Welcome home, shiny expensive machine. May you hold up your end of the bargain. Tom, no doubt light-headed from lack of cash, has already suggested street racing and decorating you with polka-dots. I, in more traditional fashion, am scrupulously wiping off every speck of dirt, a project I will keep up for maybe another 36 hours before I allow you to lapse into pollen and clutter. 

Now that the deed is done, I might as well turn off the dread faucet and try to enjoy myself. This is the sportiest car I've ever owned, so maybe I will learn to love driving, which would be convenient, given how much of it I have to do. She's peppy on the highway and swoops through curves and corners with aplomb--a surprise to me, who's spent more than a decade driving the car version of a couch cushion.

I realize that poets aren't actually supposed to have nice cars, but every once in a while mistakes are made.

Today is forecast to be warm and at least partly sunny. So I'll get sheets onto the lines, take an early walk, maybe spot another cache of mushrooms. Yesterday I scored a tote bag full of chicken-of-the-woods: enough for dinner plus three quarts in the freezer. I haven't yet spotted any chanterelles in my usual haunts, but I'm keeping an eye peeled. 

People like to stop and talk to me when they see me cutting mushrooms or carrying around a batch in my hat or otherwise being peculiar. The other day a woman stopped me in Baxter Woods to exclaim over what I'd found. She herself was carrying a camera with a telephoto lens, the usual sign of a birder, so I asked what she was looking for. She responded, "Oh, I'm a raccoon nut."

The woods are full of us weirdos.

Rain poured all night, and it's still raining--more than an inch so far, soaking into gardens, sluicing into the bay. In the small hours I half-woke to the sound of it drumming the roof, clacking the panes. How I love crisp sheets, an open bedroom window, the fragrant beat of steady rain. No wind, no bluster; just sweet downpour, hour upon hour.

Yesterday I accomplished step 1: I signed all the paperwork for the car. Now I'm waiting for the credit union to jump through its hoops so I can accomplish step 2: pay for the car, pick it up, and bring it home. Of course I immediately had buyer's remorse and a giant stress headache, but that's to be expected. There's nothing like the soul-killing atmosphere of a car dealership to make a person believe in doom.

Well, the doom is (semi) done now, so I will attempt to spend my liminal hours accomplishing something revivifying and non-car-related, like going for a walk in the rain, dusting the living room, and working on conference plans. Yesterday I bought a quart of local strawberries, our first of the season, so that was an aid in learning to live with an excruciating car payment. There is no dessert better than local strawberries and cream served in a pretty bowl to the one I love. Shortcake is unnecessary bulk. Ripe berries, sliced, barely sugared, and topped with too much softly whipped cream: what more does a person need?

I'm still rereading Ford's The Sportswriter, and I hope to pick up Jarrell's novel Pictures from an Institution from the library today. This afternoon Teresa and I will meet to finalize our teaching plans for the conference . . . though finalize is a silly word for how we teach together. No matter how much prep we do (and we do a lot of prep), we always end up catching each other's eyes in the middle of a class, laughing, and then changing everything on the fly. 

Among other things, we spent this weekend on wedding prep--working on our gifts, figuring out our itinerary. At the moment Amtrak is a cheaper option than flying, so Tom bought roundtrip train tickets. This will add a day to either end of our travels, but the fun of the Lakeshore Limited is so worth it. We will be staying in a downtown hotel with a pool and a sauna. We'll be surrounded by our kids and their partners, by my family, Tom's family, old friends from Maine and Brooklyn, plus all of the new family and friends awaiting us. We'll be wearing silly outfits. How could this not be a fabulous time?

First, however, I have to buy a car. And unless there's yet another snag, that's what's happening today, though I have no hopes of bringing it home immediately as our credit union functions at a glacial pace. Meanwhile, I hope, the Impreza will disappear from the driveway and I'll somehow manage to do some editing and accomplish some conference tasks and get the house cleaned and go grocery shopping around the edges of Car Distraction.

Steady rain is supposed to move in this evening, but the day should stay clear so I'm going to risk hanging clothes on the line. I transplanted chard yesterday and sowed a second crop of cilantro, in anticipation of a wet few days. Now the garden will take care of itself for a little while, and I will try to remember that I write poems. 

Though the morning is dawning clear, showers and thunderstorms are supposed to move into Portland over the course of the day. So I'm glad I got the mowing done yesterday, as well as a big chunk of the weeding, because the forecast looks like it will be unsettled all week. This morning I'll do a bit more weeding, maybe prune, too, and cart some mulch, but if the rains come in earlier than expected I won't be hard on myself.

The gardens really do look lovely, even in their slightly imperfect state. A crescent of golden Stella D'Oro lilies beams along the sidewalk. White, red, and yellow roses overflow. The black-lace elderberry trembles beneath saucers of pink blossom. The grass is dotted with white clover heads. Bees hum in the flowering thyme. Cardinals flit among dogwood and viburnums.

I have decided that Dostoevsky and I are still incompatible. I just cannot get attached to The Brothers Karamazov, and as of this morning I have accepted my weakness and returned the volume to the shelf. I could blame my failure on car-shopping brain damage, but that would be disingenuous. I have never enjoyed Dostoevsky, even in less vehicular times. So now I am once again hovering between reading projects, though I am plugging the gap with a sugar-coated placebo in the form of Richard Ford's The Sportswriter. I wish I were a Karamazov and Ulysses reader, but at least I have the comfort of being a War and Peace and Middlemarch re-reader.

