This is what downtown Portland looked like yesterday afternoon--more than a thousand people gathered in Monument Square, though the temperature was 15 degrees and plummeting. I was thrilled to see so many high school-age protesters, many of them sheepishly bumping up against their also-protesting teachers. I was impressed by the number of businesses that had chosen to close in solidarity. I was pleased by the excellent behavior of the police, who managed traffic and the march route efficiently but were otherwise low key in all ways. I was very glad to be there with my friends, our little bloc of poets.

But I was also very glad to walk back into my warm house and unthaw myself. Though I was wearing three layers on my legs, two pairs of socks, insulated boots, two coats, two scarves, two pairs of gloves, and a hat, I still came home numb with cold, especially my feet. It was exactly the right night for noodle bowls--udon, roasted tofu, a soy-marinated egg, and stir-fried cabbage in citrus-chicken broth. There's no better comfort than noodles and broth.

Now, at first light, the temperature outside is minus four, but the house is snug and warm. Our new expensive furnace sure heats up the place better than the old one did. This weekend I need to read further into The Pillow Book and Tabucchi's Dream of Dreams; I need to write a blurb for a friend's chapbook; I need to work on some poem drafts and clean the bathrooms and do the grocery shopping. I am looking forward to taking a break from editing: I've been driving myself on that project this week, and it's not been easy work.

I think my favorite sign yesterday was the one I saw a high schooler carrying: Young People Are Fucking Sick of This. You and me both, honey.

 After his terrible glass-smashing night, Young Charles has returned to his usual wide-eyed coziness--snuggling, chirping, rolling around on the rugs, and otherwise behaving as if he would never, ever, ever consider jumping onto a shelf at midnight and pushing crystal onto the floor. Everyone slept well, and I am very much enjoying not vacuuming at 5 a.m.

It's another frigid morning out there, temperature hovering just above zero, snowpack stiff and squeaky under foot. Shortly I'll swathe myself in coat and scarf and start hauling bins to the curb, but for a few more minutes I can linger here in coffee warmth.

Today is the national strike, and many businesses in Portland are either closed or donating significant portions of their proceeds to immigrant aid organizations. High schoolers plan to walk out of school and march. There will be a big protest gathering downtown this afternoon, which I'll attend with some of my poets. Folks in this town are righteously pissed off.

In my Monson class on Wednesday, I used a passage and a series of writing prompts with the kids that turned out to be a very effective way to get young writers in a conservative district to think hard about current events without calling out anyone's politics by name. I am happy to share this lesson plan with other teachers. If you would like a copy, please send me a message.

I woke at some deep point of the night to the sound of shattering glass. Tom, who'd fallen asleep on the couch, roused himself and I heard him sweeping up something fragile. When he finally wandered up to bed, I asked what had happened, and he said Chuck had jumped onto the kitchen counter, and then onto a shelf of glassware above the counter, and pushed two crystal glasses that T had inherited from his grandfather onto the floor.

So Young Charles is in the doghouse this morning . . . theoretically, of course, because he has the brain of a goldfish and has no idea he's done anything wrong.

Well, it's only stuff, and we have more of that than we need. I ran the vacuum cleaner in the kitchen at 5 a.m., and for Chuck that counted as the most horrible of punishments, so I guess we're all eye-for-an-eye now.

The temperature's not much warmer here in the south than it was in the north: 6 degrees this morning, and forecast to drop to zero over the next couple of days. I do hope I'll get out into the Arctic for a few walks, but mostly I'll be back at my desk for the rest of the week, straining away at a giant editing project, trying to catch up on writing and reading. I'm glad to say that yesterday's class went really well: the kids jumped into revision in the way geese splash down onto a flooded golf course--much metaphorical honking and wing flapping and mud kicking. It was a pleasure to watch.

The temperature in Monson hovers at zero this morning, and it won't get a lot warmer than that today. The town, which is so cheerful and "stop here!" in the summertime, now hunkers under a blanket of dingy snow. It looks like the set of a sad film about aging on-the-lam bank robbers holed up in a village at the end of the world.

