Another weekend of not going canoeing, but the rain has been wonderful for the gardens, so I am not complaining. Then last night, just before dark, fog moved in from the cove, and the yard became a green mystery, cloud twining among the chairs and shrubs, melting the birdbath to Grecian ruin, the grass to Arthurian sward. The little northern city by the sea became the fount of romance, Tennyson's imagination in miniature. I expected a white arm to manifest from the fire pit, a sword hilt clutched in its lily grip.

But this morning the fog has vanished, and the air looks exactly like Monday, gray and practical, a day for vacuuming and mopping and driving to work. Tomorrow is my last high school class of the season, and I've caught up with the editing carousel. So maybe the next few weeks will be a chance to do some writing and manuscript revision before the exigencies of the conference intrude. For now, though, I am on Monday alert. Make a list. Rush around. Get stuff done.

Still, there's this bubble of quiet . . . liable to burst as soon as Chuck races down the stairs or T creaks up from the bed.

Outside, a jay squawks: Ack ack. Ack ack.

The bubble trembles but does not break.

I got home yesterday before 9 a.m. so was able to hustle out to my digging project before the rains came in. And success!--I finished turning over the entire sidewalk strip; thinned out lilies, spurge, and candytuft from other beds; planted the thinnings in the strip; and, between each set of new plants dug in the dahlia tubers that have descended from the ones that Baron and Janet gave me so many years ago. So even though the new lilies et al. will be babyish this year, the dahlias will fill in the empty spaces with a riot of dark leaves and late-season blossoms.

The project was extremely satisfying: it cost zero dollars, it will be a 100 percent improvement over crabgrass and tedious weedwhacking, and it was excellent exercise. As I've said before, I'm no athlete, but I am a mule, and my body still loves this kind of challenge.

And then the rains arrived and I spent the afternoon by the fire reading Jhumpa Lahiri's stories. Now and again I got up to gaze out through various windows at my delighted gardens. I scribbled notes to myself about my new poetry manuscript. I hugged happy Chuck whenever he suggested I should. Upstairs T was working on his photo projects, and now and again one of us went looking for the other, for a quick word or a question or just to brush a kiss on the back of a neck.

Briefest of Edens. Rent-a-utopia. Pocket paradise. Carpe diem.

This will be a quick post as I'm up north and getting ready to make an early start home. The kids' gallery opening was fantastic: we had a huge crowd, and I was so, so happy for them. The work looks gorgeous on the walls, and so many people came to see it--parents, grandparents, neighbors, school staff. It's wonderful to see their commitment to art get so much respect.

. . . and now I'm off to hit the road . . .

Last night, as we were driving home from our writing group, a friend said, "You wrote some great drafts tonight." I'm glad she thought so, of course, but I'm also intrigued that these pieces arrived in the midst of a dry period: they are the first poem-like words I've written for weeks.

Dry periods can be distressing, and over the years I've moaned about them repeatedly on this blog: what if I never write again? what if this is it for me? weep weep, wail wail, etc. But as I noted to you yesterday, I've been unfazed by my current drought. In fact, it's almost been a relief, this absence of internal pressure to produce poems. Surely, much of that is linked to the sudden busyness of my public poet life. But  maybe I've suddenly (and probably temporarily) shed the fear that I need to prove myself. Maybe I've reached a landing on the stairs, one where I can pause and hum to myself I'm a poet. I write poems. Just not today.

Perhaps that seems like a small shift, but I've spent a lifetime talking to myself in the interrogative: am I a poet? do I write poems? why not today? I don't think this internal goad has been all bad. Probably it's been necessary. In family lore, I was the lazy child, the sloppy child, the child not living up to her potential, the child least likely to be able to take care of herself. I suppose most of us exist among such myths, and they become part of the way we learn to navigate ourselves: repudiating them, embracing them, wrestling with them, using them. As I interrogate my laziness, my sloppiness, I also interrogate my ambition. How much do I really want to do this thing I claim I want to do?

I daresay I'll return to such questionings soon enough. Yet even in my current plain state of mind, I don't feel any less ambitious about making better and better poems. I just don't feel urgent. I don't have a sense that the poems are running away from me if I don't write write write write. I wonder if they are simply slipping into my life via a different door.

A batch of quiet showers rolled in yesterday afternoon, soaked my laundry, lingered through the night. Now, in the dark morning, the leaves on the maples look twice as large as they did yesterday, and the grass is inches higher.

