And here I sit beside the window, staring out into the blue-black morning of Monson, Maine. I'm happy to report that the little cold has morphed into an even littler cold, though it could easily have done otherwise. Thus, I am sort of well rested, sort of ready to step into the classroom, and this feels like success.

In a few minutes, the general store will open and I'll step across the street to fetch my coffee and yogurt. Meanwhile, lemony streaks hem the fading night sky; log trucks mutter down the road; the bare tree branches are pencil scratches.

In this stray moment between dawn and day, my thoughts feel drained of color. Yet today's class will be all about details: creating images, tracing images, conjuring up a dense materiality in words. I'm curious to see what my pen will make of this. Nothing, maybe. Or something strange and wonderful.

I woke up with a little cold--tiny sore throat, sour mouth, both very minor, definitely not Covid, not nearly severe enough to cancel class for, presumably linked to travel and being overtired, will probably be gone by tomorrow when I have to teach: but still, they're just one more blah to add to the chain of blah. I've been trying to hype my enthusiasm about driving three hours this afternoon in my great "new" car--new brakes, new rocker panels, and now a fabulous new exhaust system and shiny new catalytic converter--but my enthusiasm is not falling for the hype. No surprise, but I do need to snap myself out of this state of mind and refocus myself on my work.

What I really mean is refocus myself on different work because I've been completely absorbed in writing a very painful essay-memoir about Ray and our times--painful because it's been complicated to write, painful because it's been like picking a scab. But it's done now, I think. It it took me into some shadowy places. It had to be written. And now it is sitting on my desktop asking, "What next?"

I have no answer to that yet. What I have is a tiny sore throat and a sour mouth, a day of obligation and driving, the fear that I will never again sleep purely and simply.

But I'll go for a walk this morning. I'll figure things out--figure something out, or let the breeze do it for me . . . watch a bird or two, watch a dog, maybe begin to watch myself.

I write to you from home. We got in last night about 7:15; dropped our stuff, then immediately walked around the corner so we could get drinks and dinner before the restaurant stopped serving. Probably it would have been wiser to stay home and heat up leftovers, but wise hasn't felt like a coherent philosophy this weekend.

We did go straight to bed as soon as we came home again. That was as wise as we could get.

Anyway. Here we are at Monday. Tomorrow I've got to drive to Monson, so today is my day for figuring out how to function. Groceries, laundry, a walk . . . I haven't glanced at the calendar. I have no idea what other obligations lurk there.

Forgive this rattled note. Tired doesn't begin to describe our state of mind.

As expected, it's been an insanely exhausting weekend.

Yesterday morning the alarm went off at 3 a.m., and we began our long trek: a 4:15 bus to Boston, a 7 a.m. bus to NYC, then straight to Brooklyn, a quick meal, and then two and a half hours standing in the blocked-off street beside Commonwealth Bar talking to people I hadn't seen for 40 years, or had never met before, or had seen but under wonky circumstances, or had just seen a couple of months ago when I was in New York, or talked to all of the time every chance I could get, or were my own beloveds . . . and this was punctuated by a bagpiper playing "Amazing Grace," and Ray's impeccable playlists unrolling from the speakers, and a bright blue sky, and sudden gusts of tears . . .

Afterward our posse gathered--Tom and I, both boys and their partners--and trudged the long blocks to Paul's apartment, where we sat together and mulled things over as Paul whipped up chili and cornbread and salad; we wondered what we might do all evening . . .

And then my phone buzzed and it was Steve, Ray's husband, asking us to meet him at his apartment, so our posse said yes and rode the train to Gowanus, and when we arrived, we realized that this wasn't the larger, multitudinous gathering we'd pictured but the apartment was full of Steve's family and Ray's family and two lone guys from foreign lands, and now us, which was the most touching thing that had happened to us all day because, as we said afterward, a person can feel like family but the family doesn't necessarily see things that way, nor should they . . .

But there we were, sitting and standing around amidst a shifting collection of brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, everyone's heart on their sleeve, everyone eager to take comfort, ask questions, make jokes, tell the funny stories: it was the sweetest thing, and we were so tired, but so was every person in the room, weary and open-hearted . . .

And now here I am, still so tired, not well slept but sort of slept, lying in my son's living room listening to the traffic on the highway and the subway rumbling underneath the street and the whoop-whoop of a passing cop car, girding myself for the next things: breakfast with the boys and their partners, then splitting away again, back into Manhattan, back onto the bus, the long drive back to Boston, then on to Maine, and our house, and Monday morning glowering ahead of us like a piece of dented sheet metal . . .

