I arrived in Wellington at nightfall. The forest was creaking and snapping, the way cold trees do in a high breeze. I could hear the squeak of snow among the branches and the wind booming like the ocean's echo.

All night the wind blew, buffeting walls, twisting chimney smoke into knots. But now, just before daylight, a silence has settled over the little house in the woods.

Yesterday's reading was such a pleasure. People came! The room was full! It was very sweet to read with Gibson and Mike, very sweet to have the chance to try out new poems in the air in front of such an engaged audience. And when I got home Tom was busily making homemade ravioli, so all I had to do was lounge by the fire and wait to be fed a delicious meal. Such luxury.

I didn't watch football last night, but I did watch the halftime show, and Bad Bunny was excellent. I loved the working-class emphasis--people doing their jobs, people enjoying their pleasures. I loved the sugarcane field, the flags of all the Americas. I loved the sound of Spanish washing over me. Of course I was already a Bad Bunny fan: his music is often playing in this house. Yes, I like his music for its own sake, but also I like being in the position of not speaking a language; to hear and to wonder; to let cadence, not meaning, take control of the body. We monolinguists owe it to ourselves, and to everyone else, to swim in the seas of mystery.

This afternoon I'll be driving north, so this morning I'll be scrabbling to catch up on desk work. I'm almost but not quite done with the giant editing stack, but my teaching schedule is throwing a wrench into my editing schedule, meaning that I probably won't quite make the deadline. Ah, well.

Naturally the cold continues, and more snow is on the way, though I should get home tomorrow before it starts in earnest. Winter is still digging its claws into us.

I meant to devote yesterday to getting my weekly housework under control, and I did do that, but I also managed to write one of the best sonnets I've composed for a while--an unexpected boon in a prosaic day. And in other unexpected news, T's glue job did successfully repair the dishwasher--though he says he's still planning to bring home the foraged dishwasher, under the assumption that this one will probably go belly up soon anyhow. I find that expectation disheartening, given that we bought it new when we moved into this house and we haven't even been here ten years yet. But such is modern life.

It's seven degrees outside this morning--a heat wave compared to NYC, where I hear it's three. Still, temps are nippy here, and I've got to trek out to a reading up in Brunswick today. If you're interested in attending, it starts at 1 p.m. at the Moulton Union on the Bowdoin College campus. I'll be reading alongside two excellent poets: Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, the executive director of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and Mike Bove, a professor at Southern Maine Community College. It's been a few months since I've read in public, and I'm looking forward to it. I've got a mountain of new work, which of course is pushing me to rethink themes in my older work, and I enjoyed sitting down in my blue chair and putting together a 15-minute mashup.

I finished rereading Adam Bede yesterday. I felt, as I always feel when I reexperience a George Eliot novel, that I've been cleansed. There is no writer so kind, so honest, so serious in her observations, so sympathetic with human frailty, so inexorable about the damage such frailty does to others. Her novels are dense and demanding and irresistible. They are the great heart of the English nineteenth century.

What would my life be without rereading? I can't imagine. I can't imagine. These books are my blood.

Watery first light glows blue against a skim of new snow. Coffee steams in a small white cup. Heat puffs from the registers.

It is Saturday morning and I am in no rush at all. I even stayed in bed till after 6--not quite asleep, not quite awake, though Chuckie valiantly did his alarm-clock duty: jumping on my head, licking my chin, sticking a paw in my ear.

Tomorrow I'll be reading at Bowdoin; Monday I'll head north so I can teach in Monson on Tuesday. So today has to be housework day. I am not thrilled to have to clog up my Saturday with vacuuming and toilet scrubbing, but so it goes.

Maybe we'll find out today if Tom's glue attempts have repaired the dishwasher. If not, though, he's got a plan B: a foraged dishwasher from his job site. And in cheerful news, our Sarasota gang has acquired tickets for an Orioles-Yankees spring-training game on the ides of March. That's Ruckus's birthday, and I can tell you right now that he and I would not have been rooting for the same team. Ruckus and I disagreed a lot about sports. Still, it will be good to celebrate his memory by arguing with him, as I did so often during his life.

