I started my drive home yesterday in rain and snow, but the weather softened by the time I reached southern New Hampshire traffic, which was a help.  I spent the bulk of my afternoon on the couch with a Dickens novel, which was restorative, after a weekend of hardly reading anything at all. But then I got a call to say that my son's partner is in the hospital, which ratcheted the worry back up. Unclear what is actually going on, but they've been sick for a few weeks and things seem to be snowballing. Today we should learn more.

It's been raining all night and will rain more later in the day, but I hope to squeeze in a walk. I'll get caught up on laundry and work on an editing project. I'll go out to the fish market. I'll hope for the best.

I'll be heading home at daylight, an attempt to avoid the steady rain coming in from the west. Happy to own four new tires, but the sight of snow in the mountains on Friday doesn't make me want to linger in the mountains today.

Talk to you tomorrow--

Without incident, Tina the elderly Subaru made her doughty way across rivers and mountains into the Champlain Valley and spent a comfortable overnight parked on a hillock of grass in the cold rain.

Now at very first light, the Greens are a rumple of dark blue through the kitchen window and the Adirondacks are a rumple of dark blue through the living room window, and the cat of the house sourly waits for me to notice that it's breakfast time.

I have been rereading Dickens's Little Dorrit and have reached the part of the book when the Dorrit family has magically transformed from impoverished debtors in the Marshalsea Prison into a rich and haughty entourage crossing the Alps on their way to a Venetian palazzo. Little Dorrit, the shy, hardworking backbone of the poor family, has suddenly become useless in the rich family. Now she has no one to take care of. All she can do is stare out the window in wonder and imagine what is happening among the people of the prison, now that she can no longer see them, or even admit their existence.

In many ways Little Dorrit is an irritating character--the epitome of Dickens's obstinate pipe dreams about sweet, self-effacing child-women. But she is curious. She imagines. And these characteristics, in her new life as the daughter of a rich man, become liabilities. They reveal too much. She is constantly being told to show less wonder.

I have been thinking this morning about that sad fate. To never show surprise. To never be surprised.

The daylight is strengthening. I can glimpse the shapes of cows in the field beyond the house, thick black and white torsos, heads hidden among the dry stems.

Just a quick note this morning, as I'm swirling through my morning chores so I can get out of here soon after daylight. I'll give you the Vermont lowdown tomorrow.

We got a bit of rain last night, and this morning the neighborhood is damp and blustery and Novemberish. Now the furnace is grumbling, and the kitten is purring, and the coffee is steaming, and T is making his sandwich for work and I am listening to sheets churn in the washing machine, and we are chunking forward through our quotidian hours.

Tomorrow morning I'll be hitting the road for Vermont, so today will be housework, and laundry, and catching up with emails, and getting onto my mat, though I hope I'll also be going out to write tonight. I dug up Baron's dahlias yesterday, so they are now safely stored in the basement for the winter. Really that's my last big autumn chore. I may cut back a few more frost-bitten plants, rake a few more leaves, but for the most part the beds are ready for winter. We've still got a smidgen of chard in the garden and some late lettuce, and the kale is doing well, now that the groundhog has gone into hibernation. I'll likely be harvesting into December, unless we get a sudden snow or the temperatures plummet.

I like November, when the hats appear and the coats get buttoned. I like turning on lamps in the late afternoon and lighting the wood fire. I like hot cups of tea and my warm walking boots. I like the smell of baking and roasting and a bouquet of sage on the counter.

Yesterday Teresa and I finished our Whitman reading project, and now we are going to turn our attention to Zbigniew Herbert's Mr. Cogito.  I am still working my way through The Waves and Little Dorrit and The Descent of Alette. Chuck is excited about a piece of kindling. The chickadees are noisy in the maples. I love my long-poem draft. America feels a touch less gruesome. It's a cheerful morning around here.

What a good election night!

My son was at Ray's bar in Brooklyn when Mamdani's victory was proclaimed, and he said the bartenders immediately blasted "New York, New York," filling everyone with weepy joy. If only Ray himself had been there to run the stereo. Here in Maine we solidly voted down a proposal to prohibit absentee ballots and voted in a red-flag gun law--a very big deal in a state with a strong gun culture. Portland raised the city's minimum wage. Democrats won large and small victories around the country. It's been a long time since we've been able to feel a little political happiness.

After my marathon work streak, I made it home last night and then T and I walked out arm in arm to the neighborhood barbecue joint, a comfortable way to settle back into town life. Today I've got a phone meeting scheduled and house stuff and reading to catch up on, but there will be airiness too. I'll go for a walk. I'll figure out dinner. I'll dig up my dahlia tubers and store them in the basement. Probably I'll be on the horn with my kid, emoting about the NYC election.

I'm very much enjoying this year's high school cohort. They arrived at the first class ready to be serious and engaged, but now they are starting to let loose and be silly together, which adds to the fun. And my car was very well behaved, which is a relief, given my looming Vermont trip. Altogether it's been a good, if hectic, week, and I am full of sap.

And my long-poem draft awaits . . . 

In the homeland the hardwood trees are mostly bare now, and the tamaracks have entered into their golden glory. Soon they, too, will drop their needles, but for a brief span they are suns.

Their brilliance made the drive north beautiful. Altogether it was a good trip. Yesterday was my car's first long trip with her new rack-and-pinion, and the tight steering made me feel like I was handling a sports car on the curves--an unaccustomed sensation, for sure. Clearly the steering had been deteriorating for a while, but slowly enough to keep me unaware, until things got really flabby. I can almost imagine I'm driving a new car (which, considering the number of pieces I've replaced in the past two years, is more or less true).

I arrived in Wellington to celebration: it's hunting season, and Steve had just gotten a deer. The sorrows of death and life, so tangled. I've never been a hunter, but I understand the confusions of gratitude. How Steve thanked the doe. How winter looms.