Night-morning, soft, black, damp. All windows open; air waves dense with cicadas and crickets. Above their thick racket a single whistling cardinal: Cheer, cheer, cheer, cheer. 

But already the black is moderating to gray. The neighbors' pale house looms. Sky flickers among branches. The cardinal falls silent as the insects drone on.

This will be a packed week: the big Portland Public Schools event tomorrow; meetings on Thursday; and all the while cranking away at that editing project; catching up on harvest stuff; undertaking the frivolous chores of wedding prep, like making sure I get my hair cut.

And Monday, as usual, is housework day--wrestling with bathrooms and floors, then buckling down to desk work, though I am going to take a break for a midmorning walk with a friend.

Yesterday I dealt with grass and watering; harvested another bushel of chard; baked a plum cake. I've still got my herb crops to work on this week: I need to freeze basil and parsley, cut sage for air-drying, pack up the already-dry oregano and thyme. Thank goodness I didn't plant a real vegetable garden this year. I would be insane right now, and I'm already a little bit crazed as it is.

We got a spit of rain yesterday afternoon, but nothing that counts as real moisture. We might get a few more drops today but they won't be the deep, days-long rain we need. Drought is settling in, and it's disheartening.

Still, without rain I was able to finish the firewood job yesterday. I trundled the rest of the seasoned logs from shed to basement hatch, tossed them in, then stacked everything, organized kindling, swept the bark mess up from the floor, and now chilly nights can arrive whenever they feel like it. I will have another round of firewood chores: in a couple of weeks we'll get a delivery of green logs that will need to be stacked in the woodshed, where they will dry out for next winter's use. But the basement transfer always feels especially big. I love the sight of a swept floor, tidy stacks, everything neat and utilitarian and ready for winter.

Today I'll deal with grass, such as it is. The only thing green in the lawn is straggly crabgrass, but it sure does like to grow, even without water. Then Tom and I will work on wrapping wedding gifts, which is more complicated than it sounds because we also need to figure out how to carry them in our luggage. And our luggage situation will be extra complicated, not only because of the gifts but also because of wedding outfits and the two overnights we'll be spending on the train.

For the moment, though, I'm just happy to be enjoying Sunday morning--two cups of coffee instead of one, the pleasure of knowing that T is upstairs in bed instead of flying out the door to work, a comfortable idle alone in my couch corner . . . 

Firewood in the cellar, sauce in the freezer, poems in the notebook. Let the winds howl.

Yesterday was dominated by tomatoes. I started cutting up vegetables for the stock pots at 8 a.m., and we sat down for dinner just before 8 p.m. The job still isn't quite over--I need to ladle the finished sauce into freezer boxes--but the cooking/pureeing/cooking-again stages are done.

So that's one big late-summer chore completed. Now if I can finish moving firewood into the basement this weekend, I'll feel even better. I've do have one more week at home before we leave for Chicago, but it's speckled with meetings and events. In the meantime, T is shopping for a new front door. That has become his big pressing project. The casing is rotting away, and the sag and gaps have gotten extreme, but as usual with home repairs, side issues are complicating matters--in this case the rickety wooden front stoop that some previous terrible handyman built over an existing busted-up brick one. The whole thing is going to have to be removed before T can get the old door casing out and the new one in. Blah.

Anyway, that's the Alcott House update for Saturday, August 22, 2026. Tuesday marked our 9-year anniversary of owning this place, and it remains shabby and mostly unrenovated, but such is life with a carpenter who has to work full time for somebody else. Still, we are heading into winter with a brand-new furnace and a reliable car and a free foraged dishwasher, and plenty of firewood and tomato sauce and blueberries and wild mushrooms, and it looks like we might get a new front door as well. Plus, I cannot forget the fantastic daughter-in-law we're about to acquire. So do not think I am complaining.

No dreams and a solid sleep last night, thank goodness. And now it's Friday, and my thoughts are turning toward the kitchen. Yesterday I brought home twenty pounds of canning tomatoes, so today is sauce day: chopping up and cooking down piles of tomatoes, peppers, onions, and herbs; grinding the softened vegetables through the hand mill; then simmering the puree with a knob of butter and a pinch of sugar until it starts to thicken. It will be an all-day affair, though with plenty of space for me to work at my desk, toss firewood, even wander down to the bookstore and choose a couple of treats for my long train trip.

In Harmony I usually had to buy tomatoes in bulk if I wanted to preserve anything for the winter. My garden just didn't get enough late-summer sun, and the growing season was so short. Here, I could grow enough on my own, but I was still mostly ripening them in the house: sauce was always a late-September task.

