I always enjoy plundering the local free library boxes during my morning walks, and yesterday I was pleased to find two nearly mint-condition copies of Life from 1969: one a special issue about the moon landing, the other titled "The Incredible Year '68." Both contain many cigarette and cheap liquor ads. One encourages me to buy a Toyota because it comes with "backup lights." Both, oddly, include long poems by James Dickey. But in my view, the piece-de-resistance is a poetry review by someone named Charles Elliott, which opens like this:

When Judgment Day arrives in the seminars of Elysium, Elizabeth Bishop stands a pretty fair chance of being put down as a minor poet.

It then touches on the superiorities of Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Marianne Moore before spending two columns grudgingly admitting that EB has something going for her, though it can't possibly be lasting.

It's the oddest review--one essentially saying "Here's a book I like but I refuse to believe that people in the future will care about such things," as if legacy should be the prime mover in any discussion of art, as if simple present-tense pleasure is a lesser experience.

Of course the comedy, nearly 60 years later, lies in the Judgment Day that's already arrived: in our own fashionable pantheon, Bishop's star floats higher than any of the other names that Elliott chose to taunt her with. Lowell has been reduced to "crazy guy," Moore to "technician," Jarrell to nothing at all . . . who remembers Jarrell? This is just as unfair as Elliott's original review was, but so go "the seminars of Elysium."

**

Sea fog rolled into the little northern city last night, and it lingers this morning. The neighborhood is green and misty and freighted with wet, and the air smells of brine. But the air, though humid, is pleasantly cool, and I am wrapped in my red bathrobe by the open window, happy to be drinking hot black coffee, happy to be listening to a robin who seems to be pretending to be a thrush--those long liquid sad remarks, the music of a forest evening suddenly reenacted on a city morning.

I worked on a couple of poem drafts yesterday, finished the Erdrich novel, started rereading Margaret Drabble's The Red Queen, made garlicky pappardelle with shrimp, scallions, and chard, listened to some of the Sox game, stared out into the fog. Next week I'll start the move back into work life . . . it's time, and I'm ready, but my little early summer hiatus has been sweet, and I'll miss it.

Meanwhile today I suppose we'll do something or other about car shopping. The credit union still hasn't decided how much money to lend us, and T has been working out various scenarios which he has yet to share with me, but Saturday is our only window to visit a dealership, so I expect we will gird on our swords and stride into the fray at some point today. (Though why aren't dealerships open on Sundays? That seems like a stupid decision for a capitalist to make.)

T doesn't like air conditioning, so I only turn it on when conditions have reached the brutal stage, which wasn't quite the case last night. Still, even with a fan running, the bedroom air was sticky and hot, and I did not expect to immediately tumble into the sleep of a satisfied boulder. But somehow I did, and this morning I'm blinky and groggy and squinty, as if I've just rolled out of a winter's hibernation. . . .

I break off this dozy commentary to report that my tiny street is suddenly full of firetrucks. Something seems to be happening on Saunders Street, the next block over, something that involves five trucks and ten or so men walking around casually in their gear and blocking all traffic, if there were any traffic. But now two of the trucks have driven away, leaving the rest of the guys to deal with whatever non-emergency this is, and now the remaining trucks are leaving as well, all of them choosing to drive the wrong way down our narrow one-way street . . . a brief and exciting (and apparently benign) interlude, suspenseful chiefly because firetrucks are the vehicle version of our giant maples, which is to say they are way too big for the situation and seem likely to roll over houses and cars without noticing, but magically never do.

Okay, well, that's over now. Back to whatever I was talking about before . . . I think I was maundering on about being dozy, but there's nothing like five firetrucks strobing their lights across the front yard to wake a person up.

It's Friday, and I'm expecting an editing project to reappear on my desk at some point today, and maybe we'll get news about the car loan, and I have to drive to the post office and I have to haul recycling to the curb and maybe mow grass in the backyard, and I think I'll make something with shrimp in it for dinner, and I'm worried that something bad is about to happen to one of the characters in the Erdrich novel I'm reading. As you can see from this sentence, my day could unfold in any number of ways, but at least I'm pretty sure that none of my neighbors is on fire.

I had a fun visit with the printer yesterday, who turns out to have one of T's photos hanging in his house, which certainly increases my happiness about hiring him to do this job. He showed me some other poetry broadsides he's done--one for Richard Blanco was especially beautiful--and now I'm very much looking forward to seeing what he'll do with my poem. T and I are getting excited about this wedding--both of us working on our gifts, both of us having fun planning our outfits. T acquired his suit and shirt this week; I've got a dress and shoes but need to figure out earrings and a necklace. "Dress up in favorite bright colors" is what the kids asked for, so that is what we will do.

Today I hope the credit union will finally have collected enough paperwork to make a decision about the car loan. Otherwise, I'm not too sure what the day will hold. Thunderstorms rolled through last night, and the weather will continue to be unsettled today. The air is foggy and humid, my hair has suddenly become curly, and the sodden peonies are a sloppy beautiful mess. I'm looking forward to a morning walk in this lush, wet world, but I doubt it will be a day for yardwork. So I'll focus on inside tasks: read Louise Erdrich's disturbing but extremely well written novel The Round House; continue to gather together conference materials; tinker with a poem draft; think about my manuscript; polish the dining room table; do some dusting; bake for my poetry group . . . Tomorrow I'm expecting an editing project to come back to me, and next week will be filled with meetings and obligations. The summer bubble is about to burst. But not quite yet.

