Hello from the little cabin. We haven't been here in daylight, so I don't have any photos for you, other than one I took yesterday afternoon from the dock in Blue Hill. Four of us are tucked up in this little house, and Tom and I get to sleep in bunkbeds like the kids. The other two of us are up the driveway in a one-room cottage. It's all very cute and sweet, and we feel lucky to have been offered such nice housing.

For the moment I'm the only one away (as usual), and I'm perched here with a cup of coffee on a hassock beside the gas fire, almost replicating my usual morning routine. The sun is just rising and I can see a strip of coral sky through the trees and a glimmer of salt water below.

Later this morning the performers will head out for rehearsal, T will wander off to take pictures, and the afternoon show will happen, whether we're ready or not. I expect we'll have an audience: a lot of people came to yesterday's poetry readings. These midcoast festivals are very popular: Belfast was busy too, last week. It's nice to know so many people are curious about words.

I'm feeling well rested this morning, after a quiet night. I got home after five, started the laundry, made a simple dinner--fingerlings roasted with andouille sausage, peppers, and onions; buttery spinach; a beet and lettuce salad. We played cards, listened to a bit of the baseball game, fell asleep early. It was exactly the evening I needed before today's push.

Later this morning our caravan will drive up (over? out? down? coastal directions are strange) to Blue Hill. I'm reading at Blue Hill Books at 2:30, and then we're off the clock till tomorrow's rehearsal. We'll figure out where our cabins are, figure out where to eat dinner, maybe go for a walk . . . who knows?

First, though, I need to figure out what I'll be reading, what to wear, what food to pack, what Chuckie will need while we're gone . . . Yesterday he managed to sneak into the coat closet and got himself shut in there for the entire day. Tom found him eight hours later looking sleepy but unfazed. No mess, no suffering, but still we'd rather not have that happen again. It's a problem with black cats: they're so easily invisible.

Yesterday was a long day . . . visiting with my houseguest, then rehearsing all day, then going out to write in the evening . . . I was glad to be doing it all, but golly.

Today will be another long day in rehearsal, but I'm hoping to at least have a quiet evening, and maybe lay on eyes on Tom for a few hours. I'm glad he'll be coming to Blue Hill with us tomorrow. Another weekend without him would have been hard.

I think we're going to get a crowd at both performances. The Blue Hill show is free so there's no head count, but the Portland show is ticketed, and last I heard we were getting close to being sold out. That's both a comfortable and nerve-wracking feeling.

Today is the day we have to get ourselves into final shape. This afternoon we'll perform for Bowdoin dance faculty and students, so the morning will be a stressful few hours of finalizing visual and sound cues and polishing dances. It's such an odd sort of show: not a play, not a poetry reading, not storytelling, not a professional dance performance but an amalgam of research, imagination, movement, along with music and projected artwork.

Come see us if you're so inclined. We'll be at the Word Literary Festival on Sunday, October 25, 4 p.m., at Emlen Hall at the Bay School. And we'll be at Mechanics' Hall on Congress Street in downtown Portland on Thursday, October 29, 7 p.m.

Yesterday, when I pulled into the driveway, I saw that Tom had finished putting up the sheathing around the front door while I was gone. Next steps: storm-door installation and reattaching the siding, and then the house will be respectable again, except for the still-missing front stoop. I rushed around a bit, tidying up a few things, and then our old friend from Harmony appeared and we had a fun evening going into town for a meal and hanging around by the fire as Chuck beamed and pirouetted. And then I crashed into bed.

Now this morning T will leave for work, Sue will drive to her conference, and I will join my collaboration team and head to Bowdoin for day 1 at the dance studio. Let's hope my introvert button doesn't start flashing red again because if so I'll have to rip the wires out.

Today we'll be resurrecting our piece, which we haven't performed since July. Tomorrow afternoon we'll be opening our rehearsal to Bowdoin's dance faculty and students, so there's no time to waste. Meanwhile, I've been leaping from poetry festival to teaching high schoolers to hosting a houseguest to performing, so I feel like some cross between a jack-in-a-box and a tennis racket.

