It's a chilly morning outside but the fire is blazing cheerfully and already the house is beginning to warm. Tom has settled on a repair guy who can do our furnace work after Thanksgiving, so there's an end in view, though really we're doing more than okay. But the household gods still have us in their cranky gunsights: yesterday morning the heating element blew in my kitchen oven . . . yes, a dead oven right before the biggest cooking holiday of the year. I started calling appliance repair shops, and one told me they were scheduling into January, which made my stomach lurch. I did eventually find someone who can come on Tuesday to replace the element, so for the moment I don't foresee cutting up the turkey into parts and fricasseeing them on the stovetop. Still, given our black cloud, who knows?

But the quotidian trudges forward and it even whistles a little tune. Yesterday my next editing project arrived, meaning that today I'll be back at my desk beginning to sort through files and figure out my tasks. I got the house cleaned yesterday, so for the moment life feels fairly orderly, despite our ongoing domestic disasters. I went out to write last night and scribbled a draft I might like to look at again. This afternoon I'll zoom with Jeannie and Teresa. Tonight I'll play cribbage with my dear one and sear venison steaks for dinner. My big kitten will chirp and cuddle and chase pencils under the couch.

I'm trying to find an appropriate line of poetry to end this we're-hanging-in-there post, but all I can come up with is Tennyson's "Half a league, half a league, half a league onward." That line is entirely inappropriate to the situation and therefore I will leave you with it.

I got home late yesterday afternoon to a cool but nowhere-near-freezing house--good news, given that the stove hadn't been stoked since 6:30 a.m. and temperatures outside had fluctuated between the 20s and the 40s. Tom and I have both gotten so fond of this doughty little Jotul. How sturdily it saves us.

Still, we need to move forward, and T is close to formally hiring someone who says he'll be able to install a new furnace during the week after Thanksgiving. Now our decision to spend the holiday at home feels ever more prescient: we would not have been able to leave the house to itself so would have wrecked my sister's plans.

But fortunately this trip to Monson will be our only absence before the repair guy arrives, and for the next two weeks I can concentrate on keeping the place warm.

Today I've got to deal with a passel of housework chores, and I need to catch up on reading before I meet with Jeannie and Teresa tomorrow. I might mess around with a little poem I drafted during class yesterday. I need to read my son's grad school application essay. I'll do a bit of grocery shopping. I'll take my walk. I hope to go out to write tonight. It's good to be home.

By the way: Applications to the Conference on Poetry and Learning have been open for little more than a week, and we are already a third full . . . plus, I've had several more people express interest in registering. If you are hoping to attend, you should apply ASAP.

It's a cold morning here in Wellington. Since I was last here two weeks ago, winter has set in. There is a crust of snow in the woods and an icy layer on the gravel roads. The trees are bare and the clouds riot in the sky, and for dinner last night we ate fresh venison, as tender and sweet as filet mignon.

November in central Maine: so regal and stark and voluptuous.

The house is on the cool side this morning, but that's because we purposely let the fire go out overnight so I could scrape ashes this morning. With that chore done, the stove has returned to business, much to the satisfaction of Chuck, who is a big fan of the hearthrug.

The first estimates for furnace replacement are coming through, and they are just as shocking as I thought they'd be. But what choice do we have? None.

Thus, for the moment I am squinching my thoughts away from that bad story. Today will be sunny, and this afternoon I will drive north to the homeland to spend the night with the dearest of old friends. Tomorrow I'll be in the classroom with a pack of delightful kids. And then I'll drive home in the late-day sunshine to a tepid house and an ecstatic big kitten and a pretty great boyfriend. And then I will start turning my thoughts to Thanksgiving. Despite their hospital ordeal, our New York pair is determined to spend the holiday in Maine, though I've given them every opportunity to back out if that feels best for them. But, yes, they do appear to want to bask in our limping-along heating situation, and Tom says maybe we'll even have a furnace by then. Who knows what miracle an HVAC guy can pull off? If he doesn't, at least roasting a turkey will warm up the house and we can sit around the fire wrapped in blankets and drinking hot cider. Our boy grew up in the woods. He's used to it all.

You know what's worse than not having a furnace in November? Not having running water. That is my very least favorite household emergency, and I had way, way too much of that in Harmony. This no-furnace stuff is a comparative piece of cake.

This long-poem class turned out to be one of the most satisfying I have ever taught. Though it was complicated to both invent and execute, it brought everyone involved into startling new relationship with their material. The Whitman-based discussions and prompts built up the stamina of participants who had never undertaken such a big poem before while also encouraging the mess and ambiguity that is so necessary at the start of a long-poem adventure. And then we suddenly broke the Whitman container, which pushed us into entirely new conversations with our material.

I would love to offer this class again, so if any of you are interested, let me know and we'll figure out dates.

***

It is pleasant to wake up on a Monday morning with two big drafts of a curious big poem waiting for me. It is pleasant to find a bright bed of coals in the wood stove and to pad comfortably through a warm house when the outside temperature is 31 degrees and I have no furnace. It is pleasant to look forward to a walk in the cold morning air.