It's been a quiet week. I've stayed home alone every day, fidgeting peacefully among my obligations. I've thought a lot about shirts on the line, dinner on the stove. I've been digging in the dirt, polishing manuscripts, watching fat robins wallow in the birdbath. I've been reading without feeling any desperation about writing. I've been writing without feeling any desperation about art. It's been restful.

But tomorrow the flurry begins again. I'll hit the road, heading to Monson to celebrate the gallery show featuring my students' work. I'll drive home Saturday morning, then turn around and go back north on Monday to teach Tuesday's final high school class of the season. It will be tiring. And it will also be the end, at least for a few months.

Outside, two herring gulls sail past, squawking as they go. A train hoots. A car door slams. Sometimes I wonder why I still keep writing these notes each morning because so little changes--day in and out, year in and out. The world fractures, the government implodes, but every single day gulls wheel up from the cove, shouting. The news of earth is damp air and swelling buds. Young Charles admires a spider on the wall. The kitchen clock ticks.

I've been reading without feeling any desperation about writing. I've been writing without feeling any desperation about art. And yet my urge to document doesn't go away. It's just that I don't seem to document anything but the smallest of things.

Daylight. Two birds fly.

Yesterday afternoon, after I'd finished my dose of editing for the day, I changed into my ugly clothes, lugged the wheelbarrow and the spade from the shed, and started digging up the grass strip between sidewalk and street. A couple of years ago I'd planted a small bed of scavenged lilies in the center of the strip. Now that they've begun to multiply, my plan is to slowly spread them into the rest of the strip. I refuse to put any paid-for plants into this sidewalk garden because inevitably, at some point, the city will rip it up during roadwork and I don't want my heart to be broken. But a crowd of free lilies, cushion spurge, and sedum will be just the ticket.

It's been a while since I've done straight-up digging in the way I did every year in the Harmony garden. I don't have the ledge issues in Portland that I fought with up north. If I hadn't turned over the soil fully every year, it would have reverted to stones. But digging is a chore I sort of enjoy. Like carrying firewood, it's tedious but also meditative. I enjoy the strength of my shoulders and arms and back. I enjoy birdsong and wind and the kids who walk by and the hoot of the passing train. And for a gardener, turned-over soil is a visual pleasure, as sweet a sight as a clean notebook page is for a writer.

This evening we've got rain coming in. This afternoon I'm getting a haircut, and this morning I'll be at my desk. But I might find an hour somewhere to do a little more digging. I haven't been very focused on writing poems, but I'm not too concerned. My poet life has been peculiar lately: poetry has been my skin instead of my bloodbeat. That's an awkward metaphor, but maybe you know what I mean: everything has been so outward-facing. Retreating into private life has meant retreating into my homestead tasks: laundry and garden, firewood and mop and shovel. Partly that's just a matter of season. Spring is demanding, even on a postage-stamp homestead like this one. But also I need to figure out how to be two kinds of poet, and that will take time.

After a chilly weekend, Monday was balmy and sweet. I hung sheets and towels on the line, went for a long walk, cleaned the house, opened windows upstairs and down.

It was also Little Chuck's first birthday, and he celebrated by chasing a ladybug and rolling in a sun puddle on the front doormat. How lucky we were when this guy bounced into our lives--this bundle of cheer, this cozy dingbat. Losing Ruckus was such sorrow, but Chuckie has done his very best to remind us that it's good to keep finding someone to love.

On my walk yesterday I snagged a copy of Tessa Hadley's novel Free Love from a roadside library, so that was a score. My desk day was productive too: I returned two finished editing projects to the press, meaning that I am actually whittling down this crazy pile. This time of year is always a peculiar one for me, editing-wise. I am the press's copyeditor for a set of annual literary prizes, and they always arrive to me in a bundle: five books at once. So the work can feel like a carousel: I finish an edit, it goes to the author, it comes back from the author, it goes to the press . . . and five books are spinning on this merry-go-round at once.

Today I'll pluck another ms from its horse, but maybe I'll also have a chance to look at a poem or two, or even go back to my own manuscript and mull over some changes. I will do some weeding in the afternoon (the perpetual maple-seedling eradication continues) but I might also dig out some grass on the sidewalk strip and transplant lilies into it. I've almost finished reading Sebald, have just started the new Hadley. I am full of spring energy, but also not quite sure where it will burst out. All I know is that something will happen.