We got home a little after 2 p.m. yesterday. So, after assuaging the cat, we went for a fast walk in the cold air, rediscovering muscles and lungs after days of sitting and rich food, before hunkering down with our books by the newly lit wood stove.

Not a flake of snow in Portland but it's cold: a scarf day, a house day. Today I need to catch up with laundry and housework and groceries, reacquaint myself with routine before pouring myself into next week's duties. Already the washing machine is churning; already I'm trying to remember what's in the freezer, what's on the list, what needs to be scrubbed and soaped.

But for a few more minutes I can sit here quietly with my coffee. I'm almost finished with Nabokov's Pale Fire, looking forward to starting the used novel I picked up in Amherst on Friday: Edmund White's Hotel de Dream. I'll rummage mildly among my household tasks, make a stew, maybe, or a ragu--something fragrant and slow. I'll clean bathrooms and wash sheets and read my books and go for another walk, and maybe after dinner I'll look at the Bills game before I fall asleep.

The little house is an embrace . . . tiny rooms and shabby furniture, Tom's bright photos on the walls, dried garden flowers on the mantle, woodbox piled high, the small and glossy kitchen; upstairs, our desks, our bed, a swish of wind in the eaves.

Last night snow squalls whirled through Amherst, and this morning the ground is coated with a rough half-inch of white, my first snow of the season, glimmering faintly under the black pines beyond the window.

Yesterday we went on a desultory outing to the college natural history museum, to the used bookstore; we drove into Northampton for dinner; we dropped like stones into bed as if we'd actually been working hard at something.

And now, today, we'll head back north, the children will head south, and Holiday A will fade into the frantically marketed antics of Holiday 2.

I'm not gloomy, though I may sounds gloomy. I guess I'm just tired, though I'm not under-slept. Maybe I'm not even tired; maybe there isn't a word for what I am.

But the snow is a kind of antidote.

Greetings from early morning western Massachusetts. The pines that surround this house are barely visible through the windows, nothing more than slashes of shadow. I sit here alone at the kitchen island, listening to coffee drip, listening to the hum of the refrigerator, feeling a bit as if I am on an island--just a trick of the lighting, I think, which swans over the white countertop but has no power over the dark that presses against the tall windows, the dark that is poised beyond the doorways.

Yesterday we drove all morning through rain, accompanied by yet another weird noise from my car, but the roads weren't icy, traffic wasn't oppressive, so we made decent time. A long day ensued of cooking, eating, and game playing--Thanksgiving in its traditional garb--and now today, post-holiday, the kitchen has a wan and wary look, as if no one should expect anything more from it.

I didn't know what book to bring, so I snatched Nabokov's Pale Fire off the shelf. I'm still under the spell of Elizabeth Bowen's The Little Girls, which I reread in a rush over the past couple of days . . . I love Bowen so much; I hunger after her strange sentences, her intense, oblique characters, her thick inscrutable emotions. Nabokov may be a bad follow-up, or not. But he is what I have.

This week I did a thing I don't do much of these days: I submitted a stack of work to journals--sent the essay off, sent a bunch of poems off. For some reason I keep thinking about the fact that I actually did it. I am surprised at myself, and also I am surprised by my surprise: why have I gotten so hermit-like about my new work? I know I write well. I don't feel at all shy about sharing it. But submissions: ugh. The process is so uninviting. Why not just stick a fork in my eye?

With Thanksgiving (sort of) behind us, December looms. I've got two more Monson sessions before Christmas, though my editing obligations will likely slow down until the new year. We'll be traveling to Vermont for the holiday, then in early January heading back to Brooklyn, where I'll be zoom-teaching amidst a big gathering to celebrate Paul's NYC directorial debut and two family birthdays, plus doing whatever I can do to help Stephen deal with Ray's legacy of stuff.

 

I am a bee in a field of clover, bumping and lurching.

So far I have celebrated Thanksgiving by sleeping hard and late and waking up to coffee, a good way to enter a long day of traveling and feasting. As of now no rain is falling, but I expect it will start any time. I have no illusion that this will be a pleasant drive, but at least we will be heading south and the traffic should be fairly quiet.

Maple chess pie is done, tiny chocolate tarts are done . . . I have fulfilled my baking assignments, and let's hope they taste okay, as I've never made either of them before.

In a moment I'll hoist myself off this couch corner to deal with various loose ends, but I'm lingering a bit, curled here with my hot coffee, warmth rising from the registers: click and tap of the household, furnace and refrigerator, miracles of modern living. I seem to preserve a naïveté about appliances. I never quite take them for granted.