So today: Cleaning the house. Figuring out what I'll be reading tomorrow. Maybe scratching out a draft for one or the other of my various writing projects. Finding something to make for dinner. Yesterday's meal was a lovely midwinter feast: pork chops marinated in lime and garlic, then oven-braised Julia Child-style and served on a bed of buttered spinach, alongside roasted red and purple fingerling potatoes with onions, a salad of sliced golden beets, and a pinch of kale microgreens. It was a delight for the eyes, and I doubt I can come up with something as pretty as that for tonight. But maybe homemade pizza will be good enough.

Continuing our household's eternal voyage into the bowels of machinery hell, Tom's pickup did not pass inspection yesterday and the dishwasher broke. T has some hopes that he's been able to glue together the thingummy bits of plastic controlling the dishwasher's start button so that it will function again, but given our season of household disasters, I expect we'll have to call a guy who won't be able to come for six weeks and when he does will charge us many hundreds of dollars to insert a small piece of new plastic into the slot. The truck I don't even need to guess about. Vehicles are always the worst-case scenario. 

Well, anyway, I did ship out one of my editing projects yesterday, so that's something. And I'm getting a haircut today. And it's Friday. And we're not out of coffee. And Chuck didn't bust up any more glassware in the night.

This morning I have to turn my attention to performance materials and then to a zoom meeting with Monson faculty. It will be a refreshing change from editing. And I was glad to get out last night to write, though the image of T taking apart the dishwasher as I left was sorrowful. First he came home from work to bad truck news. And then he had to deal with the dishwasher. Plus he had to wash all of the dirty dishes that were in said dishwasher. It was not a restful evening for him.

But I did have an excellent interaction at the meat market yesterday. I stopped in to buy a loaf of bread and decided to pick up a couple of pork chops as well. "17.83," said the butcher, ringing them up for me. And then: "Hey, that was an important year! Was that when the Constitution was signed?" I responded that I wasn't sure exactly what year it was, and then another butcher chimed in, "I think it was 1784 or 1785." And then I said, "I guess we can be sure that they were all thinking about the Constitution anyway." And the second butcher agreed and remarked, "I used to think the Revolution ended when they signed the Declaration of Independence." The first butcher added, "But really they were still at war for a while longer." And then I said, "And don't forget that practically as soon as they were done with the Revolution, they got started with the War of 1812." The three of us nodded thoughtfully and then I waved goodbye and walked my purchases back home.

It's another cold morning, per usual, but fortunately I have a Big Warm Chuck purring romantically into my ear. He looks like a full-sized cat now, but he won't be a year old till May and he maintains his youthful outlook, by which I mean he is obsessed with stealing little pieces of kindling from the basket and then chasing them under the furniture, he reaches his paws up for a hug many times each a day, and he is constantly amazed by the lumps of snow that come inside on our boots.

As predicted, I spent most of yesterday scraping away at the editing stack, with a morning break for a walk and an afternoon break to pull together next week's high school plans. These editing deadlines dangle like thousand-pound Acme anvils over my head. So today will be much the same, except that my morning break will be a hustle up to the coffee shop to meet a poet and then later I've got to bake something or other for my evening writing group, fetch my CSA vegetable delivery, and probably do something else I can't recall just now.

This week, around the edges of my work life, I've been immersed in Adam Bede and George Eliot's dear, wise patience with error. Her sympathy is vast, though her narratives are inexorable. The terrible mistakes cannot be avoided. Tragedy crests like a river.

I forget if I mentioned that I have a reading up at Bowdoin College on Sunday, part of the town of Brunswick's annual Longfellow Days. I'll be at the Moulton Union at 1 p.m., along with the excellent poets Gibson Fay-LeBlanc and Mike Bove. I wonder what I'll be reading. I guess I'll figure that out on Saturday.

I didn't set foot outside the house yesterday, other than to empty the kitchen recycling pail into the outdoor bin. Even in the dead of winter that is unusual behavior for me, but these editing projects have chained me to the desk. Today, though, I've got a walk date, so to hell with the stack, at least for an hour.

I don't feel like I have much interesting chat to share. For obvious reasons, I never talk on this blog about other people's manuscripts, but other people's manuscripts are presently absorbing the bulk of my days. Around the edges I am making chicken adobo, folding towels, reading George Eliot, doing sun salutations on my mat, admonishing Chuck about jumping on the kitchen counter, answering emails, lugging firewood up from the basement, brewing yet another cup of tea, texting my kid about baseball trades, and not sleeping quite as much as I wish I were.

The fact that I am not engaged in organizing a new poetry manuscript is beginning to weigh on me.