Yesterday's deluge was slow-moving, but finally, by late afternoon, the rainstorm lurched out to sea, and this morning the sky is vast and clear, a pale silver arch promising blue.

T and I have made plans to canoe today. Nothing surpasses a northern bog in spring . . . and just now is the ideal moment, when temperatures are still cool enough to keep the blackflies at bay, when the water is high and the birds are nesting and the muskrat families are dabbling among the reeds.

A canoe is so quiet in this world. It noses lightly into slow current, precise and delicate, not soundless but muted . . . hiss of bow, splash of paddle. To canoe a bog in spring is to enter into dream time.

This has been a strange and somewhat painful week. A week of recognition, of accepting sorrow. The sort of week we all have, often enough, often enough, the sort that each of us must flounder through in our own private, small-circle ways.

As perhaps you can tell from yesterday's post, I have been wrestling with the I of my own perceptions. I have been trying to inhabit a less self-aggrandizing self. Keats's mysterious negative capability . . . the yearning for an ever-deeper imaginative sympathy . . . this is the chime that tolls with such melancholy, such fervor. I will never become what I long to become, never write what I long to write, yet the work is all, the work is everything.

And so sorrow arises when the everything is wounded . . . scraped and slit and scabbed over, then the new tender scar scraped again. There is no protection from a cynic's bite. That is the way things are.

But today, in the chill of morning, my beloved and I will push off from a muddy bank and float slowly into sun-shadow, into ripple. An oriole may flash an orange wing as it flits from a cedar branch. A yellowlegs, lifting one foot from the silt, may cock an eye. Sky-road, water-road . . .  we linger on your brink in wonder.

Rain clatters on shingles, clinks on pipes, taps at windows, sighs a slow drip from the eaves. Rain news, various and plaintive, various and bossy, urges from every direction. There is no getting away from the headlines: RAIN. ALSO RAIN. RAIN CONTINUES. RAIN.

Vague first light unmasks the street gutter, a rain creek running downstream to the sea. Maples, laden with infant leaves, sag under rain. Grass shimmers and gloats--green and greedy, insatiable. "More rain, more rain!" screams the grass.

The house is a wooden box. Rain fingers rattle and shake and pry at the seams. Rain mutters, "How does this thing open?"

Meanwhile, lamplight. Growl of a furnace. Hot black coffee in a white cup. A Murdoch novel splayed on a table. Pale cat curled into a pale blanket.

Rain and rain. On the table a novel splayed. It is called The Sea, the Sea. All of the words demand their air today. Repeat, repeat. Say our name.

How to be a self and not a self . . . how to listen and wait and listen and wait. The hour is slow. Day opens her heavy eyes reluctantly. She was up all night on a rain bender. She hardly recognizes a self.

The Sea, the Sea remarks, "But supposing it should turn out in the end that such a love should lose its object, could it, whatever happened, lose its object?" Should lose its object, could lose its object, should lose its object, could lose its object . . . rain approves of sentences that are like rain. "Clatter and drip, clatter and drip," agrees the rain. "Why leave when you're already here?"

I dried clothes on the outside lines yesterday, my first chance in weeks, but no such luck today. It rained a bit overnight and another round of big downpours will start later this afternoon, just when I'm supposed to head north for the Monson kids' gallery opening. Right now I'm wondering if I should even go, which breaks my heart, but driving 300 miles in one evening in the pouring rain is starting to seem like a stupid idea. Well, I'll wait a few hours and see what's what before I decide. Blah.

On the other hand, yesterday I did plant tomatoes and peppers and eggplant, and transplanted lilies and iris into the front yard's patch-under-construction, and bought some some astilbe for the backyard, and weeded a flowerbed. And I was relieved to write with friends last night. And I was glad to come home to Tom. And today is Friday and I don't have to work either day this weekend, and on Sunday T and I will go canoeing in a bog.

I've got a small editing project on my desk, which is probably what I'll be focusing on this morning, but I would like to mess with some notebook scribbles. I suppose I ought to submit something somewhere, though I doubt I'll talk myself into that chore today. There are days when I say to myself, Never again. No more publishing. There are days when I say, Dawn, you're an idiot. They often overlap.

Fortunately Rilke keeps me on the path.

Paris, February 17, 1903

My Dear Sir,

. . . You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give all that up. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you [to] write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.

May I always believe this--always, with my entire lurching heart.

Fog wraps the little northern city in an eiderdown. The fog is so dense that the neighbor's next-door roof is barely visible from my bedroom window. Something the color of fog is trotting up the sidewalk: it is my white cat, emerging from a prowl among the wet pink tulips.

Overnight, maple fluff has magicked into small leaves, a tender new canopy, fog-blurred. Fog smears every windshield on the street. Fog coils down the chimneys. Even inside the houses the air has a whiff of brine. The fog is the sea come a-calling.

I spent much of yesterday at my desk, but I did manage to finish that editing project, so today will be housework, poem work, and garden work before I go out tonight to write. I may even take a trip to the nursery for tomatoes, peppers, and basil seedlings. I think it's safe to plant the tender crops now. The weather is certainly not warm, but temperatures are steadily mild and the soil is full of welcome.

[Grievance sidebar: Gasoline-powered leaf blowers in triplicate, roaring and farting along the backyard fence in excruciating disharmony. I beg you: Do not own one. They are the worst.]

