Sorry about no post yesterday. My high school session got switched to the morning and then compressed to 40 minutes, so instead of calmly writing to you, I was leaping out of bed and flying down the highway and putting on the double-speed poetry show. Today, though, I'll be working from home, editing and focusing on essay-class stuff, and then this evening I'll be going to my friend Betsy Sholl's book launch (which is at Longfellow Books in Portland at 7 pm, if you want to go too).

But I do have some news for you: spring is here. Right along the house foundation, where the afternoon sun blazes, tulips and hyacinths and crocuses are poking their tips through the leafmold. Everywhere else, the yard still has snow cover. The wind has been fierce, temperatures are grim, and the windchill has been well below zero. But the flowers will not be stopped. Down the street I spotted snowdrops opening in someone's bare front garden. It's not even March yet; in Harmony it's still the dead of winter. But the magic of the seaside is at work in Portland.

Of course last night it snowed on top of the poor little sprouts. But they'll pull through.

A home day, thank goodness. I've been craving alone time, though, truly, it's been fun to be so sociable. My teaching residency is going well, and I like my co-teacher. The central Maine party weekend was of course a joy, and I'm beginning to feel more relaxed with my poetry group. We're hanging out a bit more, gossiping and kvetching, not only talking about work. But I love days of quiet. They're like cold water in July. Tom and I had an excellent quiet day on Sunday: together, but also busy and solitary, as the rain splashed the shingles and leaked through the basement window. Today I'll work, walk, write. The wind is still gusting like an infant hurricane. I want to stride straight into the gale.

 Monday again, and I'm back on the treadmill: teaching, editing, driving, errands, plus a poetry group meeting tonight. I'm not complaining, just being a pep-talking introvert. I have to work myself up into engaging with the kinds of stuff the rest of you deal with all the time. I wish I could do it as elegantly as you do.

Fortunately the weather forecast looks okay (i.e., no snow on the days I have to drive to school), and my teaching plans feel organized, and the house is clean, and I'm reading books I love, and I have a decent poem draft to bring to our meeting tonight. Tom spent yesterday framing and hanging artwork, so our walls are beginning to look less bare. I sewed and listened to part of a Red Sox spring training game on the radio--always a lovely harbinger of change. I am itching to dig and plant, though we're not even out of February yet. But soon!

Last night, after a busy expat weekend--walking and talking and gossiping and eating and looking at art--Tom and I went into town, sat at the bar of the Sicilian pizza place, drank beer, ate big slabs of cheesy tomato delight, and watched college basketball. I never quite believed that my beloved northcountry friends would figure out how to find us down here, yet they did, and they do, and they are. The snowpack is deep up north, but here in the variable Portland climate, grass is peeking through ice; there's a scent of thawing earth. We picked out way through ice and puddles and snowcrust, and the winter-bound visitors celebrated their brief foray into spring, before heading back north into 6 more weeks of winter.

Today I need to catch up on schoolwork that got postponed for partying. I need to gird my loins for a week of driving and teaching and poetry events. A big new editing project has dropped on my desk. I'm rereading Fowles The Magus, for the millionth time, and trying to make progress on my second apron so that I can move forward into cutting out the material for my shirt. I have to clean the house. But my seed order has arrived! The cardinals are singing; the chickadees are piping their mating songs. Real spring is around the corner.

A dim Saturday morning. I've been thinking about John Fowles, about Dante, about a sad poet comrade who's afraid he's not a poet.

The furnace rumbles. My white cup shimmers with black coffee. Next door a young blond woman walks up her driveway in bedroom slippers.

Today some of my oldest friends and I will linger along the chilly bayside, will eat split pea soup and gossip, will say goodbye.

Today I will stand alone at my kitchen window and stare into a brief snowscape rick-racked with tiny animal footprints.

Sometimes I don't know what to do with myself. Sometimes I know exactly what to do with myself. How can I tell the difference?

Once, long ago, my kindergarten son invented the title of a book he meant to write. Three Clowns in a Meadow. I hope I get to read it someday.

And now the Harmony diaspora part of my week begins: dinner last night with ex-Harmony folks who now live in southern Maine; today and maybe tomorrow, overnight visits from various northcountry friends. Being a central Maine expat has turned out to be a strange and intense bond. I spent much of last evening talking to a young man I've known since babyhood, who now has a high-powered NYC job--the sort of job that is hard to quit--but is deeply homesick for Harmony. Such a familiar tale . . . for me, for my younger son. Who are we, with our small floating souls, who mourn place so deeply? Why does it happen to some of us but not to others?

I'm excited to announce the lineup for the 2019 Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. Once again, I'll be directing it, alongside my associate director Kerrin McCadden. Our guest faculty will be Jacques Rancourt and Tina Cane, and Maudelle Driskell will lead the Writing Intensive. Beth Curran will be our Schafer Teaching Fellow. I'm so looking forward to the summer, and I hope you'll consider joining us in the barn.

But we've got a lot of weather to slog through before summer can find us again. This morning sleet is clacking against the windows, the street is glossed with icy snow, the furnace is gobbling oil, and we are running out of firewood.

Yesterday, after working on my own writing, I walked down to the University of New England to check out the Maine Women Writers Collection. I sat there for an hour, looking through the archives of a Maine poet named Florence Burrill Jacobs, a graduate of Skowhegan High School's class of 1916 (the same class as Senator Margaret Chase Smith), who spent the bulk of her life in East Madison--a town very close to Harmony. Jacobs was married to a high school shop teacher, spent much of her life caring for her parents and helping then run their general store, but she wrote constantly. Amazingly, some of her early work ended up in the New Yorker, and Harper's published a collection of her sonnets, Neighbors, in the late 1940s. Clearly the publishers were hoping to market her as an Edgar Lee Masters/Edward Arlington Robinson/Robert Frost type: a capturer of small-town tragedy and joy, the kind of poet who might engage non-poets, a New England portraitist. But her career never took off, and by the late 1960s she was selling verses and stories to venues such as Hallmark, Ladies' Home Journal, and McCall's. Her paperwork makes both her pride and her disappointment very clear.

I've only looked at a bit of her archive; there's so much more to sift through. But the collection is full of other equally fascinating and ambiguous materials: Admiral Peary's wife Josephine's papers, for instance . . . along with a glass case holding her gun, with this label attached:

Mother's 12 Gua. Shotgun
Do Not Use
Dangerous