoled the station attendant into bringing her tea and her police guard into sharing it, and informed the guard of the sheer impossibility of staying on without a ladies' maid. Surely he could see her problem and wished to be civilized? . . . And the policeman--no longer guarding a prisoner but protecting a lady--put her on the next train to Baghdad. "The great and almost only comfort about being a woman," Stark reflected, in a maxim that encompasses many such events in her illustrious career, "is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised."

Perhaps the link is merely coincidental, but in my mind Stark's management of her situation, which I'm sorry to say is still a useful mechanism for dealing with both car trouble and the police, is somehow segueing into the ridiculous and embarrassing birth-certificate accusations that are dogging President Obama as well as a parallel incident here in Maine involving clueless public racism and classism. The situation centers on Philip Congdon, the governor's top economic development advisor, who, according to the Bangor Daily News, resigned after "reportedly offend[ing] multiple groups of people on separate occasions during events in Aroostook County earlier this month. According to multiple sources, Congdon made racially insensitive or inflammatory remarks about [black] college students and dismissive comments about the prospects for economic development in The County," which is sparsely populated and dependent on potato farming.

I would like to say something pithy here, but I find myself unable to compose an intelligent summary to this post, one that would neatly tie up all these frayed edges and demonstrate my sociological acumen. All I can do is put my head into my hands. Why is the American president forced to waste his time dealing with what the New York Times calls "such poisonous fire"? Why did Maine's governor hire an economic development advisor who despises the people he is supposed to help? Why do women still automatically feign stupidity, and why, as Stark notes, is "no one surprised"? Humiliation, it seems, is timeless.

Guess which famous person visited western Pennsylvania in 1842?

The Celebrity did most of his or her traveling by canal. As this period map shows, railroads accounted for only a fraction of the route between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, and that bit of track went over the Alleghenies. The Celebrity explained how the railway worked:

There are ten inclined planes; five ascending, and five descending; the carriages are dragged up the former, and let slowly down the latter, by means of stationary engines; the comparatively level spaces between, being traversed, sometimes by horse, and sometimes by engine power, as the case demands. Occasionally the rails are laid upon the extreme verge of a giddy precipice; and looking from the carriage window, the traveller gazes sheer down, without a stone or scrap of fence between, into the mountain depths below.

As I learned from Daniel Rottenberg's The Kingdom of Coal, the same method was being used in the anthracite region of eastern Pennsylvania to move coal down to barges on the Lehigh River.

The Celebrity was impressed by the Alleghenies--those "frowning hills, sullen with dark trees, and sometimes angry in one red burning spot high up, where unseen men lay crouching round a fire." But as his or her subsequent writings about the continent made clear, pioneer poverty was new to this observer:

There were . . . lodgings for the pigs, nearly as good as many of the human quarters; broken windows, patched with worn-out hats, old clothes, old boards, fragments of blankets and paper; and home-made dressers standing in the open air without the door, whereon was ranged the household store, not hard to count, of earthen jars and pots.

He or she was particularly appalled by the locals' rampant timber cutting. A native of a long-cultivated land, the Celebrity perhaps did not realize that his or her own country had once undergone similar devastation:

The eye was pained to see the stumps of great trees thickly strewn in every field of wheat. . . . It was quite sad and oppressive, to come upon great tracts where settlers had been burning down the trees and where their wounded bodies lay about, like those of murdered creatures, while here and there some charred and blackened giant reared aloft two withered arms, and seemed to call down curses on his foes.

These comments from 1842 are intriguing, not least because they feel so contemporary (except for the inclined planes). As a child visiting the Alleghenies in the 1970s, I was well aware that Appalachian living styles were not the same as those in suburban New England. My grandfather would not have hesitated to patch a window with worn-out hats. "Home-made dressers" did stand "in the open air." Moreover, much as he loved his farm, my grandfather was oblivious to its health. For instance, he either burnt his garbage in the kitchen stove or loaded it onto a tractor sled, hauled it out to a quarry in the middle of his hayfield, and dumped it. This was fun. Sometimes I was allowed to drive the tractor on these expeditions, and my sister and I looked forward to flinging soda bottles into the rocks and listening to them shatter. Everything went into that quarry: plastic, paint cans, car batteries. Years passed before I realized what a dreadful legacy this good man had inflicted on his own home.

