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.

You are busy being born the whole first ascent of life, and then, after some apex, you are busy dying. . . . "Being born" here is an open and existential category: the gaining of experience, a living intensely in the present, after which comes the long period of life when a person is finished with the new. This "dying" doesn't have to be negative. It too is an open and existential category of being: the age when the bulk of your experience, the succession of days lived in the present, are mostly over. You turn reflective, interior, to examine and sort and tally. You reach a point where so much is behind you, but its scenes continue to exist somewhere, as memory and absence at once, as images you'll never see again.

None of it matters; it is gone. But it all matters; it lingers. The whole of youthful experience has slid away, the years and the people, the moments and feelings. In all that loss, a person continues to locate little tokes of joy from new and surprising places. Still learning, still becoming. Busy being born, and busy dying. You have a present, a now, even as you drag with you a snowballing bulk of what was. Sometimes you spike a new joy, you really do, and sometimes you hit an old one, and the more you've lived the more there are of the old ones.

                                         --Rachel Kushner, "The Hard Crowd"

**

Much of Kushner's essay "The Hard Crowd" circles around memories of growing up in San Francisco in the 80s and early 90s. She and I did not have the same childhood: Kushner is four years younger than I am, brought up by unconventional beatnik communist parents, immersed early in the grit of the city, intensely social, whereas I was brought up by isolated parents who seemed older than they actually were, who inhabited the mores and fears of an earlier generation, who were deeply nostalgic for an idealized rural past. Nonetheless, our worlds overlap, and not only in terms of pop culture and the historical moment (Also, oddly, we have the same birthday.) Among other things, both of us are the daughters of educated parents and both found ourselves, for chunks of our lives, immersed in worlds where people have no conception of books or art as mentorship or security. In those situations one can become, in Kushner's words, "the soft one" . . . or perhaps be revealed as such, for surely that is what we always were.

The excerpt I shared from "The Hard Crowd" both surprised me and did not. Teresa, Jeannie, and I have been talking for months about the sensation of having reached a moment of reckoning in our work as poets. For the most part we have stopped envying the trappings of success. We no longer strive for attention in journals and contests. We've stopped castigating ourselves for not being famous. We've "turn[ed] reflective, interior"; we "examine and sort and tally." This wrestling has been a central element of our Poetry Lab conversations, a commonality among us, though I am younger than the other two by a decade. But as Kushner points out, dying is a "long period of life."

Still, I was surprised to see these thoughts framed so jauntily. That's not to discount the note of elegy in her words, but "little tokes of joy" felt so cheerful, and also accurate. This dying business is interesting, absorbing, comical, and at times almost subversive. It keeps me busy and entertained. It is like sorting through piles at a yard sale: junk mugs, junk baseball hats, junk record albums, junk chairs . . . and then, suddenly, a random postcard becomes a portal. O past. O whiff of rust and bones and pulsing life.

This will be a short note as I have been up all night dealing with yet another round of bat problems. I have reached the end of my tether. Clearly something must be done.

However, there is some comic relief: I have been receiving spam comments on this blog suggesting I click on a link to rent an industrial dock crane. Perhaps many poets long for good deals on dock cranes.

I've been reading a book of essays by Rachel Kushner and had plans to quote from one of them today. But I am too tired to copy out anything accurately, so that will have to wait.

Chuck thinks bats are cool.

I'm happy to announce that registration has opened for the 2026 Conference on Poetry & Learning at Monson Arts. And for the first time ever, we're going to reprise the entire faculty from the previous year's conference. Gretchen Berg and Gwyneth Jones were tremendous gifts to the program last year, and Teresa and I are can't wait to work with them again next summer.

Our theme will be transformation and, as we did last year, we will bring poetry into conversation with other art forms, both in our discussions and our generative work.

I hope to see you in Monson this summer, but if you can't attend and/or if you have the means, I beg you to consider supporting our scholarship fund. In this current political climate, fewer and fewer schools are allotting funds to teachers for professional development. Last year we saw a sharp rise in requests for scholarships, and we did not have enough in reserve to support everyone in need. The conference is an exercise in humanity, intellect, emotion, and collaboration. We are staunch in our belief in art and community as a power for good in this world. If you can, please help us continue to serve.