Though mornings and evenings are cool, the days have become suddenly balmy. By mid-morning yesterday I was outside in shirtsleeves pruning the lilies and iris, weeding empty vegetable rows, preparing beds for winter. Yet the day felt like early September.

In the afternoon T and I went into town to do our version of shopping--e.g., idling through bookstores and vintage shops. I found a fabulous black mohair coat; he found a 1960s-era short-sleeved cotton plaid shirt of the sort he loves. We bought our kid a cookbook for his birthday. We ate dumplings at the Cantonese restaurant. We ambled the streets in the soft air, then drove back home to our allotted tasks: he went down into the basement and finished edge-binding the cabinet doors he's building; I spatchcocked two Cornish hens.

But the interlude is over. This afternoon I'll head north for an overnight in Monson, teach the kids tomorrow, hustle home, embroil myself in various obligations, teach teachers on Saturday . . . ah, autumn's breathless demands--though I do now have a really nice coat to wear, should it ever get cold again.

I'll be working this week with the notion of audience, via the epistolary poem--essentially the same lesson for both kids and teachers, though the teacher session will be compressed and will involve some standing back and asking, "Okay, what just happened? How could this work in your setting?" It will be interesting (for me) to do a classroom trial just before doing a teacher presentation. I'll let you know how it goes.

Otherwise: immersed in Olivia Laing's The Garden against Time--she's really, really good and I am thinking of writing her a fan letter; mourning, without surprise, the Mets' loss to the Dodgers; wondering what I'll do with all of those pears ripening in the bushel basket in my living room; recovering from book launches; scouring the kitchen sink; fidgeting with a poem draft; going for a long walk before breakfast . . . the usual life, words and soap and the solid thunk of feet on pavement, under the poignant sunshine, under the shedding leaves.

I spent much of yesterday outside--planting garlic, rolling up hoses, clearing out dead lily stems, emptying flowerpots, spreading compost, then riding my bike across the neighborhood to pick pears. Now a half bushel of hard brown pears sits in my living room, next to the dwindling harvest of green tomatoes, and later in the week, after I get back from Monson, the fruit should be soft enough to process--probably mostly as sauce, but maybe I'll get a pie out of them as well.

It is a treat to have such good ingredients to work with, but now that I'm on the road so often, I have to be smarter in how I plan for meals--how I use the freezer, for instance. I've taken to stocking up on fish, which doesn't require a ton of space (all we we have is a basic old-style refrigerator) and thaws and cooks relatively quickly.  Last night's meal was an example of ease: salmon marinated in miso and maple syrup, then roasted on a sheet pan with green beans (mine, from the freezer), a side of mixed grains (mostly quinoa and millet), a salad of yellow and red tomatoes, and apple crisp for dessert. Lots of cilantro and mint were involved, and even a bit of late basil . . . it was one of those meals that tastes like the season. And if I hadn't dawdled, I could have made the entire meal in under an hour; the crisp was the only item that required significant cooking time.

Probably it's silly (also boring) to spend so much time reprising meals, but except for my four years in college housing and the handful of years when I was working full time, I have always been the cook-in-chief. As everyone who holds that position knows, it's an endless and complicated responsibility.

By the time I was in high school, I was regularly cooking family meals--not all that enjoyable a task as my father has food issues and it was impossible to experiment with anything outside his customary diet. Also, I had no control over grocery shopping or garden: what showed up on the counter was the material I had to work with.

Still, it was a start. And then, in our first apartments together, T and I undertook our apprenticeship to cookbooks: Julia Child's, Marcella Hazan's, John Thorne's, Richard Olney's. I learned a few skills. I made spectacular errors. By the time we moved to Maine, I had learned how to grocery-shop, and now I began to learn how to garden. Of course, Harmony was a terrible place to be a gardener--too much tree cover, stony acid soil, a short growing season--but the wild foraging was magnificent, and after a while I figured out what I could and could not grow there. It was hard, though. My arms were full of babies, my barn was full of goats, my hours were full of firewood.

So despite its raggedy edges, this tiny plot in Portland can sometimes feel like Eden. Without children at home, I have more time of course. But I also have full southern exposure, rich soil, and a seaside climate. I don't have the space to grow a lot of produce, but what I do grow is far more lush than it was up north. Finally I am learning what it means to make a kitchen garden: not a farmer's garden but a cook's garden . . . a very, very different thing.

Saturday morning: a small lie-in, a wood fire, hot coffee, my couch corner . . . the exact right way to start the weekend. Last night T and I had dinner out with old friends; we came home find the Mets managing to hang on for a big win; I went to bed early and fell straight to sleep and dreamed of my childhood house in Rhode Island. And now on this cold morning I am listening to kindling crackle, watching golden flame leap up from split maple, thinking without hurry about the various tasks of the day--rolling up garden hoses, planting garlic, spreading compost, emptying plant pots, maybe picking pears from a friend's tree . . . the puttery chores of autumn.

