We haven't had a long, warm, heavy rain like this for ages, and it has been a joy. All night I woke and slept and woke and slept to downpour drumming on the shingles, spray clattering against the panes, the scent of water misting through the open window.

Now, even in this half-dark, I can see the gardens stretching and glowing. Rain clatters and drums; it shows no signs of stopping. I don't know how many inches have fallen so far, but the earth is drinking them in.

Yesterday I finished reading the Lahiri and Fowles stories and started Willa Cather's The Professor's House. I went for a walk before the rains began. I spent time with Hayden Carruth's poems; I read a friend's manuscript; I fiddled with some revisions and wrote marketing copy for the Monson programs and answered emails and chipped away at interview questions. I washed dishes as two hummingbirds visited the feeder and a pair of mockingbirds flirted on the back fence. I baked scones and went out to write with my friends. I came home to lamplight and Tom and Chuck.

My first days of summer vacation have been wordy and lonesome and spacious and friendly and rainy. It has not been difficult to revise my hours into a new sort of work. The house itself is a help--shabby and half-assed as it is, its tidy cottage sweetness coaxes me into unstructured concentration. I've talked to Teresa about this before: we're both very aware that we write best in our own rooms. Away, we flounder. At home, we make.

My summer vacation has begun like March break, at least weather-wise: damp, raw, and full of grievance. This morning's temperatures are a little warmer than yesterday's, but we've got inches of rain on the way, so I don't expect to be doing much outside other than rushing through an early walk before the storm rumbles in.

It will be a house day. I plan to start reading a friend's manuscript this morning, and I'd like to muck around with a couple of my own poem drafts. I've been slowly responding to a long set of interview questions that I'm told will be transformed into an article for the Millay House journal this summer. I'm finishing up the Lahiri story collection and rereading John Fowles's novella "The Ebony Tower." I'll drink numerous mugs of lemon-ginger tea. I'll fetch my CSA order, and play with some prompt ideas, and bake for this evening's writing group.

Except for a brief zoom meeting regarding a copyediting job, today belongs to me, and I feel like I usually feel in the early days of a hiatus: worried about whether I'll make good use of my time; not worried at all about whether I'll make good use of my time. I tend to be a productive idler, but usually I need a few days to work out what my idleness will entail. Sometimes it involves much staring out the window. Sometimes it involves arcane household projects such as reaming out the linen cupboard and slowly refolding every towel and pillowcase. Sometimes it involves a flurry of obsessive research about odd topics or disconnected subjects. Eventually the idleness will coalesce into new writing or a thought about manuscript organization or the germ of a new class. It might tug me into a reading adventure or force me to write yacky, excited emails to a friend.

But the first few days of idleness can feel uneasy. With the structure of obligation stripped away, the hours loom. What will I do if I do nothing? How soon will this freedom end?

There is nothing like the slow, easy yawn and stretch that is the first day of summer vacation. Of course in actuality I'll be working all summer; I just won't be teaching high schoolers. But that doesn't dim the delight of waking up this morning and humming,"Three months off!"

I feel as if all of my muscles have suddenly loosened, that I've sloughed off a fifty-pound backpack I didn't know I was wearing. I have plenty to do--I always have plenty to do--but for three months I won't need to fit myself into the cracks around [[[planning-driving-overnight-teaching-driving]]]. It's a demanding pattern for a person who is not extra-skilled at physical transitions. As much as I love the work I do as a teacher, I am very, very glad to have a respite from the travel schedule.

Today I'll go for a walk with a friend. I'll run errands. I'll wash sheets. I might keep working on the poems I've been revising. I might start looking at manuscripts. I might do some weeding.

Last night for dinner I cooked the freshest fiddleheads I've had my hands on since I was cutting my own in Harmony. What a feast they were, alongside roasted local potatoes and red onion, and a few deviled eggs made with yogurt, coarse mustard, and pickled dandelion buds (which were outstanding, even better than capers . . . I will definitely make a bigger batch next year). It was a meal that tasted like spring, like the woods and fields.

Here's an older, uncollected poem of mine that I just reread. It made me laugh. Maybe it will make you laugh too.

The Regret of the Poet after Sending Work to a Magazine

 

Dawn Potter

 

Countless smart people have ordered you to buck up.

This tottering world, they claim, requires you.

Thus you obediently cram everything you’ve written

into a virtual envelope and shoot it into the aether.

 

Meanwhile, two young guys have ripped out

the third-floor skylights of the house next door.

Now they are propped waist-high in the open holes,

and they are murmuring to one another—

 

maybe about measurements or lunch,

maybe about the baby-blue sky

dangling like a stage set behind their curly heads.

This opus you’ve invented is altogether fraudulent.

 

You, with your feet planted boringly on the ground,

cannot compete with an air-show.

A vortex of gulls circles overhead.

Fingers of loose shingles waver beneath a modest sunbeam.

 

How is it possible to buck up?

Every word you’ve written has already been lived better.

Publish a thousand poems and you won’t escape

the same old keening sorrow— 

 

you, there, weighed down with your concrete galoshes

and your armload of Danger signs,

squinting up at two young steeple-jacks and wondering

how anyone manages to end a poem with hope.

Patchy frost this morning in Monson, and the sun is a blurred orange behind the eastern trees. Branches are still mostly bare up here, though fields have greened, though daffodils nod and quiver in the dooryards. Spring is riotous in Portland, but here it is more like a thought.

This is my last morning in town until high summer and the conference, when I'll be living by the lake for a week, not alongside the main street, gritty with winter sand, log trucks coasting through at 3 a.m., dump truck roaring past by 4 . . .

*

I'd written a much longer note to you, but something went wrong with the platform and very little of it saved when I tried to publish it. So you'll just have to imagine my thoughts moseying among fiddleheads and last-day-of-school feelings, because I don't think I can resurrect exactly what I was saying.

Ah, well. But you already know all about last-day-of-school feelings. You can fill in the blank.

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 . . .