Yesterday morning, as I was shuffling through poems, trying to prep for next week's reading, I heard my phone tick Email. When I checked the message, I discovered it was an announcement that I'd made the first cut for a very big prize. This prize is so big that I have absolutely no expectation of winning. This prize is the sort that cements a career. As a result, having made any sort of cut in the competition feels like fireworks, and I am chuffed and cheerful and disbelieving. I keep rereading the email to see if there's been some mistake.

So today, in the midst of packing, I need to mail a stack of my books to the foundation and write notes to recommenders and otherwise act as if I believe in myself. Though it's not as if I don't believe in myself. I do: just not in this context. This context is a fairy tale.

Still, a fairy tale makes any Friday morning more exciting, and so I am sitting here in my couch corner bubbling quietly to myself before I return to earth and start hauling compost and recycling to the curb and tossing towels into the washer and scrubbing breakfast dishes and otherwise enacting my accustomed role. 

Last night I went out to my friend Betsy's book launch at Mechanics' Hall, a beautiful old building downtown, built in the early 1800s as an artisans' improvement association. The place was packed: probably 100 people were there to cheer her on, including lots of friends, who waved at me and hugged me and tapped me on the shoulder and saved me a seat and chattered to me, and I said to myself, Gosh, I seem to live here now. I recall the first big public poetry event I attended in Portland, where I was so overwhelmed by shyness that I left early without talking to anyone. I felt like a disaster. And now I do not feel like a disaster. That is a welcome change.

Class plans are done: a three-Atwood day on the docket for Tuesday . . . flash memoir, flash fiction, and a poem; a study of speaker's voice/time movement/character treatment in each; writing prompts that let the kids try out what they see.

So today I'll start working on my reading list for next Thursday in New Jersey. I've got to fill 40 minutes, an enormous block of time, and I'm worried about being boring. I might read a few newer pieces, not just book ones,  which means sorting through the stack and trying out poems in the air. And then, after that, I've got to start dealing with clothes. Hiking clothes, teaching clothes, city clothes, reading clothes, with not much luggage space for the city/reading outfits and very little time for laundry between stints. Perhaps this is why rock-and-rollers stick with black.

Apparently it's 32 degrees outside; I wonder if we finally got a frost. If so, that means yard work too--yanking out collapsed marigolds, digging up the last dahlia.

Tonight I'll be going to my friend Betsy Sholl's book launch, which I'm sure will be a crowded event as she is much loved. So altogether it will be a busy day, though in an odd way. I'll be packing food for our cottage stay this weekend, so that means a cooler and baskets of bread and vegetables and olive oil and coffee and such. In contrast, I really, really need to keep my NYC packing basic as I'll be lugging books to sell and it's tiring to toil up and down those subway stairs with extra weight. All of this necessitous confusion makes me sure I'm going to forget something vital, like salt, or pants.

But at least the class plans are finished, and printed, and stowed in my teaching bag. That's one big done to check off the list. I am not quick at syllabus making. The big slowdown is tracking down the right materials to teach from. Once I do that, the conversation starters and writing prompts come quickly. But it can take me hours to choose models that will lead to focused but natural discussions and experiments.

The firewood chore is done: logs stacked snugly, bark and chips raked up, wheelbarrow tucked away in its new woodshed berth. It's a good thing I decided to work steadily because an unforecast rainstorm floated through mid-afternoon, just after I'd finished cleaning up, and that would have made handling logs much more unpleasant. There's nothing like wet work gloves to wreck a stacking party . . . though snowy wet work gloves take the prize for the worst firewood-stacking accessory. Ugh.

Anyway, job over, and now I'll go back to my desk and figure out next week's teaching plan. I've got to have everything in hand before leaving on Friday, and I ought to start organizing myself for NYC as well since I'll be leaving for the city almost as soon as I get home from Monson.

What a ridiculous schedule. I'm so glad not to be a rock star.

Today, however, I'm still in household mode. I've got to get the car to the shop. I've got to work on class plans. I've got to do laundry. Otherwise, my time is my own. Yesterday I received a poem acceptance, which was nice, and reminded me that's it's not entirely terrible to submit work. So I could do more of that today. I could also do some Christmas shopping but I bet I won't.

Writing writing writing. The faucet has been just a drip lately. I wonder when the explosion will happen.

The firewood arrived on cue, so yesterday I stacked, and then Tom stacked when he got home from work, and maybe I'll be able to finish the job today. It was a lovely day to be outside--sweet-tempered and golden, with crows shouting at me from the maples--and today will be another such. A poignant day also, as P learned that a college friend had died of cancer, a loss in its own right, but he was the son of a famous actor, so weirdly the news is splashed everywhere in the entertainment press and mourners are wrestling with the bizarreness of having known someone in private circumstances who has now, after death, become a paparazzo item.

I have been reading a book I picked up off the street, Joan Aiken's 1964 children's novel Black Hearts in Battersea, which I remember taking out of the library often when I was little. It's pleasant to revisit it, and to track what it was that drew me into the tale in those days . . . I think a certain Dickensian expansiveness, combined with an odd classless society, in which dukes and kings easily consort with ladies' maids and blacksmiths, as they might in Mother Goose. 

