Yesterday was an out-and about day--a trip up the coast (across the coast? down the coast? directions are confusing when one is winding among the spits and fingers of the midcoast) to have lunch with a friend, then errands, and then my writing group. I did all of the driving because that is the protocol: the person with the new car has to do all of the driving for the first few days and then everything can go back to normal. But I was glad to let Gloria stretch her legs on the highway and the back roads, and I have almost figured out how her buttons work. Gloria, by the way, is the Mazda's name. The Impreza was Tina--chosen because my boys suggested that I name her in honor of one Harmony's leading citizens. I see no reason to break that pattern.

This morning it's raining lightly. I need to drag the trash out to the curb, and get my walk in; I need to deal with a bunch of desk stuff; I've got to figure out something to make for dinner, and I have two quarts of strawberries to hull and transform into a pie. I also have a couple of draft blurts from last night's writing prompts to mess around with. If the rain slows to a mist, I'd like to weed the front gardens. I might run an errand or two.

These next couple of days will be my last hurrah with unemployment. On Monday evening Teresa will arrive from Florida and the conference faculty will leap back into rehearsal mode--a repeat of our Sarasota residency schedule, but this time we'll be working in the Bowdoin dance studio, a 40-minute drive north of Portland. Then, on Sunday, we'll head up to Monson and plunge into the joyous netherworld that is the conference. I'm excited about this year's participants--a mix of old friends and new . . . people who once attended the Frost Place iteration but whom I haven't seen for several years; people I've worked with online through Studio Session and Poetry Kitchen classes; local poets as well as people who are brand-new to me. We're fully subscribed, which makes the Monson Arts folks very happy, and it makes me happy as well. I'm so glad this conference remains vital and lively. I'm so glad participants love the new digs.

Every once in a while I read an elegiac Facebook post lamenting the Frost Place old days. This is, I will admit, painful for me. The truth is that the conference is more stable and more adventurous than it was able to be at the Frost Place. I loved that setting too, and I suffered, on many levels, when I made the decision to leave it. But the move turned out to be very good for both the creative growth of the conference and my own mental health. Having everyone together on the same campus makes both the classroom and the social sides more cohesive. Having an in-place staff that handles all non-program logistics means that I can focus entirely on my real job without exhausting myself into a smear of tears. Working in a place where poetry is just one of many endeavors to celebrate is uplifting and stimulating. Like the Frost Place, Monson Arts is beautiful, historic, arty, welcoming. It is also comfortable, which was not a prime feature of the FP. The only thing missing here is Robert Frost's ghost. But the truth is there are a lot of other fantastic ghosts floating around out there who are eager to be welcomed in.

I slept like a stunned ox last night, reeling in from our movie-and-late-dinner evening and immediately stumbling up to bed and into unconsciousness. I was not even slightly tipsy; I was just tired tired tired. Car worries have notably messed with my rest over the past few weeks, so a giant sleep was both vital and inevitable, and last night it arrived with a bang.

Now here I sit with my coffee, blinking and groggy. Sunlight fingers the neighbor's roof. Nearby a cardinal warns Jericho, Jericho, oh no, then flits to a distant shrub to repeat himself. A car sighs up the street and around the corner. An airplane grumbles into takeoff. The little northern city by the sea begins to phrase its daytime song.

I spent much of yesterday metaphorically tying up various strings and tatters: dealing with scheduling, paperwork, emails; sussing out project stuff, making lists, clearing now-unnecessary piles of this-and-that. Though nothing I did was especially creative, it felt good to be reentering the word world, even at its most pedestrian level. Holding a book is not the same as reading a book, but it's not nothing either. And arranging my physical, temporal, and thought spaces welcomes the work that will eventually happen there.

Which is a pompous way of saying I cleaned my desk.

