When I arrived in the homeland yesterday afternoon, a chill wind was whipping through the trees, spinning bright leaves into gusts and eddies. All night long it roared. I woke and slept and woke and slept, soothed by its oceanic growl. Living in the woods is living among the noise of trees, and for more than two decades this creak and swirl was my soundscape. Even today nothing comforts my ear like wind in a forest.

In a few minutes I'll get up, get dressed, get coffee and toast. I'll lug my overnight stuff out into the new morning and head north to Monson and a day's work. Today will be my first full day with this year's high school cohort, and our focus will be language. What are these words? Where do they bring us? How can we follow them?

 

Sunday continued our all-consuming house-centered weekend. While Tom was hammering off the final vestiges of the brick stoop and scraping out the rotten sill under the door, I was mowing grass and picking cherry tomatoes and hanging clothes on the line and kneading anadama bread and slicing fruit for a pear and cranberry pie. Now the house is sporting the ugly plywood band-aid it will wear till next weekend, and the pantry is stocked with food for packed lunches, and we are both pulling ourselves together for our long work weeks.

This afternoon I'll head north to the homeland and spend the night in Wellington, then teach in Monson tomorrow and tumble back to Portland afterward so that T can escort me out for a birthday celebration a day early. Dinner isn't possible on my actual birthday because I'm taking part in a zoom reading that evening--a one-year celebration of Baron's passing. (I'm unclear if this reading is open to an audience; if it is, I'll share the link soon.) Then, at the crack of dawn on Thursday, I'll drive to Lewiston to visit a class at Bates, and probably I'll be doing something on Friday too; I just can't recall what.

The flurry of October has begun, but this morning I'm feeling energetic and focused, which is a good sign, I think. Plenty of sleep, plenty of physical activity, time with home things, visits with friends, and a poem draft on the burner: all of this is good medicine.

Well, the front stoop is gone, but what a job. Tom spent the entire day beating at bricks and concrete with hammers and pry bars. It was a beast of a chore, and now the driveway is stacked with rubble and the rotted sill glares out in full hideous evidence.

There wasn't much I could do to help, other than make lunch, tote rubble, and offer good cheer. So I caught up with herb processing: getting dried ones into jars, getting fresh ones into the freezer. I picked a final batch of Serrano peppers and strung them up to dry. I cleaned and prepped another batch of wild mushrooms. The freezer is pretty much at capacity now: I really ought to stop looking for mushrooms, but it's so hard to ignore the riches when I spot them.

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be heading north for an overnight before my Tuesday high school class. So today I'll deal with groceries and get a start on the weekly housework, though there's no point in trying to clean floors during an active construction project. I want to bake a pear and cranberry pie. I want to work on a poem draft. I want to help Tom in whatever way I can, though mostly I can't do anything except be friendly.

Still, when it comes to construction projects, good cheer and friendliness aren't nothing. The default is complain about the mess, complain about the noise, complain about boot dirt, not to mention complain about the cost. Carpenters take a lot of shit on the job. Meanwhile, what I am is thrilled that we're getting a new solid home improvement. Also, I really like this guy. I'll make a hot lunch for him anytime he wants one.

Our odd burst of summer has receded. This morning is chilly, and temperatures aren't forecast to get out of the low 60s. Good weather for working outside, which is exactly what Tom and I will be doing today. This morning he'll drive to the lumberyard pick up the new front door he ordered. And then he'll start tearing apart our front stoop, with me as his clumsy assistant. This will involve more than simply yanking apart old boards because the house's previous "handyman" made the idiot decision to cram a set of badly constructed plank stairs over a patched and crumbling set of brick ones. So T has two busted-up stoops to remove, and the condition of the brick one is as yet unknown. Will the bricks easily loosen and be salvageable? Or will he be beating at chunks of concrete with a big hammer? Stay tuned for the next thrilling installment of Stoop Wars.