Tomorrow I'll head north for another Monson session, but today will mostly be mine. So I might rake leaves. I might fidget with my poem. I might finish reading some poetry collections. I might do some housework. At some point this week another big editing job will show up on my desk and I'll be back to hourly labor. But that long-poem class was hard work and I'm not sorry to have this brief chance to coast.

For more than twenty winters I rose in the dark, scraped ashes, coaxed the banked coals alight, fed the flames before feeding animals, making coffee, waking children for school. All day whoever was home would tend the fire. Then last thing before bed T would pack the firebox with logs and turn the draft down low so that the embers would be simmering for me in the morning. That stove was our constant care. Our love for it kept us alive.

So it has not been hard to get back into the wood fire routine, and thus far the house has been completely comfortable. I worried that I would be cold during my zoom class, upstairs with the door shut. But the chimney runs through the study wall, and that ambient warmth keeps the room cozy. We may get to the point of having to borrow some space heaters. For now we are more than fine.

Altogether yesterday was a good day. T confabbed about heat systems with our older son, who is renovating his Chicago house so has been thinking hard about options and costs. Our younger son sent a photo of his partner, happily out of the hospital and back home with their cats. My class seems to be going really well, and I am still excited about my draft. In the evening we went out to a cheerful dinner party with a passel of friends. We returned to a warm house and a fine slow-burning bed of coals. And there was no sign of a bat.

Now here I sit, on a chilly rainy mid-November morning, tucked into my couch corner, ensconced in my shabby red bathrobe, a cup-and-saucer of black coffee steaming on the table, a big kitten crunching up chow in the dining room, my beloved upstairs among the blankets, fire purring, clock ticking. Okay, yes, we have no furnace and T is joking about staging an art heist so that we can afford to replace it. Okay, yes, the goddamn bats. But I surprise myself by how sunny I feel. I grew up in what you might call a glass-mostly-empty household. By some freak of circumstance I turned out to be a glass-mostly-full kind of simpleton. I have no idea how that switch happened. Well, I do have an idea . . . Thank goodness for friends and laughter.

A few days ago I began occasionally smelling oil when the furnace would kick on. The odor always dissipated quickly but it didn't seem right, so yesterday I called the oil company and they immediately scheduled a service check. I wasn't overly worried--we'd had the furnace cleaned and checked in September--so I certainly wasn't prepared for what happened next. The service guy told me that there'd been a breach in the combustion chamber and now poisonous gases were leaking into the ductwork. The breach could not be repaired. We needed to stop using the furnace immediately and replace it.

This is not news one wants to receive, ever. It is November in Maine, and a new furnace will cost an obscene amount of money, and who knows how soon we can get one installed. And of course the disaster happened on a Friday, so we can't even start to get quotes on prices until next week.

I was shellshocked . . . dreading about sharing the news with Tom, wondering how I would coax our tiny wood stove into becoming our primary heat source . . . This fall has been a beast of misfortune: my terrible car repairs, Baron's death, ongoing bat trouble, our dear one in the hospital (though they've since been released, thank goodness), and now we've lost our furnace.

But here's the thing. When I told Tom, he did not rant or sulk. He did not stomp around the house or sigh heavily. He did not glower or woe-is-me. He made no mention of how-the-fuck-are-we-going-to-pay-for-this. Instead, he nodded. He sat down on the couch and ate some pretzels. He made a few jokes involving the furnace's brand name. ("Now that we aren't using it anymore, we can let it march in the Thermal Pride parade.") He waxed pretend-nostalgic about its long life of service. (It was installed in this house in the 70s.) He texted some co-workers for suggestions about HVAC guys to call. He did a little research on heat pumps. He was, in short, calm and sensible, as he has been about so many of the messes we've waded through in our life together.

And I, under the sweet balm of his temper, relaxed and did what I know how to do: make a wood stove work. This little Jotul stove was not designed to be anything more than an efficient fireplace. It does not have a catalytic converter or a built-in damper. It has the plainest of air controls and a very small firebox. But despite those limitations, it is sturdy and airtight and in excellent firing condition. And we have plenty of dry hardwood and a clean chimney. So last night I set myself to coaxing the baby stove into serious household service.

This morning, when I got up, there were still live coals in the firebox and the household thermostat hadn't dropped below 60 degrees, which is where I normally set the furnace temperature overnight. So that was an achievement, a sign that we'll be able to keep the house comfortable, at least for the moment. My travel to Monson will be a problem, as T leaves for work very early and the firebox is so small that it needs to be fed many times a day. But my neighbor has offered to stoke it, and I've only got one more class before Thanksgiving. So I think we can limp through.

This weekend I'll be back in class, which means I'll be excitedly working on my own draft as well as spending time with other excited people. T and I have been invited out to dinner with people we like a lot. Chuck is purring up a storm. My son's partner is home in their own bed and showing signs of feeling better. The coffee is hot and the little stove is singing. I am married to the best sort of friend. Things could be so much worse.