I want to remind you Portland-area locals that I'll be leading a 10-week poetry master class for the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance this fall, beginning on September 14. At least I'm hoping I'll be leading it because if we don't get enough sign-ups, it won't run. And since I'd really like it to run, I'm begging you wafflers to go ahead and take the plunge and register so we can hang out for 10 weeks together.

I realized lately that this will be the first Labor Day Weekend in approximately 20 years that I won't be staffing the Harmony Fair's exhibit hall. I did, in fact, get an invitation to serve as the vegetable judge, but I've got to drive the boy to college, so I had to say no. I thought I'd feel more melancholy than I do about missing the fair, but maybe 20 years spent breathing dust and shouting over the roar of truck pulls is long enough. Instead, I will be hauling boxes out of a Vermont storage unit, lugging a "portable" keyboard up dormitory stairs, and exchanging wan smiles with other students' similarly laden parents. And then I will embrace the boy and drive away to eat a peaceable dinner with my in-laws. On the whole it will be better than arguing with a crabby old man over why his head of garlic didn't get a blue ribbon.

A small wind twitches the feathers of the honeylocust outside my window. The morning is dark, as if rain lurks in the clouds, though the forecast claims otherwise. Like you, I am melancholy about Texas and Louisiana, drowning in those torrents rushing down and down and down from a chaotic sky; and, perhaps like you, I've been thinking about those scenarios in which nightmares become fact: when the storm does destroy your home, the man in the van does kidnap your child, the speeding car does kill your lover . . . how we may take precautions, avoid risk, sink into existential dread, yet we cannot prepare ourselves for fate.

A small wind twitches the feathers of the honeylocust outside my window. A black-haired youth, shoulders slumped, strides down the sidewalk and out of sight. A tiny dog sits patiently as his owner checks her phone. The minutiae, the unimportant moments, gather and dissipate. We live and die in our cloak of forgetting. Yet the red bicycle is still chained to the post, as it has been for the past week. What happened to its rider? Who possesses the key?

It's another cool morning in Maine. The little sailboats moored in the bay all point their noses toward the west, as if they're a herd of cows grazing in a field. Cars swish up and down the streets, and a woman strolls along the sidewalk with a cat slung over her arm.

Son Number 2 came home last night and immediately devoured most of a pan of lasagna. Tom has taken to calling him Twelve Thousand Calorie Boy. I guess canoeing for a thousand miles gives you a certain amount of leeway in food intake.

Today the compost people will be delivering my truckload of soil, but instead of raking out garden beds I will be at the mall (ugh) trying to figure out if we can get Twelve Thousand Calorie Boy's phone repaired before he goes back to college.

One of these days I will be a poet again.

I woke up with all the windows wide open and the air temperature outside my comforter hovering at 50 degrees. How did summer disappear so suddenly? I guess I'd best remember to shut the windows before I go to bed.

Tom and I started off our day yesterday by shopping for paint. Then he began prepping the upstairs walls, and I turned my attention to the back yard, which is a desert of neglect overhung by three enormous gorgeous maples. The yard beneath those massive trees is a big square of dirt interspersed with a few ugly prickly weeds, its fence lines cluttered with rotten tarps, old hammocks and chairs, empty cans of Silly String, and miscellaneous windblown trash, all mixed in with last year's leaves and a couple of semi-stacked cords of firewood. My only goals were to separate the leaves, brush, stones, and garbage into piles and to restack the firewood more intelligently. No beautifying will be possible till next spring, but at least I can try to make the space more usable as a staging area. And I'm happy to say that after an afternoon's labor we now have a tidy woodpile and a discreet and useful compost-bin/leaf-mulch arrangement behind the shed. All the disgusting trash is stored away inside the shed for next Saturday's dump trip, and this afternoon I can start moving another lopsided stack of firewood from the middle of the driveway (Why is it there, you ask? I have no idea) and rake out whatever nasty junk is hiding behind it. There will be plenty.

In the interstices I'll be catching up on doll-house housework, editing a book about the spiritual influences of 19th-century American writers, and eventually fetching Son Number 2 from the airport. So I will leave you with this hilarious passage from Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, in which Thomas Cromwell jokingly tells Anne Boleyn what would have been in store for her had she married a northern lord. Reading this description feels like reading a 16th-century article from the National Enquirer.

