Yesterday's gale was unnerving. In Portland, gusts close to 60 miles per hour tore at the massive Norway maples as they flailed their boughs over the fragile rooftops. The wind wailed like a train, and Chuck kept staring up at me in wonder and concern. But by evening the storm had died down, and this morning I glimpse only a few small branches littering the yard.

The warm rain washed away nearly all of our snow, and now cold has settled back in. It's the last Saturday before Christmas, and I am tucked into my couch corner as Tom sleeps upstairs, as the furnace chugs in the basement, as Chuck plays chow hockey among the dining room chairs.

It feels very, very good to be unemployed for a few weeks. My writing time will come, but this weekend will mostly feature communal busyness: wrapping presents, acquiring treats for Christmas lunch, confabbing with Tom about plans. There will be eleven of us in Amherst, a crowd of young and old, probably the last big family gathering before the Chicago wedding, and everyone is excited.

Meanwhile, Maine is a hive. This week alone I've had a sleepover with friends in the homeland and holiday hijinks with my high schoolers, been on a movie date with my sweetheart, and gone out for a poetry evening that was also a Christmas party. Ahead are dinners with friends both nights this weekend, and for New Year's Eve T and I are planning a card party.

I love quiet; I crave it; I will soon be begging for it. But in these waning hours of a dark year, the beloveds flicker like candle flame. I'm a moth.

I have one more zoom meeting this morning, and then, finally, finally, I'll be on vacation. I'm not quite sure what I'll do with myself in these strange new hours, with no responsibilities for the rest of the day other than laundry and dinner. The weather is forecast to be terrible--gale-force winds and weird warm rain--so I may simply light an afternoon fire in the stove and curl up with books and notebooks and Chuck and a cup of tea and a couch blanket, and listen to the wind howl.

We've got a busy weekend ahead: lots of Christmas prep, and we've been invited out for dinner on both Saturday and Sunday . . . what is this social whirl? Both T and I are looking forward to the holiday this year. It will be a crowd: both of our boys and their partners, our nephew and his parents, and my in-laws. The big house will be so full that T's parents made reservations for the two of us to stay in the fancy inn down the road, and we're very much looking forward to that novelty. After an autumn dotted with death, dreadful car repairs, a busted furnace, and overwork, the prospect of spending four nights in an inn above our pay grade seems extremely exciting.

And I would really, really, really like to work on some poems. Teresa and Jeannie and I are planning to dive into a communal experiment with linked sonnets in which we write poems wrapped around one another's lines. I'm excited to get started, now that I finally have a bit of space in which to imagine.

Yesterday, to my great relief, I finished the giant editing project I've been focused on for the past couple of months. My deadline is Friday; and with the onslaught of work and household-emergency distractions during these past few weeks, I've been increasingly fearful of running late. However, I did manage to get the job done in time after all, so today I'll write up my editing notes and ship the files out, and then I will be on holiday hours . . . sort of.  I've still got two zoom meetings this week and a bunch of paperwork chores to slog through, plus my usual housework demands. But I'm beginning to glimpse an airier future.

Another good thing is that my incipient head cold seems to be fading away. I have been tired (I almost fell asleep at the movie last night), but in a cozy, hibernating sort of way rather than an exhausted one. I'm looking ahead--a month off from teaching, a few weeks off from editing: none of this is at all good for our bank account, but I can't regret the gap. It's been a long time since I've had any plain days to myself.

Last night, for dinner, I made a polpettone--a rolled Italian meatloaf--with venison (from my friend Steve's deer) and mutton (from his daughter Amber's sheep farm . . . and don't be distracted by the English-novel connotations of mutton: this is as tender and mild as the best-quality lamb). I stuffed it with garden kale, foraged maitakes, local onions, garden pesto, and parmesan. On the side: buttered yellow and purple potatoes (local) with garden dill as well as roasted garden green beans tossed with store lettuce. It was a beautiful mid-December meal, a happiness of freezer riches and sturdy winter produce; quintessentially north country, with a dream Mediterranean behind it; food as a complex swirl of making-do and making-up.

Yesterday morning my car thermometer read zero as I drove through Harmony. Today Portland is supposed to be in the 40s, the rest of the week even warmer, before we have a flash freeze and drop into the basement again.

This weather seesaw is  unnerving. Also I'm feeling slightly coldy today and crossing my fingers the malaise will wear off instead of getting worse. I do not have time to be sick: this big editing project is due at the end of the week, and then the holidays tumble in. Fortunately, my teaching responsibilities are over for the moment. I won't be back in Monson till mid-January, so I'm hoping that once I ship this manuscript and slither through Christmas I'll snag a few open days for myself before the next onslaught.

Today will be cups and cups and cups of tea, a walk in the brisk air, and hours at my desk. Tonight we're planning to go out to watch The Third Man, one of T's favorite movies. I've started reading Anita Brookner's sad novel Strangers. I'll be getting a dead headlight replaced on my car and I'll be thinking about sonnets. I'll stand at the kitchen window and stare out at the squirrels. Duty, love, melancholy, and a small sniffle. The human condition.

 Eight degrees and windy in the homeland, but the house is cozy. In the night I heard my friends getting up to stoke the stoves, and I felt that sleepy childish delight of being cared for . . .  clank of iron, chunk of wood.

But such moments are brief. Soon I'll get up, get dressed, clump downstairs, become a responsible adult again . . . drink coffee, eat toast, start my car, drive north.

Today the kids and I will work on self-portraits, always an interesting project with teenagers, I think . . . how to see oneself, how to invent oneself. Really, it's an interesting project at any age.

Yesterday was one of those snow-globe days: flakes sifting from the sky all day long, pretending to be flurries, but in the end we got three inches of un-forecast accumulation. I worked on cards, finished my Christmas shopping, watched parts of a weird football game, shoveled snow, made rice and beans for dinner, read some A. S. Byatt stories. And now here we are at Monday again, and I'll be heading north to the homeland this afternoon, then teaching my last class of the season tomorrow.

The coffee table is loaded with new-to-us books. That's because Saturday was the Portland Public Library's annual book sale, a favorite event because we get to drive out to the library warehouse on the edge of town and wander among disorganized tables overflowing with surprises. We always come home with piles, of course. This year I snared the aforementioned Byatt story collection, plus The Major Works of John Clare, The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas (in a beautiful old edition), Seamus Heaney's Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996, Anita Brookner's Strangers, another copy of Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel's Dayswork because somebody I know will surely need this book, and a fine little volume of annals titled Marvels of 1924.

Of course in order to make room for the new, I had to weed out the old, so another of yesterday's chores was to lug a bag of castoffs to the local little free library. I used to feel sadder about that than I do these days. I've gotten better at releasing myself from the tyranny of print. Not a lot better, but a little bit.

All mass shootings are horrific, but for me the Brown University situation has been particularly upsetting. I grew up outside of Providence and spent my childhood and youth among the university music buildings and bookstores, among the East Side shops and streets. Then in my twenties Tom and I lived for several years on Governor Street, a block or so from this shooting, while he was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. Our son Paul later lived in the neighborhood, too, when he was enrolled in a Brown summer drama program. Providence was my first city, Brown was the center of my music life, that neighborhood was the spring of my love affair with Tom, and so this shooting is geographic distress, memory distress, in addition to all of its other distresses.

I sit here now, in a couch corner, in a living room, in a little house, in another small New England city neighborhood, one not so different from the East Side--watery, tree-lined, domesticated; shops and sidewalks and students.

We cling to our innocence because what else can we do?