Well, I'm home again, and glad to be here. Five nights at in my own bed, until Monday, when I head north again to Monson. At this point, such a long run of home nights feels like a miracle.

Today I'll be at my desk, working on class plans. I'll go for a walk, and wash sheets, and collect our CSA order, and bake a batch of brownies, and in the evening go out to write with my friends. Tomorrow afternoon I'll need to drive to Augusta for a poetry event at the statehouse. But this weekend, I hope, I'll be gardening.

Crocuses are up; scylla and primroses are beginning to bloom; last season's kale is unfolding new leaves. I cut a handful of chives for last night's dinner. I need to rake and pick up sticks and prep the garden boxes and figure out groundhog barriers and plant some seeds. I ought to take my mower to the hardware store to get the blades sharpened. I feel very behindhand with yard work, but one needs to be home and underemployed to make a head start, and that has not been my fate.

So it is pleasant to be sitting idly for these few minutes in my couch corner, alongside Big Chuck, who is happily filled with breakfast and curls sociably against my leg. I do have to work today, but at my own pace. Tomorrow will be chaotic. The weekend may be wet. All I can do is thread myself into whatever comes.

Just a quick note, as I've got to pull myself together for the roadtrip back to Portland. But it's never too late to be surprised by one's parents. Turns out my mom has a small crush on 1980s-era Cher and Nicolas Cage. She said, "Let's watch Moonstruck," so we sat around eating ice cream sandwiches and gazing at pretend Italian-Americans in pretend New York City fall in love to the soundtrack of La Boheme. 

It was a pretty good evening.

The forecast for Vermont today is 100 percent rain, but it's still too dark for me to glimpse the actual state of things outside. Yesterday, though, was quite warm, and on a brief walk I found a blooming hellebore and clusters of daffodils budding in the shelter of the house. A day of rain will surely start greening the fields.

The landscape of the Champlain Valley is not my personal ideal of beauty. I prefer forests to farmland, and this is a highly domesticated region. But watching a meadow transform from winter into spring is always a delight.

Today I'll be cooking, cleaning, carrying firewood, doing whatever needs to be done--or rather the edges of whatever needs to be done because there's no way to add anything more than a slight gloss to a situation that's never going to be under control.

Outside rain will fall, and the fields will become ponds that shimmer under a heavy sky.

And now here we are at Monday again, and I am girding myself for the long drive west.

In good news, I'm feeling much healthier: yesterday morning I dragged the vacuum cleaner around the house and in the afternoon pruned my roses, without ill effect from either. So while I'll probably stiffen up in the car, I don't think I'll be crawling out of it in agony the way I was last Wednesday.

The timing isn't bad for this trip to Vermont. The weather looks passable; and though crossing the mountains can always be dicey, I'll avoid the summer shortcut and stay on the big roads. Work is in a manageable state: all editing projects are off my desk, and nothing new has yet arrived.  I do have to prep for my high schoolers, but I can mess with that while my parents are resting. The big issue is "oh, do I have to leave home yet again?" but that is an old familiar plaint. I don't know if I'll ever get used to being on the road so much.

Maybe I'll expand my new Poetry Kitchen idea while my parents are napping. Maybe I'll work on a poem. Maybe I'll just stare out the window at eager birds crowding the feeder.

Here I am again, awake too early, but at least I'm getting up at 4:30 after a full night's sleep, not lying sleepless in bed at 1 a.m. Fortunately, my back injury or whatever this is seems to be gradually healing. I'm still quite stiff, but less so than I was, and the shooting pains have dissipated. Maybe I'll have a Tylenol-free day . . . that would be a treat.

Since I'll be hitting the road for Vermont tomorrow, I've got to get my housework done today, and run errands, and otherwise behave like a non-injured person. I'd like to do some inaugural yard work but I may not have the time or the bending capacity. Gardening is basically just a string of strange yoga poses wrapped around shrubs, and my flexibility is convalescent. But by next weekend I should be back to normal.

Even setting aside my injury issues, the last few days have been odd. As you know, I've been carrying around some news that I can't yet share, but it's rattled me a little, washed me into an evanescent past-present-future that is not so different from convalescence. I'm intermittently distracted, elegiac, prone to tears. Probably it's a good thing that I'm going to Vermont for a few days, where I'll be confronted by situations and obligations and won't have the luxury to waft around in a fugue state.

First, though, I need to find a novel to read. And by the way, I've had another thought about that possible Poetry Kitchen class: syntax as inspiration. Maybe one of these days I'll get a chance to work out the details.

It's cold this morning, which is too bad because today is the big No Kings protest so in a few hours we'll have to go downtown and stand around and freeze. Sigh. But when civic duty calls, you put on long underwear and two coats and trudge up the hill and speak your mind.

Fortunately my yanked back muscle or whatever this is seems to be healing, though I'm still very stiff and sore when I get out of bed. Yesterday I swallowed only one dose of Tylenol and managed to do my house chores and even walk my usual two-plus miles, so that was an improvement over the day before, when I was running entirely on acetaminophen and having a hard time putting on my socks. But I'm not sleeping well--body discomfort plus busy thoughts, always a winning combination--which accounts for why I'm writing to you so early on a Saturday morning. 

Still, it's nice to be quiet and untethered, even if I have to be awake. I like knowing that T is asleep, that Chuck is roaming the floors, that the lamps glow and the furnace groans and coffee steams in the pot. The weekend already feels so brief: on Monday I'm heading to Vermont to visit my parents for a couple of days, and then as soon as I return I'll drop into extreme busyness again: end-of-year teaching lunacy, conference prep, stacks of editing, gardening. But now is a little window of peace.

Speaking of the conference, we are completely full! Wait list only! And with a number of new participants signed up alongside some regulars! I'm so pleased, and relieved. Every year I doom-talk myself into imagining it won't run, no one will show up, the program's a bust, that's it, give up, etc. You know that conversation: who else can you trust to be your own worst enemy?

Now that I've quelled the doom-talker, what I ought to do is design another Poetry Kitchen class for later this summer. I've had so much else to do lately that I haven't had the wherewithal to keep inventing classes. But I'm considering a generative poetry session based around the influence of the novel--maybe selections from Woolf, James, Bowen, Henry Green; maybe some Victorians as well . . . I haven't even begun to suss out how this might work, but it feels like it could be rich.

So a thing happened to me yesterday afternoon that I cannot tell you about for a few days . . . which I understand is an annoying teaser and you have every right to be irritated, but my thoughts have been so occupied by the surprise, pleasure, nerves, and elegy linked to this news that I can't refrain from acknowledging my state of mind. Fortunately I'll be busy today: finishing an editing project (I hope), dashing out for a haircut, then talking to Teresa about Aurora Leigh. In Florida we agreed in passing that we were moved and excited by the poem, but we didn't have any chance to talk more intently about what we were seeing. I'm looking forward to finding out what brilliant thoughts she's uncovering.

Otherwise, I'm still kind of hobbled by my sore back, though it's better than it was, and my nose still won't stop running, and Chuck is trying to drink my coffee, and I've got to haul trash to the curb or get Tom to do it for me if that chore turns out to be a dumb idea for my injury. But maybe at some point today I'll also have a chance to look at the draft-blurt in my notebook--the first new poem draft I've written for weeks. It was so good to get back to work with the poets last night. How I love my writing group. That is a thing I never thought I'd say, back in the days when I was a proud solitary in the woods. But these poet-friends make Portland a sort of Eden.