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. . . .

Someone else bought the car before I could get there, so we are back to the beginning of this ordeal. I'd spent all morning trying to pull together the various threads--trying to reach T who was on a construction site with bad cell service, trying to reach the loan officer, who was incommunicado at various times. The end result was crushing and I cried. I so hate this process. Every decision is wrong: be too careful and you lose the vehicle; be too rash and you end up with a lemon; do anything at all and you're saddled with a financial boulder.

My over-emotions were also linked to the fact that I'd been awake all night fretting. It's hard to be serene when I've had almost no sleep. Fortunately, I did manage to drop off last night, though I had to do some work to get myself there. And I do feel less tragic this morning.

Oy. This is not how I want to live out my days--combing through Blue Book and JD Power printouts, comparing the details of CarFax reports, researching complaints about reliability, watching T plot out the horrors of loan repayment for each possibility I track down. The fact is: I don't even like to drive. I would be delighted to never drive again. But my job--which I love--requires me to travel long distances in bad weather over bad roads. And thus I must have a car, and the car must have all wheel drive, and be in decent shape, and not have ridiculously high mileage, and cannot break down all the time. This doesn't seem like a lot to ask for, does it? However, such basic parameters mean that the car will cost more than $20,000. We're in a brutal situation, no matter how we look at it.

At least we like each other, so there's that.

I think I may have found my car yesterday, though we haven't yet had the final discussion about how I should move ahead. It's a 2022 Mazda CX-30 with 32,000 miles on the odometer, still under warranty for the big things (engine, transmission, and such) and with a fairly modest trim package, which is keeping the price sort of reasonable (not that reasonable is actually a word one can associate with car pricing). So I'll likely be spending my day in sales/credit union/insurance purgatory, and of course I got almost no sleep last night because of worrying about car stuff, meaning that I'm in prime shape for such a thrilling day.

But better to just get it done. I'll be relieved to have this over: to park the replacement car in the driveway, get the junker car towed to its final destination, and return the borrowed car with gratitude and a full tank of gas.

Otherwise, what's new? It's hard to recall, given that my brain and my hours have mostly been sucked up into the horrible car vortex. I met with Teresa yesterday afternoon to talk about Aurora Leigh and her lovely poetry manuscript, so that was a respite. I did some editing, and I did some housework. I dealt with an invasion of ants into Chuck's chow dish. (He was disappointed I got rid of them; he enjoyed the ants.) I've been working on poem drafts, though I don't much like where they're going. Still, better to be writing than not writing, even if the results are disappointing.

It's a dark morning, raining steadily. I've been sleeping hard lately, for some reason, and it was sweet to swim up from depths to a slow awareness of tap and clatter against the panes.

Monday has arrived: I'll be back to editing; I need to do my weekly housework; I've got a meeting this afternoon--but the rain is a silvery gate into the day.

I'm still finishing The Red Queen, but I decided yesterday that my next novel will be Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamozov, which I haven't reread for years. I also ordered Randall Jarrell's novel Pictures at an Institution from the library, on the advice of a friend. I've been thinking about Jarrell's poems since I shared that review of Bishop with you the other day. Maybe the one poem contemporary readers might know is "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." But there are many other World War II-linked poems, many set beyond the war as well. His poems are lonely. His characters mostly don't know what to do in this world, other than what they have to do.

Jarrell's poems are emotional, compressed, accomplished. I don't want to forget them.