I'm still feeling a little blue, but oh well. The fog is also blue. We will be blue together.

For a change, it's not currently raining in the little northern city by the sea, though clearly it's recently been raining and most likely will be raining again soon. I like a wet cold spring and all, but a glimmer of sunshine would certainly be novel. Midafternoon yesterday I lit the wood stove just to cut the damp chill--dankness is creeping into the bones of the house.

Still, my new shrubs and transplants are delighted with the weather, and that's what matters. The rose, the elderberries, the flowering almond, the forsythia, the serviceberry, the viburnum--all are glowing. This may be wet weather for humans, but it is ideal weather for mitigating root shock.

Root shock is a metaphor waiting to be unrolled.

I dreamed last night that I was writing a poem called "Ambient Love." Awake, I can't decide if that's a ridiculous title or an interesting one.

This morning I'll go for my walk and then finish an editing project, and then I might run a few errands, and then maybe I'll get outside and do some muddy weeding in the backyard beds. Or maybe, if it's still raining, I'll try writing a poem titled "Ambient Love" that also features root shock.

I've had a few hard things happen this week, a few root shocks, the regular sort of painful things that every old child stumbles into. I could use some ambient love. I'll send some your way in case you could use it too.

Late in the day T arrived home from his long weekend in the north, truck-weary but very happy, and the cat and I were also very happy, and we all spent a cozy evening returning to our regular little habits and affections. I made a welcome-home steak dinner, T chattered about what he'd seen, the cat sat in the middle of our card game--everyone enjoyed the homecoming.

Now, this morning, we're lurching back into our workaday schedule. Outside it is, of course, raining, and the birds are singing wildly and tulips are glowing in the mist and the thick grass is as green as paint. I have some hopes of weeding flowerbeds this afternoon, but not very many hopes. This rain is perpetual. Still, I refuse to be dampened--at least my spirits refuse to be dampened. The rest of me has no choice. It's a walk in the rain or no walk at all. And for my particular body, no walk at all is always the wrong answer.

I've got editing to work on today, and a conference syllabus to tweak, but no more high school classes to prep until September. With that routine gone, my schedule feels airy, untethered. I do have to drive to Monson on Friday for the kids' gallery opening, but a friend and I are going to motor up and back in one day and trade off on the driving--tiring but that means we can have a full weekend at home. Given that I've worked three Saturdays in a row, I am highly relieved that she's helping me have this option.

Meanwhile, dishes, laundry. Meanwhile, sweeping the floors. A mockingbird splashes in the bird bath. An olive-yellow warbler flutters down into a flowerbed, alighting next to a scarlet cardinal. A pileated woodpecker wails in the trees. The first iris, deep purple velvet, unfolds beside the stone wall.

When it wasn't raining yesterday, it was drizzling, and when it wasn't drizzling, it was misting, but I had no choice: the day was my only chance to get some big garden jobs done. So I spent the day wet--wet sneakers, wet work gloves, jeans smeared with mud--and moved twenty or so wheelbarrow loads of semi-rotted maple leaves to a corner of the front yard that I'm working to reclaim to flowerbed. Once, many owners ago, someone planted that section, but subsequent owners neglected it and eventually someone feebly attempted to return the plot to grass. But there are so many tree roots in the area that I can't dig up the so-called sod or the long-embedded weeds. The only choice is to smother it with mulch. So I weeded, and deep-mulched, and transplanted some lilies and creeping phlox, and now the corner looks so much neater and, fingers crossed, I'll never have to mow that dumb thin patch of grass again.

The fatal flaw of gardener logic: "I don't like mowing so I'm going to turn the grass into garden and give myself exponentially more work."

After I finished the mulching project and took a tea break to talk on the phone to my sons, I dragged out the reel mower and hacked my way through the grass I am not turning into garden--a thick, green, sodden job, but rain is forecast for the rest of the week, so if not now, when? And then I did a bit of shrub pruning and weeded out another round of maple seedlings. There's still lots more weeding to do, but that's always the case in spring. At least the big jobs are done. The place is looking pretty good, and I'm not even a bit achy this morning. Thank you, winter exercise regimen. You may be dull but you keep me chugging.

Late in the day, after I'd cleaned myself up, I took part in a zoom meeting, an invitation from the poet Patricia Smith, who has proposed organizing a collective of older women writers. I got onto this invitation list because I worked with Patricia at the Frost Place, when she taught at one of our virtual conferences during the pandemic. It was interesting, sitting in on this first conversation among more than thirty aging women writers from around the country, most of them strangers to one another. Some names I recognized; others were new to me. Some were poets; many worked in other genres. Several spoke of extreme loneliness, the sense of marginalization, the need to find other women writers with whom they could share non-writing-centered conversations about their lives.

I've been lucky in that regard. I have an existing cadre of women friends--from central Maine, from Portland, from my broader writing life--who regularly have these kinds of conversations. But the women on this zoom call were from all over the United States. A few are quite well known. And all are hyper-aware of the intersections between their creative longings, their aging bodies, and the ways in which they are perceived or overlooked in the world. I found the conversation extremely moving: the eagerness, the desperation to find solace in one another.

I'm not sure where this collective is headed, or whether I'll stay involved over the long term, but I'm interested in what might happen. I'll keep you posted.