Welcome home, shiny expensive machine. May you hold up your end of the bargain. Tom, no doubt light-headed from lack of cash, has already suggested street racing and decorating you with polka-dots. I, in more traditional fashion, am scrupulously wiping off every speck of dirt, a project I will keep up for maybe another 36 hours before I allow you to lapse into pollen and clutter. 

Now that the deed is done, I might as well turn off the dread faucet and try to enjoy myself. This is the sportiest car I've ever owned, so maybe I will learn to love driving, which would be convenient, given how much of it I have to do. She's peppy on the highway and swoops through curves and corners with aplomb--a surprise to me, who's spent more than a decade driving the car version of a couch cushion.

I realize that poets aren't actually supposed to have nice cars, but every once in a while mistakes are made.

Today is forecast to be warm and at least partly sunny. So I'll get sheets onto the lines, take an early walk, maybe spot another cache of mushrooms. Yesterday I scored a tote bag full of chicken-of-the-woods: enough for dinner plus three quarts in the freezer. I haven't yet spotted any chanterelles in my usual haunts, but I'm keeping an eye peeled. 

People like to stop and talk to me when they see me cutting mushrooms or carrying around a batch in my hat or otherwise being peculiar. The other day a woman stopped me in Baxter Woods to exclaim over what I'd found. She herself was carrying a camera with a telephoto lens, the usual sign of a birder, so I asked what she was looking for. She responded, "Oh, I'm a raccoon nut."

The woods are full of us weirdos.

Rain poured all night, and it's still raining--more than an inch so far, soaking into gardens, sluicing into the bay. In the small hours I half-woke to the sound of it drumming the roof, clacking the panes. How I love crisp sheets, an open bedroom window, the fragrant beat of steady rain. No wind, no bluster; just sweet downpour, hour upon hour.

Yesterday I accomplished step 1: I signed all the paperwork for the car. Now I'm waiting for the credit union to jump through its hoops so I can accomplish step 2: pay for the car, pick it up, and bring it home. Of course I immediately had buyer's remorse and a giant stress headache, but that's to be expected. There's nothing like the soul-killing atmosphere of a car dealership to make a person believe in doom.

Well, the doom is (semi) done now, so I will attempt to spend my liminal hours accomplishing something revivifying and non-car-related, like going for a walk in the rain, dusting the living room, and working on conference plans. Yesterday I bought a quart of local strawberries, our first of the season, so that was an aid in learning to live with an excruciating car payment. There is no dessert better than local strawberries and cream served in a pretty bowl to the one I love. Shortcake is unnecessary bulk. Ripe berries, sliced, barely sugared, and topped with too much softly whipped cream: what more does a person need?

I'm still rereading Ford's The Sportswriter, and I hope to pick up Jarrell's novel Pictures from an Institution from the library today. This afternoon Teresa and I will meet to finalize our teaching plans for the conference . . . though finalize is a silly word for how we teach together. No matter how much prep we do (and we do a lot of prep), we always end up catching each other's eyes in the middle of a class, laughing, and then changing everything on the fly. 

Among other things, we spent this weekend on wedding prep--working on our gifts, figuring out our itinerary. At the moment Amtrak is a cheaper option than flying, so Tom bought roundtrip train tickets. This will add a day to either end of our travels, but the fun of the Lakeshore Limited is so worth it. We will be staying in a downtown hotel with a pool and a sauna. We'll be surrounded by our kids and their partners, by my family, Tom's family, old friends from Maine and Brooklyn, plus all of the new family and friends awaiting us. We'll be wearing silly outfits. How could this not be a fabulous time?

First, however, I have to buy a car. And unless there's yet another snag, that's what's happening today, though I have no hopes of bringing it home immediately as our credit union functions at a glacial pace. Meanwhile, I hope, the Impreza will disappear from the driveway and I'll somehow manage to do some editing and accomplish some conference tasks and get the house cleaned and go grocery shopping around the edges of Car Distraction.