It was a warm night, and today we've got thunderstorms forecast for the late afternoon, though daytime temperatures will be a bit cooler than they were yesterday. I might get out to mow the front yard, if the sun isn't glaring. I've never had much stamina for working in a full blaze, though I've frequently forced myself to do so. But I'm over that idiot habit now.

This morning I need to drive into town to meet with a letterpress printer who may be working on a project for me--a wedding present for my son and his fiancee. And I need to continue dealing with auto-loan application stuff. Being a freelancer means that applying for anything financial always involves a stupid amount of paperwork: there's no such thing as a simple weekly paystub in my life.

Otherwise the day will be quiet. Now that I've finished my Poetry Kitchen syllabus, I'm going through my conference plans: tweaking materials, discussions, prompts; creating packets for photocopying; double-checking the daily schedule. Today I'll start pulling together the materials I'll be traveling with: books for the display table, poems for share-a-poem night. I travel heavy, so let's hope I'll have a car to carry this stuff.

Yesterday was primary day in Maine, so that will be another distraction for the day. There are no clear winners in the governor's race, meaning that Democrats will need to be sorted out via ranked-choice voting. I will likely have to write an occasional poem for whichever candidate eventually gets inaugurated (likely to be a Democrat, but who knows), so I've got an odd sort of stake in the matter. What will I write, for whom, and how?

It will cost $6,000 to replace the transmission, so Tina the Subaru is now officially dead. Time to cancel the insurance and try to sell her for parts. Sigh. She was a pain in the ass, repair-wise, but she drove our kid back and forth to high school and then college, and she drove me back and forth to all of my various jobs and obligations, and she never left me stuck in the mud or the snow. I lift my cap to her.

Today I need to mess around with getting us preapproved for a car loan, and then T is going to plot out various financial trajectories as he decides what sort of car we should be trying to find. And then, I guess, we will start actively looking.

I'm trying not to worry too much about this car situation, though in addition to the money anxieties I also fear I'm not going to have a vehicle by the time I need to start traveling again. But I'm striving to keep my thoughts away from fret and focused on the present: I need to vote today. I need to work on Monson plans. I might pick at some poem drafts. I've started reading Louise Erdrich's The Round House. I'd like to finish Notley's Mysteries of Small Houses. I'm waiting for an author to return an editing project. I could mess around more with my manuscript.

And the conference is getting ever closer. As usual, we've had some last-minute participant upheaval, but this year I've been able to fill all of the open spots quickly, which is a very, very good thing. Last year my beloved cat died suddenly while I was in Monson, and my beloved kid got really sick at the same time. This year I'm merely in automobile panic, and let's hope that's the worst of the emergencies I'll be dealing with.

Yesterday it rained, so I transplanted--moved a serviceberry into a sunnier bed beside the patio, cut handfuls of sweet woodruff from the thriving backyard beds and moved them into empty patches along the driveway. And then I walked around and took pictures of the front and side beds.

 

But of course I woke in the middle of the night fretting about what I need to do today: call the garage about the dead Subaru; call the bank about getting a car loan; begin to make decisions. Fortunately I do have a borrowed car I'm able to use for a couple of weeks, which does make daily life easier. I used it yesterday to drive to the fish market and buy a pair of softshell crabs for dinner. We love softshells, and they've had a long season in the market this year.

This is how I served them yesterday. First, soak them in buttermilk for a few hours. Then dredge with seasoned flour and fry in butter and olive oil, 4 minutes each side. Serve with garlic bread (a local baguette, broiled with butter, green garlic from the garden, parmesan, and za'atar); roasted peppers and red onion; yogurt with pickled dandelion buds, garden dill, red onion. Follow with homemade coffee ice cream.

One thing about an accidental weekend at home is that I have unexpectedly gotten a lot of yardwork done. Friday morning, before we left on our abortive mission, I'd frantically weeded and trimmed everything in the front yard. Then Saturday turned out to be cool and occasionally misty, so it was perfect for weeding (and thus for not perseverating about cars). I cultivated and tidied all of the backyard beds, refreshed the hummingbird feeder and the bird bath, watered seedlings and young transplants, and ran the trimmer. I even hacked weeds out of the gravel patio.

Today will be another cloudy, vaguely showery day,  Now that the front and back yards are (temporarily) lovely, all I have on my mind garden-wise is the long semi-naturalized strip between our driveway and the neighbors'. In gardener-speak, naturalized means a bed that's designed to mimic the natural spread of plant life. The plants don't necessarily occur in the wild, but they fill in as understory and spread in a casual-seeming manner. It's a useful strategy for difficult-to-cultivate areas such as this one, much of which is a tangle of tree roots.

But enough of this boring garden talk. Let's be overwhelmed by car decisions. Yikes.