"My lady," he turns to Anne, "you would not like to be in Harry Percy's country. For you know he would do as those northern lords do, and keep you in a freezing turret up a winding stair, and only let you come down for your dinner. And just as you are seated, and they are bringing in a pudding made of oatmeal mixed with the blood of cattle they have got in a raid, my lord comes thundering in, swinging a sack--oh, sweetheart, you say, a present for me? and he says, aye, madam, if it please you, and opens the sack and into your lap rolls the severed head of a Scot."

Strange to say, I completely forgot to write you a note yesterday morning. Friday I was still up north, sleeping off the after-effects of a freezing-cold gig alongside the windy shores of Moosehead Lake. But I have no excuse for not writing yesterday . . . only the distractions of garden design. I have been sleeping terribly of late, waking up at 2 a.m. to fret over "what do I need to do next?" and "don't forget to order ____" and "how do I find a person to ____?" and so on and so on. None of this is anything I need to worry about at 2 a.m., but my brain is an idiot.

In any case, here I am today, ready to share boring stories about paint chips and the price of a truckload of compost. I have been laying newsprint weed barriers, and digging out saplings, and reaming out ugly old misplaced perennials and spreading bags of fresh soil, and laying drip hose for irrigation. I still can't touch half of the front yard because the sewer pipe guys have yet to rip it up. But once I get my truckload of compost delivered for the terraced bed, I can lay a few flagstone paths and begin some fall planting.

You won't be surprised to hear that I have done no writing, no copying out of Coriolanus or dreamy perusal of poems. My life revolves around editing, housework, gardenwork, and room painting is on the horizon. I read a bit of Wolf Hall every day; the reading light is never turned off, of course. But it is so good to have dirty hands again.

This afternoon I will head north for a gig in Greenville. Thus, today will also be the first since becoming a homeowner that won't involve any visits to the new house. I feel a bit anxious about getting behind on my work there, but in truth I've accomplished a lot since last Friday. My primary focus has been an existing bed in the front yard. Some previous owner created it, even going so far as to construct a terrace with a retaining wall. I suppose that person also planted perennials in it, but there are no signs of them now. The bed's been ignored for half a decade, and whatever was originally imagined has vanished into a mess of weeds and saplings.

During this week's hot afternoons, I have been upside-down in that bed, ruthlessly ripping and pruning in order to reach some semblance of soil level. There's no way to completely dig out the roots, so my next step will be to create a weed barrier. For that I'm going to use layers of plain newsprint, purchased by the roll at the art-supply store down the street. (Earthworms love paper, so the newsprint will do double-duty as weed blocker and soil amender.) Then I'll water it well, and then I'll cover it with a load of fresh compost. And then it will be ready for a new life.

But I'll also need to work around the fact that one of these mornings an excavator will be showing up to cut a trench through the front yard and replace our sewer pipe. That's holding my enthusiasm in check. Also, this weekend I'll probably have to start painting rooms. I'm sure I'll be excited about fresh paint too, yet I feel kind of mournful about putting the garden on hiatus.

So now you have the bulletin from Transcendentalist House . . . a name that does not roll off the tongue, so perhaps I should call it Alcott House or maybe Emerson House. Thoreau House would surely be inappropriate: isn't that the one I left behind?

It seems that Paul LePage, Maine's governor (who dreams of being Donald Trump when he grows up), is claiming that 7,600 Mainers fought for the Confederacy. This is just about the stupidest assertion possible. According to a response article in the Bangor Daily News, about 73,000 Mainers fought for the Union, so now I am wondering if the guv is confused about (1) the difference between Union and Confederacy and (2) where the comma goes in a big number. I mean, come on: as the Bangor Daily News article avers, during the Civil War, no one was more staunchly Unionist than Maine. And while about 30 Mainers are on record as fighting for the Confederacy, most of them were college students, so it's not clear if they were even from the state.

I am so tired of "I want it to be true; therefore, it is true" politics. And in this case, I'm also appalled that our governor is impugning the history of his own state. The vast majority of Mainers were not treasonous. Those who fought did so because they wanted to preserve the nation, not break it apart.

In western Pennsylvania, the KKK burnt crosses to terrify my Polish immigrant ancestors. In central New Jersey, my Dutch and Quaker forebears owned slaves. My family history is not either-or. It's both-and. I am all for facing up to history, and to our faults and errors in grappling with it. I believe we carry the weight of our family's past, as well as of our larger social, political, and cultural pasts. I believe we need to admit to the evil therein. But in the case of "7,600 Mainers fought for the Conderacy," LePage is inventing a treachery that did not exist. If I were the descendant of a Maine Civil War veteran, I would be livid.