In last night's dream, T and I seemed to have acquired a shabby travel-trailer, which was parked at some sort of leafy campground-ish place. We were sitting outside, and Young Chuck was watching us through the screen door, just like he does in real life, and nothing exciting was happening at all--just summertime and three pals hanging out. I'm still basking in the leftover aura . . . it feels so rare to have a purely pleasant dream: nobody worried or embarrassed, no impossible tasks, no dreadful discoveries, no surreal irony. It was kind of my brain to offer me such a restful episode. Among other things, I've been fighting an annoying little cold all week, an illness with extremely minor symptoms that is tailing into convalescent exhaustion because I had zero time to baby it. Yesterday, though, I did allow myself to sag, so I should be feeling better today. And now I have my sweet little dream to help me out.

As of this morning there is no work stacked on my desk. I expect the next editing project to arrive later today or tomorrow, but still that gives me one full day without a time sheet. I need to get started on the giant presentation/reading I'll be doing for the MCELA conference in March. (Unfortunately I've got to prep well ahead of time because I'll be in Florida until just before the event takes place.) But I'm also considering the possibility of starting to print out poems for ordering into a new collection. I'm planning to bake a pie. I'm hoping to do some reading. I want to take a walk. I'll go out to write tonight with the poets.

During that reading at Bowdoin I realized how happy I am about some of my new uncollected pieces. I guess I haven't really been thinking about how much I like the individual poems: I've been distracted by the looming struggle to organize them. So what I would like to do today is quietly remember they exist. 

An inch or so of new snow fell overnight, and I have a morning doctor's appointment so will be outside shoveling and clearing early. But that's fine: if I don't have to drive in it while it's falling, I am delighted to see fresh snow.

The Big Kitten is quite happy to have me home again. He leans against my shoulder and sticks his damp nose into my ear and purrs lustily. And the weather has warmed up a little: it's a balmy 27 out there this morning, a notable change from weeks of low single digits.

This morning, after I get back from my appointment, I'll ship the files of my big editing project to the author . . . and then, very briefly, I will be unemployed. I've got so much prep to do for so many other upcoming jobs that unemployment is more of an idea than a reality. Maybe a better description is I'll have a breather. But a new editing project will show up later this week, this one will be back after the author goes through the files, I've got classes and a presentation to plan, I need to keep working on materials for our Florida residency, plus Baron's memorial reading is on the horizon . . . 

So this afternoon's spare hours probably won't be spare at all. But they likely will involve poems instead of copyediting, which is a version of refreshment. 

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.