Tonight I may fry up latkes for dinner, serving them with yogurt and dill alongside baked new beets and freshly harvested lettuce. Even better, we still have a little bit of lemon pudding cake left over from last night's dinner party. In other good news Tom sold the Impreza for $600 to a guy who will tow it away tomorrow, and Chuck enjoyed an up-close chipmunk that was yelling at him through the storm door. It's been a fine weekend for everyone so far.

Yesterday's car stuff ended up being delayed because of the holiday, so everything will start up again on Monday, which is completely fine with me. I plan to enjoy this weekend by not looking up anything on Autotrader . . . ugh, those car sites: so much confusing bait-and-switch.

I've got yard work I should do this weekend--mowing and weeding and such--and I'm going to make dessert for dinner this evening with friends (lemon pudding cake, my current favorite sweet). At some point this summer I need to spend a day shopping for wedding jewelry, but I don't know when. My plan is to comb vintage stores for something bright, maybe in glass. The kids want "festive cocktail . . . embrace color," so we are doing our best to oblige. And I will say it's been fun to go all-out with semi-silly party clothes.

I'm still plowing through Dostoevsky, still pecking away at revisions. On Thursday I met with my arts commission handler and we started sussing out some early thoughts for poet laureate projects. On Friday Teresa and Jeannie and I came up with a plan for our next Substack post. The conference creeps ever closer, and my PL term formally begins on July 1. At that point I'll be in the throes of rehearsal: the conference faculty will be up at Bowdoin for most of the week before the conference, working in the dance studio on our Monson, Maine, USA performance. Thank goodness I'll have a car by then (fingers crossed, fingers crossed, please, nothing go wrong).

The past two weeks have been one long tension headache. I've been so distracted by car angst that I've barely been able to focus on the things I actually care about, and I'm always annoyed when I allow myself to get into such states. I dislike the pettiness: there are so many worse troubles in this world, yet there I was, standing in the kitchen crying over a car. It's stupid. It's a trap. It's so American.

All I can say in my favor is that I'm glad I invented a prompt about gas stations a couple of weeks ago, before this whole ordeal began. The prompt arose from an Elizabeth Bishop poem, "Filling Station," and my idea was "write your own poem about a gas station and repeat plain words throughout." Simple but effective, as it turned out.

I might be exasperated with myself over this car despair, but at least I know there are great poems about gas stations milling around in my friends' notebooks.

Today I will go to the dealership and sign papers for a 2022 Mazda CX-30--white exterior, black interior, 59,000 miles on it, full of safety features, all-wheel drive, handles beautifully, a clean accident history, and costing more than I spent for a year of college at a Little Ivy so, please, fates assure me I'm not making a terrible mistake. The credit union is closed for Juneteenth today, so we can't move forward with the financing till Monday. But at some point next week I'll be bringing home a car, and you will have the pleasure of never hearing me talk about car shopping again. (This is probably a lie, as T's elderly pickup is next in line for catastrophic failure.)

Storms raced through yesterday, but today is dawning calm and bright. I'm not sure what's on my schedule, other than signing away our life's blood for a car at some point in the day and talking about poems with Teresa and Jeannie this afternoon. The beaten-up peonies are in dire need of rescue, so once the garden dries out a bit, maybe I'll find a chance to prune away the smashed blossoms. I'm plodding through The Brothers Karamazov, wishing that I was enjoying it more and hoping that once I get through this slow beginning I'll suddenly latch onto it. Part of my problem is that the print in this edition is really small. But also the characters aren't attractive in any way, at least not so far, so I'm having a hard time caring about what's about to happen to them. I've always loved Tolstoy much more than Dostoevsky, but I was hoping that finally, in my maturity, I might have learned to broaden my scope. Apparently not.

After packing another day with stupid car stuff, I was able to track down another option that we are close to buying . . . if all goes well with the loan. This time I was able to put a 24-hour hold on the vehicle so at least it won't sell out from under us. It's not as good a deal as the one we lost, but it's adequate, and it's more or less the same car. On my travels I did test-drive a new Corolla AWD hybrid, which I expected to love but I did not. The hybrid part was fine, but the car itself felt kind of tinny, like I was driving a toy. I guess it's some comfort to know I'm not pining over a car I can't afford anyway.

Well, everything could go south again, but I am hoping that maybe, please, finally, at last I can stop shriveling my soul with Carfax reports. Ay yi yi. 

One great thing that happened yesterday was getting a beautiful long friendly letter from someone I'm eager to get to know better. A hand extended is always a surprise and a delight, but it was especially comforting at a moment when my spirits are being crushed in the vehicular mills. So I'm feeling brighter this morning, a little more like myself, a little less like a cog in the vortex, and I'm actually remembering that I like to do things such as gardening and reading and writing and cooking and going for walks and hanging out with friends and hanging out by myself and playing cards with Tom and texting funny stories to my sons and entertaining the cat by poking him with a dust mop.

Not that I'm out of the doldrums. Ever more glop awaits--wincingly taking the plunge, haggling with a salesman, signing piles of paperwork, buying insurance, dealing with registration, getting the dead Subaru out of the driveway. But after that, in the hazy future, maybe I can relax and let myself enjoy owning a car that doesn't terrify me every day.

Today rain is forecast, so no sheets on the outside lines. I've got desk work to do, an afternoon zoom meeting, and I may end up hosting my writing group here tonight as our usual host has a conflict. I hope to tear my thoughts away from cars, at least for part of the day. And surely there's a writing prompt I could invent from a Carfax report. . . .