Friday. Recycling day, leaf-raking day, packing-for-New-York-in-the-smallest-bag-possible day. This will be a dreadfully compressed trip for us, but at least the boys and their partners will have an actual weekend to hang out together--a glint of cheer amid the sorrow.

I did manage to get stuff done yesterday: returned an editing project to the press, wrote a blurb for a poetry collection, finished my Monson plans, formulated my next Zoom class, plus walked to the dentist, did the housework, proofed a kid's grad-school application, probably did other chores that I can't even remember now . . . and then in the evening I went out to write, which was such sweet relief after a long and sucky fortnight of not being together. For some reason everyone was writing really well; the drafts were just pouring out; it was tonic to be sitting in that room feeling the sparks fly. I love my writing group.

So today I have a poem draft to look at and I have my essay to look at. As far as I can recall, I have no other pressing desk obligations, nothing that can't wait till next week. There are worse ways to enter into a weekend of hard things.

You likely won't hear from me again till Monday. We'll be leaving the house tomorrow at 3:30 a.m., and wifi on the bus is always wonky. Sunday morning I might have a chance to write, but I also might not: we'll be crammed into my son's tiny apartment, and I can't be sure I'll have any waking moments to myself.

Then again I could surprise you, and myself, with a rambling picaresque narrative of my travels. We'll see what happens.

The days this week have been cold and windy and bright--late autumn in its glory, lungs filling with breeze, hair blown into rat tails, warm boots kicking leaves.

In the garden kale reigns supreme, but the tough late-season herbs also hang on: sage, thyme, oregano. I'm still cutting snippets of mint, posies of cilantro and parsley. Even the salad greens linger: more bitter than in their youth but still lovely with balsamic and feta, apples and fennel, roasted carrots and red onion.

In the kitchen I turn out pumpkin pudding with hard sauce; spaghetti squash with butter, parmesan, and cilantro; roasted kale and cherry tomato salads. I carry firewood and empty ashes and scour the glass door of the woodstove until it gleams. I arrange bouquets of dried grasses and hydrangea blooms in vases all over the house. I take care. It is a thing I know how to do. It is useless it is not useless it is useless it is not useless.

Yesterday I cranked through an editing job. I readied myself for next week's Monson class. I answered emails and filled in dates on my calendar and went to the gas station and lugged returnables to the bottle bank, and the essay sat quietly at home, breathing to itself.

This morning: dentist. This afternoon: work phone call. In between: mopping and vacuuming and toilet scrubbing and laundry. The usual slog of obligation. 

What does self-preservation mean, and is it selfish? The answer is "depends," of course. Do no harm is a sweet thought, but we all do harm. Every time we buy a cup of Dunkin' coffee sourced from Central American plantation conglomerates that exploit their laborers and their environment. Every time we set a match to a twig,

The tentacles of evil strangle our good intentions.

Still, there is this day, this house, this body. An essay waits for me. Tonight I'll go out to write poems for the first time in weeks. And, oh, these bright, bright days of wind and sun.

I worked all of yesterday morning on my essay, which continues to be unwieldy and disjointed but at least there is now more raw material to consider.

It's been so long since I've written willingly in this form. Outside of a few small review-essays, I've produced nothing but poems for more than a decade. So there's no sense of ease in pouring out my material. All I can do is acknowledge a need to write prose and trust that some version of synthesis will happen in its own time and manner.

I feel like Gretel in the witch's oven; I feel like a beat-up old mixtape that's been rattling around under the front seat of a car for time immemorial. I'm swamped in responsibilities I didn't know I had. Yet as my son said to me on the phone yesterday, isn't that an artist's response to grief--the urge to make? He is 27 years old and smarter than I am, which is such a comfort. I am the dumbest person in town when I am in the midst.

But I've got to plug the faucet and and turn my attention to actual paying work--an academic article to edit, an author to coax, Monson class plans to dredge up. I've got schedules to fix, materials to pull together for a teaching day with Teresa . . . and then there are the unpaid obligations: blurbs to write for two poetry collections, materials to gather for teachers in need, notes to send to friends in grief . . . the myriad tasks of community care--

We are huddled together in a small glass house. We are fenced in by malice. I am tired. But so what.