I'm sure the region's long industrial history influenced that attitude. People get used to poison. A few days ago I was listening to novelist Denise Giardina speak on NPR about the West Virginia coalfields. She compared her community's relationship to coal to an addict's relationship to a drug: a terrible dependence on what is killing it, a terrible indifference to the future. Yet as the Celebrity's 1842 account makes clear, coal was not the first regional devastation. The creation of the farmland pastoral required a similar ruthless indifference. The pattern of dominance is longer than industry, longer than pioneering, longer than Indian-settler conflicts, longer than human-animal competition. It seems to be a primary urge of life.

I wonder if I will ever get my garden dug up and planted. It is either covered with snow, or rain, or chickens. At the moment it is covered with all three.

Yesterday I bought tires. Today I will buy an oil change and an inspection and possibly a registration. It is that kind of week. Sometimes I dream of how wonderful it would be to not own a car. My older son, who just received his picture license in the mail, dreams of how wonderful it would be to not have to drive his parents' ugly old Suburu. My younger son dreams of how wonderful it would be to drive a chariot while wearing Roman armor.

At the moment, I would merely like to dream. I appear to have crossed into the land of insomnia, and here's a poem about sleep and cars that seems strangely appropriate to this disconnected post.

Sleep

Dawn Potter

I flaunt my silk underwear,

one more slit-eyed bitch

clogging your cracked headlights.

Any old hag is the girl of your dreams,

and I

am only halfway down the road to rot,

thumb-bone flagging your sleek

Cadillac.

Dust blunders at loose ends,

tornado blue, thick as brains.

I slouch ditch-side,

time's cynic.

Driver, don't make me wait.

Just hit,

hit, and run.

[from How the Crimes Happened (CavanKerry Press, 2010)]

Following is the sort of information that makes me feel that writing a poem cycle about the history of western Pennsylvania might just be possible.

"An elephant was exhibited in . . . Greensburg in 1808."

This small fact appears in Scott C. Martin's Killing Time: Leisure and Culture in Southwestern Pennsylvania, 1800-1850, a cultural study that I would like to enjoy reading more than I really am. So far, the book has too much Martin and not enough elephant anecdotes. I'm still hoping, but already my brain has started inventing its own 1808 elephant pictorial, so perhaps the author is actually doing me a service.

Miraculously, I managed to whip up a fine Easter dinner, even though I hadn't been to the grocery store for a week: sirloin soaked in lime marinade and then grilled over wood; mashed potatoes, spring onions, and asiago; a pan of fresh dandelion greens, first of the season, with balsamic vinegar and lots of fried garlic; and a fudge pie. Plus, Tom is going to build me a new chicken yard. I'm so happy. There is practically nothing more infuriating than watching a flock of chickens scratch up a bed of newly planted peas.

Ambiguous hints of chickens in literature, contorted to suit the critic's preconceived notions: Wordsworth writes, "Behold her, single in the field, / Yon solitary Highland Lass! / Reaping and singing by herself; / Stop here, or gently pass!" If one assumes (as one must) that the aforementioned "Highland Lass!" is a hen, one must also admit that the narrator rather enjoys watching her "Reaping" "in the field." Yet the reader should note that even he, this non-farming passerby, limits his enjoyment to a single "Lass!"

We drove back to Harmony in the pouring rain, to a 40-degree house that took some time to become habitable. Then I discovered that mice had been stockpiling sunflower seeds in my bed. Welcome home. Sigh.

But I removed the seeds, Tom cranked the woodstove, the boys shared their candy, and we sat on the couch under blankets and watched Airplane. So in fact we had a pleasant evening after all.

What we'll have for Easter dinner is anyone's guess. Unless the grocery store is magically open for the holiday, our vegetable side dish will be pickles and carrot sticks. For the first time in years, I did not make hot cross buns, and the boys received no Easter baskets. But outside the fog is lifting, and a glimmer of sun is limning the remnants of snow. It is even possible that a daffodil might bloom today.