I fell asleep too early so I woke up too early, but sleep is sleep, I guess, even if the hours are weird. At about 3 a.m. the log trucks started roaring through, as they always do, and my bedroom fronts the main road, so rest was fitful after that. Still, the bed was comfortable, and I managed to linger dozily for a couple of hours until I finally had to admit that I was awake.

I suppose I should have tried to stay up longer last night, and I had every opportunity to do so as there was a big artists' dinner and hangout that was full of friendly, chatty people. But by 7:30 my introvert overload button started flashing red--time to leave, time to leave, time to leave. I haven't had much private time over the past several days, and I've got at least 10 days of public flurry ahead of me. My brain-body alert system clearly decided to take charge.

So here I am, restoratively alone, feet up on an apartment couch, wrapped in my familiar bathrobe, waiting for coffee to wind its way through the filter. Today the kids will be working with members of the Illustration Institute on an all-day project, so my teaching duties will be pretty light. Still, I'll need to be sociable, and that, apparently, is what my brain-body alert system was trying to reset yesterday evening. Let's hope it did.

The Illustration Institute residency is a good chance for our young visual artists and writers to come together to create work, so everyone on staff is pleased. I'm sure it will be an excellent day, as long as I can don this newly mended anti-hermit cloak. It'll need to stay intact for quite a while, what with visitors and rehearsals and travel and performances and and and.

Funny how a body just makes a decision sometimes. Quit. Enough. Go. 

 

It's 36 degrees outside, and a fire is catching in the wood stove. Chuckie is filled with breakfast, Tom is in bed nursing a cup of coffee, and I am deliberately celebrating these few minutes in front of the fire before I have to hoick myself forward into another travel day. This morning's docket: off to the Y for a class, and then home to make up the guest bed and tidy the back room so that it's ready for tomorrow evening, when one of my dear Harmony friends swoops briefly into town.

This month is crammed with event, but at least I've been able to make good use of the off days to resettle myself. Yesterday I did the housework and shopping and in the afternoon even made some progress on garden cleanup: tearing out frosted plants and, most importantly, digging up dahlia tubers for winter storage. Our yard is currently a construction site, stacked with materials and detritus, so clearing out the garden isn't helping anything aesthetically. Still, focusing on home stuff settles my mind. Somehow charging back out onto the road is easier when I know that the floors are mopped, the dahlias are safe for the winter, the woodboxes and kindling baskets are full and waiting.

I haven't forgotten the Sappho project, but it's had to take a backseat for a few days. I'm not exactly out of the zone, but I am out of time to be in the zone. During some quiet moments in Belfast I did add a couple of new drafts, but neither is finished yet. I'm beginning to feel that the poems are arcing toward an ending, though I don't know what that ending will be yet. Maybe I'll work on the project in Monson tonight, or maybe I won't. Usually I don't write well in the evenings. As this choppily written paragraph makes clear, I don't know what my brain will demand of me, or when. And there's no rush. The story simmers.

Home again, briefly, which means that today has to be rushing-around-with-chores day: weekly housework, groceries, catching up with emails; and if there's any time left over from all of that, I'll start tearing frosted plants out of the garden. Tomorrow I'll head north for an overnight in Monson, so I need to make the most of this drop-in visit to my own domain. I would love to also do a little bit of nothing much. It's hard to figure out how, though.

The Belfast jaunt went well: a packed reading on Saturday night and a full workshop the next morning. Apparently lots of people come to this festival from faraway places; I had poets from NYC and even Toronto in my workshop. I imagine that the midcoast's summer-house culture partly accounts for that, but still it seemed notable.

Meanwhile, Tom worked on his house project all weekend, and at the same time a huge roofing crew was replacing the neighbors' three roofs, so our corner of the world was saws and hammering and ropes and shouts and the roofers' kids playing with rakes in the grass and eating doughnuts in the back of the truck.

Now our front door sports fresh exterior trim and new wiring for lights and doorbell, and there's non-water-damaged plywood sheathing surrounding it, and before long we might even have siding and a storm door, and someday even a stoop. All hail the handyman.