Invisible in the fog, a chickadee sings DEE-dee, DEE-dee. Is there a word for this gray no-light air, this dusk before dawn? Through the screen door, snakes of fog twine into the kitchen--damp, cool, tinged with salt. This is summer Maine of the storybooks . . . dew-wet, shiver of breeze, windows flung open to the tender chill.

It's my last quiet morning for a while, and I am awake too early, but it's hard to regret sleep with such loveliness around me. Flowers, bowing under fog weight, glow like jewels--gold, rose, magenta, lemon, cream. In the quince a chickadee repeats, repeats. Behind her ostinato a robin bubbles, a sparrow chitters.  Speckles of milky sky prick the vast shadow canopy of the maples. This tiny plot, this miniature realm . . . I wander from window to window, amazed.

A few things will happen this week. The big one will be Teresa's arrival tomorrow afternoon, triggering our flurried plunge into rehearsal mode. Then, on Wednesday, I will officially become poet laureate of Maine. There's no ceremony planned, no formality I need to step up for. Still, I'll feel at least a mental shift. Publicly I've mostly laid low since the April announcement. Primarily, I haven't wanted to take the shine off Julia Bouwsma's last few months in the position. But also I've needed time to come to grips with the idea of the job. I am a different person from Julia, from all of the previous laureates. It's important to learn from them but not imitate them. The question has been "what will I bring to the task?" I don't just mean "what projects will I do?" but "what qualities of myself must I share?"

It's foggy this morning, and two cute exasperating brown bunnies are skipping and hopping around and under my neighbor's car. These bunnies are an invasive species that has suddenly exploded in Portland, and I am not delighted. I admit they are adorable. But so were the tribbles in that Star Trek episode.

However, I am delighted that I slept in till 6 a.m. on this Saturday morning. For some reason Chuck didn't work very hard to wake me, and my body, still convalescing from its long stretch of car-related insomnia, took advantage of his neglect.

For me, waking up at 6 is the equivalent of wallowing, so I feel quite smug this morning. Look at me, sleeping in on a Saturday: I'm like a regular guy.

This weekend I need to weed the front garden beds and mow grass. I'd also like to go for a bike ride as I've been out only once so far this summer. Meanwhile, Gloria can relax in the driveway and enjoy the bunnies. She'll get plenty of attention next week.

Now the gulls are screeching, and sun is grappling with the remains of the fog, and I'm remembering that there's most of a strawberry pie in the refrigerator, and I'm thinking about all of the work ahead in the next couple of weeks and getting excited about it. Rehearsing, teaching, playing, writing, performing, listening, celebrating, plus hanging out by the lake with some of my favorite people . . . wot larks, as sweet Joe muses to Pip in Great Expectations, a book I should reread soon. Maybe I'll bring it along to Monson.

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.