Steady rain is supposed to move in this evening, but the day should stay clear so I'm going to risk hanging clothes on the line. I transplanted chard yesterday and sowed a second crop of cilantro, in anticipation of a wet few days. Now the garden will take care of itself for a little while, and I will try to remember that I write poems. 

Though the morning is dawning clear, showers and thunderstorms are supposed to move into Portland over the course of the day. So I'm glad I got the mowing done yesterday, as well as a big chunk of the weeding, because the forecast looks like it will be unsettled all week. This morning I'll do a bit more weeding, maybe prune, too, and cart some mulch, but if the rains come in earlier than expected I won't be hard on myself.

The gardens really do look lovely, even in their slightly imperfect state. A crescent of golden Stella D'Oro lilies beams along the sidewalk. White, red, and yellow roses overflow. The black-lace elderberry trembles beneath saucers of pink blossom. The grass is dotted with white clover heads. Bees hum in the flowering thyme. Cardinals flit among dogwood and viburnums.

I have decided that Dostoevsky and I are still incompatible. I just cannot get attached to The Brothers Karamazov, and as of this morning I have accepted my weakness and returned the volume to the shelf. I could blame my failure on car-shopping brain damage, but that would be disingenuous. I have never enjoyed Dostoevsky, even in less vehicular times. So now I am once again hovering between reading projects, though I am plugging the gap with a sugar-coated placebo in the form of Richard Ford's The Sportswriter. I wish I were a Karamazov and Ulysses reader, but at least I have the comfort of being a War and Peace and Middlemarch re-reader.

Tonight I may fry up latkes for dinner, serving them with yogurt and dill alongside baked new beets and freshly harvested lettuce. Even better, we still have a little bit of lemon pudding cake left over from last night's dinner party. In other good news Tom sold the Impreza for $600 to a guy who will tow it away tomorrow, and Chuck enjoyed an up-close chipmunk that was yelling at him through the storm door. It's been a fine weekend for everyone so far.

Yesterday's car stuff ended up being delayed because of the holiday, so everything will start up again on Monday, which is completely fine with me. I plan to enjoy this weekend by not looking up anything on Autotrader . . . ugh, those car sites: so much confusing bait-and-switch.

I've got yard work I should do this weekend--mowing and weeding and such--and I'm going to make dessert for dinner this evening with friends (lemon pudding cake, my current favorite sweet). At some point this summer I need to spend a day shopping for wedding jewelry, but I don't know when. My plan is to comb vintage stores for something bright, maybe in glass. The kids want "festive cocktail . . . embrace color," so we are doing our best to oblige. And I will say it's been fun to go all-out with semi-silly party clothes.

I'm still plowing through Dostoevsky, still pecking away at revisions. On Thursday I met with my arts commission handler and we started sussing out some early thoughts for poet laureate projects. On Friday Teresa and Jeannie and I came up with a plan for our next Substack post. The conference creeps ever closer, and my PL term formally begins on July 1. At that point I'll be in the throes of rehearsal: the conference faculty will be up at Bowdoin for most of the week before the conference, working in the dance studio on our Monson, Maine, USA performance. Thank goodness I'll have a car by then (fingers crossed, fingers crossed, please, nothing go wrong).

The past two weeks have been one long tension headache. I've been so distracted by car angst that I've barely been able to focus on the things I actually care about, and I'm always annoyed when I allow myself to get into such states. I dislike the pettiness: there are so many worse troubles in this world, yet there I was, standing in the kitchen crying over a car. It's stupid. It's a trap. It's so American.

All I can say in my favor is that I'm glad I invented a prompt about gas stations a couple of weeks ago, before this whole ordeal began. The prompt arose from an Elizabeth Bishop poem, "Filling Station," and my idea was "write your own poem about a gas station and repeat plain words throughout." Simple but effective, as it turned out.

I might be exasperated with myself over this car despair, but at least I know there are great poems about gas stations milling around in my friends' notebooks.