T and I had such an enjoyable weekend--hanging out among the blooming gardens, riding our bikes, carting home loot from the library sale--but all good things come to an end, and now it's Monday and he has to go back to renovating someone else's house and I have to stay home and scrub toilets. 

Today will be another sweet spring day, but then we're supposed to drop into a weird mini-heat wave: two days in the high 80s, before things return to normal. I've got various errands to run: pick up my new glasses, mail stuff to my kid, buy cat food. I have a manuscript to read, and a class to start designing, and various conference things to prep.

As you can see from some of the tweaks I made on this blog over the weekend, I'm also trying to prepare for the PL changeover in July. Event scheduling is already becoming complex, not least trying to figure out how to manage a balance between paid and unpaid gigs. I need to earn a living. I need to support underserved communities. So I'm attempting to create a formal-ish way for Mainers to apply for free or low-cost visits to their schools, libraries, or other venues. The hope is that I can offer these gratis visits to institutions that really need them and have distinct ideas about how I can support their work, while also reining in my own habit of working without getting paid for it.

Yesterday was romance-novel spring: maples in young leaf, birds singing, grass thick and green. I planted zinnias, marigolds, bachelors' buttons, lobelia. I planted basil, a cherry tomato, a Serrano pepper, a pimento pepper. I mowed and trimmed, and then I changed out of my grub clothes and lolled barefoot in the lush shade of the backyard and read Willa Cather.

Between gardening and lolling, T and I filled up a bag with books and DVDs at the library sale, then stopped at a few yard sales on the way home. T went for a bike ride, and in the evening we lingered outside with a friend and savored our first al fresco meal of the season: teriyaki flank steak; grilled peppers, Vidalia onions, and queso de freir tossed with basmati rice and lettuce; stir-fried Asian greens.

We live in a city garden so there are no silences, even in the evenings. The air is dense with birdsong. Screen doors clack. Middle schoolers chatter as they lick ice-cream cones. An amiable band of twenty-somethings smokes a little dope in their driveway. A baby howls. Chuck chirps and presses his nose against a window screen. A freight train rumbles past.

I love the vibrating loneliness of the woods. I bask in it whenever I'm back in the homeland. But there's so much story in a city evening. Granted, this is a domestic neighborhood in a northern provincial town. It's not Manhattan. Still, we are surrounded, pressed upon, by humanity. Our neighbors live just feet away, their private complications bumping up against ours. Trains, planes, cars. Highways, an airport. Helicopters, ambulances, muscle cars. Dog walkers, babies in strollers. Guys shoving bottle-laden shopping carts up a hilly street. Teenagers setting off firecrackers. An unhappy person shrieking "Fuck!" A tall wild-haired girl singing into her phone.

Saturday morning at the Alcott House. Already, at 5 a.m., it's 50 degrees in the little northern city by the sea, and temperatures are supposed to rise into the low 70s. Such warmth on the heels of that magnificent rain! High spring is about to explode.

Yesterday afternoon, just after the downpours stopped, I drove to the nursery and bought flats of tender annuals, a cherry tomato, a couple of peppers, basil. I'm looking forward to planting them today. I'm looking forward to tonight's first outdoor meal of the season. I'm looking forward to the library's annual book sale. I'm happy to be doing none of this quite yet.

Outside, a Carolina wren sings. A male ruby-throated hummingbird whizzes around the corner of the shed and settles briefly at the feeder. Inside, Young Chuck hops down the stairs, pauses to stare at me through balusters, chirps a question.

On the coffee table: Cather's The Professor's House, Komunyakaa's Pleasure Dome, Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. A reprint of a 1930s WPA guide that I found on the street. A book of Sunday crosswords. James Agee's film reviews. Some art books that I can't differentiate from where I'm sitting.

On the mantle: A vase of early iris, their velvet purple so dark it's almost black. A posy of pale candytuft, forget-me-nots, golden spurge. A handsome clock that doesn't run.

I spent a chunk of yesterday trying to sort out scheduling, and I need to do more of that this morning before I rush outside and forget my desk. I've got various reading invitations to respond to, and also it looks like Monson, Maine USA, the performance piece that Gretchen, Gwynnie, Teresa, and I were rehearsing in Sarasota, will be hitting the road: first, at the conference in Monson; then, in the fall, at a festival in Blue Hill; then with a show here in Portland. But juggling the schedules of four different people and three different venues has been challenging. Apparently this is why bands have managers.

Someone, I forget who, told me that the Vermont poet laureate has an assistant. What a concept.

Now the first streaks of sunshine dapple the neighbor's vinyl siding. An invisible muscle car revs and fades. The kettle I just filled begins to grumble on the burner.

Saturday hoists itself out of bed, clears its throat, sniffles a little, sighs, starts hunting for its slippers.

We haven't had a long, warm, heavy rain like this for ages, and it has been a joy. All night I woke and slept and woke and slept to downpour drumming on the shingles, spray clattering against the panes, the scent of water misting through the open window.

Now, even in this half-dark, I can see the gardens stretching and glowing. Rain clatters and drums; it shows no signs of stopping. I don't know how many inches have fallen so far, but the earth is drinking them in.

