Yesterday, when I pulled into the driveway, I saw that Tom had finished putting up the sheathing around the front door while I was gone. Next steps: storm-door installation and reattaching the siding, and then the house will be respectable again, except for the still-missing front stoop. I rushed around a bit, tidying up a few things, and then our old friend from Harmony appeared and we had a fun evening going into town for a meal and hanging around by the fire as Chuck beamed and pirouetted. And then I crashed into bed.

Now this morning T will leave for work, Sue will drive to her conference, and I will join my collaboration team and head to Bowdoin for day 1 at the dance studio. Let's hope my introvert button doesn't start flashing red again because if so I'll have to rip the wires out.

Today we'll be resurrecting our piece, which we haven't performed since July. Tomorrow afternoon we'll be opening our rehearsal to Bowdoin's dance faculty and students, so there's no time to waste. Meanwhile, I've been leaping from poetry festival to teaching high schoolers to hosting a houseguest to performing, so I feel like some cross between a jack-in-a-box and a tennis racket.

I fell asleep too early so I woke up too early, but sleep is sleep, I guess, even if the hours are weird. At about 3 a.m. the log trucks started roaring through, as they always do, and my bedroom fronts the main road, so rest was fitful after that. Still, the bed was comfortable, and I managed to linger dozily for a couple of hours until I finally had to admit that I was awake.

I suppose I should have tried to stay up longer last night, and I had every opportunity to do so as there was a big artists' dinner and hangout that was full of friendly, chatty people. But by 7:30 my introvert overload button started flashing red--time to leave, time to leave, time to leave. I haven't had much private time over the past several days, and I've got at least 10 days of public flurry ahead of me. My brain-body alert system clearly decided to take charge.

So here I am, restoratively alone, feet up on an apartment couch, wrapped in my familiar bathrobe, waiting for coffee to wind its way through the filter. Today the kids will be working with members of the Illustration Institute on an all-day project, so my teaching duties will be pretty light. Still, I'll need to be sociable, and that, apparently, is what my brain-body alert system was trying to reset yesterday evening. Let's hope it did.

The Illustration Institute residency is a good chance for our young visual artists and writers to come together to create work, so everyone on staff is pleased. I'm sure it will be an excellent day, as long as I can don this newly mended anti-hermit cloak. It'll need to stay intact for quite a while, what with visitors and rehearsals and travel and performances and and and.

Funny how a body just makes a decision sometimes. Quit. Enough. Go. 

 

It's 36 degrees outside, and a fire is catching in the wood stove. Chuckie is filled with breakfast, Tom is in bed nursing a cup of coffee, and I am deliberately celebrating these few minutes in front of the fire before I have to hoick myself forward into another travel day. This morning's docket: off to the Y for a class, and then home to make up the guest bed and tidy the back room so that it's ready for tomorrow evening, when one of my dear Harmony friends swoops briefly into town.

This month is crammed with event, but at least I've been able to make good use of the off days to resettle myself. Yesterday I did the housework and shopping and in the afternoon even made some progress on garden cleanup: tearing out frosted plants and, most importantly, digging up dahlia tubers for winter storage. Our yard is currently a construction site, stacked with materials and detritus, so clearing out the garden isn't helping anything aesthetically. Still, focusing on home stuff settles my mind. Somehow charging back out onto the road is easier when I know that the floors are mopped, the dahlias are safe for the winter, the woodboxes and kindling baskets are full and waiting.

I haven't forgotten the Sappho project, but it's had to take a backseat for a few days. I'm not exactly out of the zone, but I am out of time to be in the zone. During some quiet moments in Belfast I did add a couple of new drafts, but neither is finished yet. I'm beginning to feel that the poems are arcing toward an ending, though I don't know what that ending will be yet. Maybe I'll work on the project in Monson tonight, or maybe I won't. Usually I don't write well in the evenings. As this choppily written paragraph makes clear, I don't know what my brain will demand of me, or when. And there's no rush. The story simmers.

Home again, briefly, which means that today has to be rushing-around-with-chores day: weekly housework, groceries, catching up with emails; and if there's any time left over from all of that, I'll start tearing frosted plants out of the garden. Tomorrow I'll head north for an overnight in Monson, so I need to make the most of this drop-in visit to my own domain. I would love to also do a little bit of nothing much. It's hard to figure out how, though.

The Belfast jaunt went well: a packed reading on Saturday night and a full workshop the next morning. Apparently lots of people come to this festival from faraway places; I had poets from NYC and even Toronto in my workshop. I imagine that the midcoast's summer-house culture partly accounts for that, but still it seemed notable.

Meanwhile, Tom worked on his house project all weekend, and at the same time a huge roofing crew was replacing the neighbors' three roofs, so our corner of the world was saws and hammering and ropes and shouts and the roofers' kids playing with rakes in the grass and eating doughnuts in the back of the truck.

Now our front door sports fresh exterior trim and new wiring for lights and doorbell, and there's non-water-damaged plywood sheathing surrounding it, and before long we might even have siding and a storm door, and someday even a stoop. All hail the handyman.

A quick good morning from Belfast, Maine, because I don't have wifi here and I don't want to use too much phone data. But here are some Coast Guard boats and blue skies for you to enjoy until we meet again.

Coffee and a crackling fire and even a small sleep-in until Chuckie got fed up with that: it's nice to have a slow Saturday morning before the weekend busyness barges in.

This morning I've got various things to do, not least figuring out what poems to read tonight. And after lunch I'll drive up to the coast to the Belfast Poetry Festival, where I'll be appearing as the keynote poet (6:30 p.m. at the UU church) and then leading a generative workshop tomorrow morning (10 a.m. at the Rockweed Center). There may or may not be spaces left in the workshop; I'm not sure, but check that out if you're in the area and in the mood.

Yesterday turned out to be unexpectedly busy. The strength and balance class at the Y was good, and felt very useful, so now I need to figure out if I can afford to take it regularly. Then dance rehearsal was a reminder of rhythm and body attention. I spent hours away from words, after a week of word frenzy, and I think that may have been a good thing. I was still thinking about my poems; I talked about them with Gretchen; I wondered what they were and would become. But a little separation was tonic.

This morning I feel energetic and well rested, reasonably ready to cross the line from introverted obsessor to public poet. I'm still learning this new way of work, but I'm sort of getting there. I hope.

This morning I'll be up and out early--first, going over to the Y with some friends to try a strength and balance class, then driving up to Bowdoin to start rehearsing for the upcoming Monson, Maine, USA performances. Teresa won't fly in until the middle of next week, but the rest of us are going to try to get a head start on resurrecting the dances.

So it will be a busy-in-sweatpants kind of day and also a chance to wean myself from the Sappho project before I head up the coast for the poetry festival tomorrow. I've been lucky to have so many hours this week to devote to writing poems, but any further progress will have to leak in around the edges of obligation.

At last night's writing group I wrote a draft completely unrelated to the Sappho poems that nonetheless felt like it had potential. Apparently whatever is smoldering in my brain isn't limited to the one obsession but is branching into other themes and details as well. Maybe it will also filter through all of these upcoming performances and readings and workshops. It is nice to imagine that writing fluidly might lead to dancing fluidly, but I have my doubts.