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.

I am not in Vermont. Yesterday evening, on route 93, just north of the Hooksett rest area in New Hampshire, my car suddenly lost power. I coasted to the shoulder, all of the engine's emergency lights flashing. The car would not move forward or backward. Traffic was flying past. It was scary, and there was nothing to do but call AAA and have the car towed back to Portland. So T and I spent the rest of our Friday evening in the cab of a tow truck. We got home a little after 8, and now Tina the Subaru is dead in my driveway, and I fear that this may really be the end for the old girl. I'll have her towed to the transmission shop on Monday, but I doubt we'll be able to face the cost of replacing it at her advanced age (and this is not her first transmission). Which leads me to the fearful situation of having to acquire another car. Which makes me want to put my head down and cry.

Obviously, things could have been much, much worse. Tina could have died in the middle of a lane. Our vehicle could have been clipped by a semi. As it happened, we failed just at the edge of the ramp from the rest area, so we were slightly protected from the onslaught of traffic. Still, it was an awful moment, and I never want to experience it again.

This morning will be all bustle-around-and-batten-the-hatches as T and I are heading to Vermont as soon as he gets home from work. Garden and yard stuff first; then packing and house stuff; then lug the Big Kitten to the cat kennel. Not a poem-filled day, but I've had a pack of them lately so that's probably just as well.

I've started rereading Austen's Persuasion, and it will be a good travel book: familiar but demanding--my favorite sort of comfort reading. I have little patience with milquetoast prose, even when I'm in need of rest. It's no relaxation to spend time with sloppily conceived characters, mechanized plots, and tone-deaf sentence style. When I read these kinds of books--and I do sometimes, for exploratory reasons--I'm at work: I'm paying attention to what I don't want to replicate in my writing or encourage in my teaching. I'm not resting.

For me, reading is often a joy, often a comfort, often a mystery, often a challenge. But it is never an escape.

Yesterday I lay in the hammock for a few minutes, in the late afternoon, staring up into the massive canopy of Norway maples whose roots and branches tangle the neighborhood's separate little backyards into a leviathans' grove. Their hugeness is startling, impressive, unnerving: the maples are a family of wooly mammoths peering down at a doll's picnic. But their intense green shade, watery sun-flicker as a breeze ripples among the broad leaves, their sky-reach . . . I know they are trouble, those trees. But they are also extraordinary.

I'm making good progress on my Poetry Kitchen plans. And by the way, there's still one open spot, so if you're at all interested in experimenting with prose-to-poem influence, do join us. It's been fun to choose passages and poems, to grapple with conversation possibilities and prompts for new drafts. I like creating these classes; I like the way the passages and poems fizz together in my thoughts, how the writing prompts become inevitable, like a chemical reaction.

Today I'll keep messing around with class plans. I'll try to fit in some gardening as I didn't end up accomplishing much outside yesterday. I'll keep reading Philip Roth's novel Indignation and finish Alice Notley's collection Mysteries of Small Houses. Maybe I'll take another look at my manuscript.  I'll listen to birdsong. I'll go out to write tonight.

Meanwhile. Trees.