Given these demolition issues, there's little chance of actually getting the new door installed this weekend, though T might find time to paint it. Still, I'm looking forward to the bustle. I love home repairs, despite the mess. Tom is such an extremely good carpenter: he is a pleasure to watch at work. And because he rarely has time to put his skills to use on our own place, every little project is very exciting. Our current front-door situation is terrible. The casing is warped and crooked and rotten. The storm door leaks rain. And the door itself is ugly and windowless. I can't wait for a fine tight new door that lets in daylight, not to mention having a stoop with evenly spaced steps and a functional railing. What luxury.

It's 65 degrees this morning, so strangely summery after a few evenings of wood fires and couch blankets. Out to dinner last night with a friend, we sat at a sidewalk table in the gloaming, marveling at the soft air. And now crickets are singing in the darkness and Chuckie perches happily beside the open screen door and I wonder if I might go back to wearing the sandals I thought I had put away for the season.

Yesterday I beetled among class plans and workshops plans, and then suddenly, after lunch, I had had enough. No more. My brain was done. I did a few house chores, I read my book, but desk work could take a hike. So it will be interesting to see what my brain decides to allow today. To be fair, it's gotten me quite far this week: all of that editing swept away, all of those classes prepped. Maybe it will soften and allow me to mess around with a few poems or my chapbook. Or maybe it will march me outside to work in the garden. Or maybe it will require me to drive to Mall Land and buy some sheets without holes in them. I await my orders.

I'm happy to report that yesterday I shoved the last of those three editing projects off my to-do list. I know another big job will show up shortly in my inbox, but that one will be far less time-sensitive: I can spoon it in around the edges of everything else, and there will be a lot of everything else in October. Two Monson, Maine, USA performances, long days of rehearsal at Bowdoin, the Belfast Poetry Festival, the Word Literary Festival, my Monson classes, a morning with Bates students . . . It's a packed month, and I feel squinty and overwhelmed just thinking about it.

But at least I am gradually getting my planning under control. The other big thing I accomplished yesterday was to finish the syllabus for the November Poetry Kitchen class on Grimms' fairy tales. So that is out of my hair, and today I can turn my thoughts to prepping for Tuesday's Monson session and pulling together the workshop I'll be leading in Belfast.

On top of everything else, I'm turning 62 next Wednesday, which also happens to be the first anniversary of Baron's death. I've always been emotional about my birthdays, those formal markers of waning time.  I love life, and I'm never gloomy about adding another year to my ticket. But loss does thicken, and autumn is always elegiac. It can't help itself. And so there's a poignancy to my looming birthday . . . a celebration and a sigh.

One more small editing project to finish today, and then I am out from under, at least for the moment. There are so many other tasks wailing at me and tugging at my skirt. I need to get ready for next week's Monson class, I need to finish prepping for my November Poetry Kitchen class, I need to return to planning the chapbook I'll be doing with the printer David Wolfe, I need to start reading the Berryman collection, I need to actually write poems again . . . 

But at least that giant editing project is off my desk. And I did get the housework done, and I did catch up on thinking-ahead grocery shopping so that the freezer is now stocked with protein basics that I can plan around as I'm coming and going. We don't have a big deep-freeze, just the small box freezer over the refrigerator. So my stock-up-ahead space is limited, and it's already bulging with tomato sauce, peaches, blueberries, chicken broth, sweet peppers, wild mushrooms, corn, chard, basil, parsley . . . But all of that will disappear quickly, once the garden shuts down for the season.

It's funny: for some people I know, the homestead urge--to save, store, squirrel away--doesn't intersect with any interest in actually cooking. Despite a freezer stuffed with produce, they're still mostly opening canned soup for dinner. The freezer boxes sit in perpetuity, with next summer's produce tossed on top of them. This is an odd disconnect, a weird version of hoarding, maybe. I've seen the same thing happen with firewood: the restless fear of running out of wood, so that every tiny branch is cut and stacked in every corner of the yard, where they slowly rot away under snow and time.

So often, the desire to save overshadows the desire to use. When we bought our house in Harmony, we found box after box stuffed into the crawl space over the shop, all filled with neatly cut strips of foam-based acoustic tiles of the sort that were popular in ugly schools in the 1970s--each strip maybe 10 inches long and 2 inches wide . . . completely useless for anything, but how long did it take to cut those scraps to size, to neatly fill those boxes, to lug them up a ladder and stack them tidily for "the future"?