But my apartment is warm, and last night I got into bed at 7 and stayed there till 5:30 this morning. I don't often sleep so hard when I'm away from home, but my body was apparently in need.

Today I'll be beginning the first of three sessions on revision. This always feels like a giant shift, after months of focus on pulling new work out of thin air. But the kids are ready. They love to write; it's incredible--heartrending, really--how much they love it. And revision, at this stage, is really just a chance to look hard at what they've already made and then reimagine it as something else. We've played lots of "reimagine this as . . . " games all year (my big teaching discovery with this cohort has been the power of comedy in teaching craft skills), so I think the writers will slide easily into more serious concentration. At least that is my hope, and maybe the experiment will work, or maybe it won't, but something will happen to help me figure out what's next.

Snow kept falling yesterday, giving us maybe another 5 inches of accumulation . . . I'm peering through the window trying to guess, but it's hard to tell in the dark. T's pickup is still in the shop, but he is up early, rushing through his breakfast, getting himself ready to borrow my car and put in a few hours of work before returning it to me so I can drive up to Monson this afternoon.

Sweetly he did all of yesterday's shoveling while I chewed away at my current editing project, but I expect I'll be out there this morning, cleaning up the new stuff. We did go for a trudge, late in the day, and the neighborhood roads were still pretty messy and challenging to navigate. It was a big storm. Even Maine had to take a deep breath and sit down for a little while.

I'll head straight to Monson this afternoon instead of stopping overnight with friends, which means I'll have an evening to myself in a campus apartment. I always struggle with these empty overnights: never quite able to work, never quite able to rest. Maybe this time I'll figure out some way to fill the hours usefully. Or maybe it will be another night of drinking tea and wandering from window to window, staring out into the snow-dark. Sleep and I have not been good friends lately.

For now the snow has paused . . . maybe we'll get a few more inches today, but certainly we have plenty to work with for now. My phone claims that 20 inches have fallen in Portland, but the total doesn't seem that high in my neighborhood, at least from my indoor vantage point. Still, whatever the details, the world looks exactly like Maine.

Tom will be home today, but I have to work, and I have a meeting in the afternoon, and I'll need to make bread at some point, and of course the two of us will be shoveling. I suspect the Good Samaritan neighborhood snowblower owners will be on duty, which will be a big help, but we've nonetheless got a lot of labor ahead of us.

I hustled through my grocery shopping and weekly housework chores yesterday morning so I wouldn't have to cram them in around shoveling and work today. I meant to spend the afternoon reading The Pillow Book and Tabucchi's Dream of Dreams and maybe wrestling with poem drafts, but all I did was lounge with a Le Carre novel, idly check football scores on my phone, and watch the snow fall. A fire crackled in the stove. Young Chuck flopped belly-up on the hearthrug. My beloved wandered upstairs and down.

But I didn't sleep well last night--maybe because of snow excitement, maybe because of American terror; who knows? Now I sit here alone in the shadowy living room, nursing my second tiny cup of coffee, listening to the far-off scrape of a city snowplow. The sound is soothing. I have always loved snowplow guys . . . All night long they rumble up and down the roads and lanes and highways, clearing, clearing, clearing. Snow swirls into their headlights, eddies against their windshield, yet on and on they go. Cloaked in the loneliness of 3 a.m. Muscling forward into the void. 

Two degrees below zero this morning, and the city waits for snow. It's forecast to start here mid-afternoon and will accumulate fast--maybe 18 inches by the time it winds down on Monday.

Tom's busted pickup got towed while I was teaching yesterday. The mechanics won't be able to look at it till Tuesday; so while technically he could drive my car to work tomorrow, he's already told the company he won't be traveling in the storm. So that is one item removed from my box of worries.

I think yesterday's class went well. Visual experimentation is challenging, and I know some participants struggled with it . . . I struggled with it myself, but also I get excited when I don't wholly understand what I'm doing or reading, and not everyone feels the same. In any case, It was good to see so many friends from Monson and the Frost Place, good to tag-team with my dear Teresa, good to play with mysterious materials.

And then hard to discover that while we'd been so absorbed in our work, the gestapo was executing yet another witness.