Yesterday I finished reading the Lahiri and Fowles stories and started Willa Cather's The Professor's House. I went for a walk before the rains began. I spent time with Hayden Carruth's poems; I read a friend's manuscript; I fiddled with some revisions and wrote marketing copy for the Monson programs and answered emails and chipped away at interview questions. I washed dishes as two hummingbirds visited the feeder and a pair of mockingbirds flirted on the back fence. I baked scones and went out to write with my friends. I came home to lamplight and Tom and Chuck.

My first days of summer vacation have been wordy and lonesome and spacious and friendly and rainy. It has not been difficult to revise my hours into a new sort of work. The house itself is a help--shabby and half-assed as it is, its tidy cottage sweetness coaxes me into unstructured concentration. I've talked to Teresa about this before: we're both very aware that we write best in our own rooms. Away, we flounder. At home, we make.

My summer vacation has begun like March break, at least weather-wise: damp, raw, and full of grievance. This morning's temperatures are a little warmer than yesterday's, but we've got inches of rain on the way, so I don't expect to be doing much outside other than rushing through an early walk before the storm rumbles in.

It will be a house day. I plan to start reading a friend's manuscript this morning, and I'd like to muck around with a couple of my own poem drafts. I've been slowly responding to a long set of interview questions that I'm told will be transformed into an article for the Millay House journal this summer. I'm finishing up the Lahiri story collection and rereading John Fowles's novella "The Ebony Tower." I'll drink numerous mugs of lemon-ginger tea. I'll fetch my CSA order, and play with some prompt ideas, and bake for this evening's writing group.

Except for a brief zoom meeting regarding a copyediting job, today belongs to me, and I feel like I usually feel in the early days of a hiatus: worried about whether I'll make good use of my time; not worried at all about whether I'll make good use of my time. I tend to be a productive idler, but usually I need a few days to work out what my idleness will entail. Sometimes it involves much staring out the window. Sometimes it involves arcane household projects such as reaming out the linen cupboard and slowly refolding every towel and pillowcase. Sometimes it involves a flurry of obsessive research about odd topics or disconnected subjects. Eventually the idleness will coalesce into new writing or a thought about manuscript organization or the germ of a new class. It might tug me into a reading adventure or force me to write yacky, excited emails to a friend.

But the first few days of idleness can feel uneasy. With the structure of obligation stripped away, the hours loom. What will I do if I do nothing? How soon will this freedom end?

There is nothing like the slow, easy yawn and stretch that is the first day of summer vacation. Of course in actuality I'll be working all summer; I just won't be teaching high schoolers. But that doesn't dim the delight of waking up this morning and humming,"Three months off!"

I feel as if all of my muscles have suddenly loosened, that I've sloughed off a fifty-pound backpack I didn't know I was wearing. I have plenty to do--I always have plenty to do--but for three months I won't need to fit myself into the cracks around [[[planning-driving-overnight-teaching-driving]]]. It's a demanding pattern for a person who is not extra-skilled at physical transitions. As much as I love the work I do as a teacher, I am very, very glad to have a respite from the travel schedule.

Today I'll go for a walk with a friend. I'll run errands. I'll wash sheets. I might keep working on the poems I've been revising. I might start looking at manuscripts. I might do some weeding.

Last night for dinner I cooked the freshest fiddleheads I've had my hands on since I was cutting my own in Harmony. What a feast they were, alongside roasted local potatoes and red onion, and a few deviled eggs made with yogurt, coarse mustard, and pickled dandelion buds (which were outstanding, even better than capers . . . I will definitely make a bigger batch next year). It was a meal that tasted like spring, like the woods and fields.

Here's an older, uncollected poem of mine that I just reread. It made me laugh. Maybe it will make you laugh too.

The Regret of the Poet after Sending Work to a Magazine

 

Dawn Potter

 

Countless smart people have ordered you to buck up.

This tottering world, they claim, requires you.

Thus you obediently cram everything you’ve written

into a virtual envelope and shoot it into the aether.

 

Meanwhile, two young guys have ripped out

the third-floor skylights of the house next door.

Now they are propped waist-high in the open holes,

and they are murmuring to one another—

 

maybe about measurements or lunch,

maybe about the baby-blue sky

dangling like a stage set behind their curly heads.

This opus you’ve invented is altogether fraudulent.

 

You, with your feet planted boringly on the ground,

cannot compete with an air-show.

A vortex of gulls circles overhead.

Fingers of loose shingles waver beneath a modest sunbeam.

 

How is it possible to buck up?

Every word you’ve written has already been lived better.

Publish a thousand poems and you won’t escape

the same old keening sorrow— 

 

you, there, weighed down with your concrete galoshes

and your armload of Danger signs,

squinting up at two young steeple-jacks and wondering

how anyone manages to end a poem with hope.

Patchy frost this morning in Monson, and the sun is a blurred orange behind the eastern trees. Branches are still mostly bare up here, though fields have greened, though daffodils nod and quiver in the dooryards. Spring is riotous in Portland, but here it is more like a thought.

This is my last morning in town until high summer and the conference, when I'll be living by the lake for a week, not alongside the main street, gritty with winter sand, log trucks coasting through at 3 a.m., dump truck roaring past by 4 . . .

*

I'd written a much longer note to you, but something went wrong with the platform and very little of it saved when I tried to publish it. So you'll just have to imagine my thoughts moseying among fiddleheads and last-day-of-school feelings, because I don't think I can resurrect exactly what I was saying.

Ah, well. But you already know all about last-day-of-school feelings. You can fill in the blank.