Now that I've reduced my vegetable plots, I'm back to relying on bulk field crops, and that is just fine. These tomatoes are cheap, gorgeous, and organic; the peppers and herbs are from my own overflowing plants; and I'll have to break down and buy grocery-store onions, but oh well. For a non-Italian I'm a pretty good Italian cook. This evening I'll be packing the freezer with divine homemade sauce, and what could be better? Drop by for some ziti, why don't you?

I am just now attempting to recover from a horrendous night of insomnia bracketed by terrible dreams, which began when I woke in a panic about the hole under our front door (we really do have a hole but the panic was manufactured by my brain) and ended with dream-me helplessly watching a car careen around the downtown roads and then crash full speed into a tree in the park, at which moment the alarm went off.

Not surprisingly, I'm still stunned. The transition between dream and waking was so abrupt, the dreams themselves so vicious, that I can't quite believe I've returned to the world of the living.

But here's the Carolina wren singing. Here's the cup of hot black coffee. Here's Chuckie, clanking his breakfast dish. I must be home again. I hope so, I really do.

It's Thursday, as far as I can recall. The miasma must be beginning to lift  . . . Ahead, the usual tasks wave their small flags at me. Stripping the bed. Washing the sheets. Walking. Firewood. Editing.

It's always difficult to transfer dreams onto the page. Nightmares in particular look so thin, sometimes even comic. But these dreams had nothing comic about them. My panic about the hole under the door was panic only . . . it had no accompanying narrative, no beast tunneling into the house, no embodied force of evil. In contrast, the car crash dream was all too vivid. I sat helplessly on the curb, among many other people, watching the moment unfold. The car was a white 60s-era muscle car, red-trimmed, broad and low-slung. The unseen driver seemed to have no control of the steering wheel. The car clipped one sidewalk, bounced into another, spinning, airborne; then hit the ground, and purposefully sped straight into a giant oak.

There are things as a poet I don't want to write about but feel obliged to write about. Bad dreams are not in that category. I don't want to write about them. I just want them to go away. Nonetheless, they do creep into my poems, even as I try to keep them out. My long poem, "Mr. Kowalski," arose from a bad dream.

I hope this car-crash dream doesn't become a poem, but I don't have control over that, apparently. Already I've said too much about it.

Another humid half-dark dawn--crickets pumping out their repetitions, a wren's song ornamenting them. I like the way night begins to set its claim at this time of year, clinging to morning, encroaching on evening: a preview of sweaters and lamplight and wood fires, even when the air is still fully summer's.

So far the week has been a desk-and-firewood grind, as it's needed to be. I must get this editing project done and this firewood stacked before I leave for Chicago. But this afternoon I'll take a bit of a break and spend a couple of hours talking to Teresa and Jeannie about our Sappho prompts. I think I may have gone overboard with my responses, but what else is new.

In the meantime, an interesting thing has happened: I got an email from an administrator in the superintendent's office at the Portland Public Schools. Turns out she's a Haverford alum who read the article about me in the magazine, and she invited me to speak and read at a gathering of all 1,500 district employees at the big downtown auditorium next Tuesday. Naturally I said yes: the idea of reading my comic middle school basketball poem to a big crowd of school folks fills me with delight. I may squirm at photo ops, but hanging around with teachers is my bread and butter, and I am always ready to try to make them happy. What's more, I now have a contact in the superintendent's office who wants to meet with me about district professional development, etc., and I am already simmering thoughts about ways to use this as an opportunity to bring together not just city teachers but those in districts beyond Portland. I'm feeling hopeful and excited, which is a good change from feeling nervous and overwhelmed.

A little rain fell yesterday--not nearly as much as the garden needs, but enough to prevent me from hauling firewood after I'd finished up my desk chores for the day. There is nothing good about handling wet logs. But I did get the house cleaned, and I did work my way through a hundred pages of editing, so stuff was accomplished.

Today: another giant editing push, another round of firewood hauling. That's the kind of week this will be.

A wind-breath, thick and damp, fumbles at the open windows. In the semi-darkness a Carolina wren solos above a cricket-drone continuo. Chuckie crunches up some chow in the kitchen.

Yesterday evening I got notice that the Academy of American Poets has posted three of my poems on its website. All are from previously published books; if you're one of this blog's eight regular readers, you've probably seen them before. But the fact is: this is the first time that a major national poetry clearinghouse has ever taken notice of my work.

I know the state laureateship was the trigger for the invitation, a blip on the po-biz radar that suddenly made me visible. I'm pleased, of course, and also gratified--even this small bit of national recognition feels like candy. But at age 61, I'm also bemused. I've been writing intensely for 30 years, and over the decades the audience for my work has increased from nonexistent to small. It's easy, and obvious, to carp about invisibility, to yearn for fame. But invisibility is also extremely cozy. And I'm not, in retrospect, at all sorry to have spent so many years under a blanket, flashlight in hand, writing and writing and writing.