Now, today, I need to walk up to the library to get the flash-fiction anthology I ordered, and then hop my mind into class planning for next Tuesday in Monson. I'm mulling a Margaret Atwood day, maybe mixing up poems, essay excerpts, flash fiction so that they can consider issues of genre shifting. 

But I should work on my own stuff too. Yesterday my mind resolutely blinked away from all thoughts of poetry. I respect that in a brain; I understand that it needs to simplify itself, not be constantly translating action and observation into words and metaphor, cadence and drama. Still, I should be alert. There's likely to be a portal, somewhere. Brains are tricky that way.

A little warmer this morning, but still cool enough for the furnace to grind on. Monday, Halloween, and I barely managed to remember to buy candy yesterday. I was thinking about P's birthday and the opening day of deer season, and Halloween nearly slipped my mind.

We had a busy day yesterday. Tom painted the first coat of stain onto the shed, and I putzed around with housework, put the outdoor chairs in the basement for the winter, baked bread, grocery-shopped, installed a new toilet seat, and so on and so on. The shed isn't finished yet, but the woodshed addition is ready for occupancy, just in time for the green firewood delivery this morning, and later today I'll have the fun of inaugurating it. The day promises to be bright and temperate--a perfect day for wood work--and stacking should go quickly in the new digs.

I've finished reading Already Dead and am idling through a New Yorker article before picking up another book. I need to clean floors. I need to get started on class plans for next week. I also need to allow myself to take a rest. I haven't had a full weekend off since I had Covid.

FYI, my December chapbook class, "Learning from Nina Simone," is now half full, so if you're thinking of signing up, you should probably do so soon. Participation is strictly limited to 6 people so that everyone's manuscript will get lots of attention.

Next Thursday, I'll be reading in the Visiting Writers Series at Warren Community College in Washington, New Jersey. If you're in the area, I'd love to see you there.

Sunday, 5:15 a.m., 34 degrees, outside air dark and sharp. I woke up too early for a weekend day off, but at least it's an unscheduled too-early: I can loll here in my couch corner as long as I like.

Yesterday's workshop seemed to go well, and in the afternoon I puttered outside in the sunshine, finishing up with the debris pile, sorting through random firewood scraps, and otherwise neatening the slop corner behind the shed. A homestead needs a slop corner, someplace to stash the compost bins and the leaf pile, but I feel city eyes always on me, as if I'm responsible for the view from other people's windows. I should probably stop thinking that way, but with so many houses pressed up against mine, in every direction, it's hard to ignore the fishbowl.

I talked with both of my boys yesterday, read a lot, ambled up to the store in the evening to buy beer. Today I've got to grocery-shop and do some housework but otherwise am hoping to meander. This coming week will be filled with going-away prep. Firewood delivery on Monday morning; the rest of the week, wood stacking, class planning, reading planning, travel planning, my friend Betsy's book launch on Thursday night--a swirl of thinking-ahead, thinking-ahead.

At least I seem to have survived my latest grief attack. My legs feel steadier underneath me, my mind less plaintive.

It's a cold morning, 33 degrees--still not quite a frost, but we're getting close. The furnace hums and burbles; the cat leaps back into the house as if his paws are on fire; fresh hot coffee tastes like the best of all possible drinks.

I did pull myself into shape yesterday, mostly by doing hours of yard work . . . sorting out and bagging a pile of roots and sticks mixed with soil and ancient trash and shed detritus, which had been accumulating in the ditch beside the shed for years before we arrived. It was a dirty ugly mess, unpleasant to untangle and satisfying to delete. I rolled up hoses and stored them in the shed, and I raked leaves against the shrubs and into the flowerbeds, first round of several more mulching sessions as the enormous maples slowly shed their loads.

I came inside with blisters on my hands and dirt caked under my nails, and a much lighter heart.

This morning I'll be leading a revision workshop, but afterward I'll head outside to finish the ugly-detritus job. We've got a load of green firewood arriving on Monday morning, so I want to get space cleaned out and ready for wood moving. With our new woodshed we now have a neat and efficient pipeline arrangement: this year's dry wood in the basement, next year's green wood in the covered shed, no more snow-wet, tarp-flapping outdoor stacks, though we'll still have to move the burnable stack into the house each year. My Wellington friends have a beautiful arrangement right outside the back door--dry wood on one side, green wood on the other, a covered walkway for the wood mover--but this is our city compromise.

I'm still reading Denis Johnson's Already Dead. I'm working on poem revisions and even some submissions. I've finished an editing project, and timing-wise this small hiatus is really helpful, as the craze of my November schedule is looming. Starting next Friday I'll be on the road for a week, bouncing from Portland to Mount Desert Island to Monson to Portland to New York to New Jersey to New York to Portland. Already I'm wondering how I'm ever going to get my laundry done. 

I'm not going to waste energy fretting about that yet, however. Today: teach and then dig. Leftover pot roast for dinner. A baseball game afterward (go, Phillies!). A long night's sleep in my own bed.