In a few hours, holiday! Our boy and his partner, in-laws and nephew, bustle of kitchen, card games and chat, walks to the reservoir and football muttering in a faraway room . . . the whole nine yards of Thanksgiving.

I hope you have the day you long to have.

I am murmuring, running through, running through, a small river of things, snagging on roots, silting up,. . . kettle, notebook, earring, thought . . . A skim of ice frames twig and stone, but underneath the current tumbles forward, it chatters and swirls, it swings downstream, racing cloud and sun, all night long it complains and sings--

Today will be filled with small things: pie making, home tasks, desk work. It is hard to know what counts as important, yet the brooks keep rushing toward the Kennebec, the Penobscot, the Androscoggin, the big rivers roll into Casco Bay, Penobscot Bay, the Bay of Fundy, the bays surge into the Gulf of Maine, the gulfs flatten into the vast North Atlantic. It is hard to know what counts as important, but the names are a litany, a rosary, a shape, and there is nothing like a death to make motion feel alive.

Here, in the little northern city by the sea, our houses cling to the stony edge. Beyond us, water and water and water. I imagine snow falling into the ocean, sky and waves occluded, the repetitions of no-silence: splash and roar, endless sift of snow.

For some reason I'm not feeling very glib of tongue this morning. Or is it glib of finger?--I'm never quite sure.

Just now, when I sat down to write to you, my hands instantly began typing the the the the the the the . . . a long strip of nothing, yet visually tactile, yet pleasingly patterned, yet urgent. Sometimes the act of writing becomes a stutter: symbols themselves flitting into amoebic motion, a kind of vibration, words without meaning, only the surface glittering. Sometimes, at least for me. I don't think I've every talked about this with anyone--about the way in which the physical presence of letters and words can take charge. I suppose it's related to synesthesia and other physical experiences with symbol and image.

In any case, writing about it has broken the urgency, which is interesting.

It's nearly 6 a.m., but still a thick darkness seals the windows. Lamps burn, furnace mutters. The day resists dawning, and the little house is an eggshell, a milkweed pod, tautly solid, frail as sleep.

Today, what shall I do today? Laundry and dishes; get onto my mat, meet a friend for a walk. I'll do some editing, I'll make pie crust . . . Make strides, take steps, move forward, inch ahead . . .

In the distance a siren wails. Night clings to the windows, but blood and breath insist, they demand. It is their job: "Eyes, blink. Thoughts, wander."

Look at all I have written, when I thought I could write nothing.

My February revision class is now full, wait list only. It is such a relief to me that people sign up for these things quickly. Hawking my wares is not my favorite thing to do. And now, with that chore done, I can turn my attention to this busy short week. I'm still beetling away at an editing project. I need to apply for a grant today and send Teresa some materials for our Monson reunion class in January. In the wings, I've got a friend's ms to format, another friend's ms to blurb, my high school class to prep. And last night my mother-in-law asked me to make a dessert for Thursday, so I've got that to figure out as well. Probably there are other things on the list I wrote out yesterday, but my brain isn't quite awake enough to remember them yet.

Anyway, Monday. I'll go for a walk this morning, and I'll try to marshal my internal forces into some version of attention. I gave myself a bit of practice on Sunday, which was more of a work day than collapse-on-the-couch Saturday was. I did some research for my upcoming class with Teresa, and I packaged up my last batches of dried herbs for the year, and I raked a few leaves. I made a good dinner: a spicy Portuguese-style fish stew alongside a salad of minced fennel and greens. None of this was strenuous, but it was practice for being strenuous.

I'm still harvesting lettuce from the garden, which pleases me. And the kale is hanging in, of course, and some of the herbs. But mostly the season is over. I've got carrots and fennel stored in the refrigerator, lots of dried herbs in the cupboards, a freezer full of wild mushrooms, kale, tomato sauce. The little homestead came through for me, but I know it's glad to have a few months off, a chance to sleep under leaves and snow.

Last night I had my first dream visitation from Ray. He was attending his own funeral, which was being held in a strange cavernous room, and he looked great, slim with all of his curly hair. I was supposed to play the violin, but one of my pegs snapped off so I spent the entire dream begging people for a violin peg, which no one had and why would they. Still, despite the dream's anxious undertones, I was happy to see him. Every moment together is precious, even when my own brain is making the whole thing up.