Yesterday I started reading Olivia Laing's memoir/essay The Garden against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, which tells the tale of resurrecting an old formal garden in Sussex, England, but also wanders into literature and history and geography. Laing is a very musical writer, thoughtful and elegant and new to me: this is a friend's library book, passed on, and its patient tone fits well into my own gardening state of mind, at least at this time of year, when the beds are rumpled and messy and my growing ambitions stretch no further than a thick covering of leaves and a long sheltered sleep.

The freezer is filled with sauce and greens and wild mushrooms. The window frames are draped with peppers. The basement is stacked with firewood. The mantle is lined with winter bouquets--dried grasses and flowers that must sate my eyes till daffodil season returns. The kitchen windowsill is gaudy with nosegays of late marigolds and sage. Half-dry basil and parsley and mint hang in bunches in the back room. Outside, kale and lettuce and fennel still flutter bravely. Riches spill from this dollhouse grove, this unlikely speck of earth.

First light peers through maple boughs, still thick with green-brown leaves. The cat settles himself onto the hearthrug. The refrigerator hums. Though I am not thinking about poems, the air is thick with them, floating like motes of yeast in a baker's kitchen.

Thank goodness there's nowhere I have to go this morning.  I was so keyed up post-reading that my brain wouldn't settle down and I got hardly any sleep. But even though I feel wretched in the present moment, I am very happy about how the evening went. It was purely lovely, not a hitch in sight . . . a full house for the little store (20 people, 25?), lots of affectionate community among my writing friends, and some surprise appearances by old Harmony friends, a few other interested listener-acquaintances, even a couple of complete strangers. It really couldn't have gone better: I felt embraced and energized, and I loved how the program started--with three good poets each reading one of my poems and one of theirs, and then a sweet, very personal intro from another good poet--all this before I even began. Throughout the evening, the atmosphere remained low-key, congenial, attentive. It was a really, really good night.

So that's behind me now: the week of book launching is over, and I have three days off before I hit the road for Monson on Monday. Clearly I am not cut out to run for president or be a touring musician. After a single week of minor publicity, I feel like I've been flattened by a panel truck. But I'm glad it happened, and that I got through it, and that people seem to like the collection, and that people I care about showed up and helped out . . . also, that I didn't disappoint the bookstore: they did sell some books.

And now back to regular life. It's trash day, it's garlic-planting day, it's try-to-catch-up-on-sleep day as T and I are going to meet friends for dinner and I should be awake for that.

Thank you all for suffering through the tales of my book-launch angst. You have been patient, and I promise to talk about something else tomorrow. 

Last night I dreamed that my house was so full of people that I couldn't prep for my reading. Also, my next-door neighbor's house had turned into a milk factory (whatever that is). It was pleasant to wake up to see the big moon rising over her non-milk-factory roof and be reassured that I'll have plenty of time alone today, before the bustle begins.

This morning, after my walk, I'll work on a reading list for tonight's book launch, and I'll take a stab at recording myself reading a poem for my friend Tina Cane's video project "Poetry Is Bread." And then I'm going to clean toilets. Classic.

Yesterday morning I worked on plans for the Zoom class I'll be teaching for the Maine poet laureate's statewide epistolary-poetry project. On October 26 I'll be leading a two-hour session for educators on how to introduce the notion of epistolary poems to students. But yesterday evening, well after I'd finished my plans, I got an email from Julia (the poet laureate) telling me that the the education departments at the various state prisons, both juvenile and adult, had committed to sending at least one staff member each to my workshop. This was surprising news but also exciting as I've long been interested in working with prison-education programs . . . somehow it's just never happened. Now I need to go back and rethink the syllabus and make sure it feels suitable for this newly broad group of attendees.

But mostly today I've just got to keep my nerves in check, and housework will help, a walk will help, a fire in the wood stove and cups of ginger tea--the distractions of daily comfort and obligation. I've got a friend coming down from Bangor for the reading, so that's exciting. I got a call from my publisher last night saying that book orders had come in after Monday's virtual launch, so that's great too. And tomorrow morning I'll wake up feeling (I hope) exquisitely calm.

Another chilly morning in the little northern city by the sea. No frost in my garden yet, but on our walk yesterday morning my friend pointed out glints of ice in the cemetery grass. We ambled along the paths, marking our progress by which trees seemed most beautiful to us. She saw a big hawk but I did not. I found a handsome cluster of acorn caps. The sky was a most miraculous blue.

I worked on some class planning in the morning, then spent much of the afternoon on garden tasks. I tore out the last of the tomatoes and stripped the vines of green fruit. I picked what may be the last of the eggplant. I pulled out tired zinnias and scarlet runners. Autumn cleanup is daunting, and I have much more to do, but there's no rush. And there's still so much growing: a royal crop of kale, fennel frothing along the front path, still plenty of lettuce and arugula and a few obstinate spinach plants that survived the September drought, oregano and sage and cilantro and parsley and mint, even some weary basil, and then the red and gold marigolds, spilling over the terrace onto the sidewalk.

Today I'll cook down the green tomatoes for salsa verde, and maybe make a few fresh pickles as well. I made a batch of red tomato sauce yesterday, and most of that will go into the freezer, though I'll save out some for tonight's lasagna. I've got desk work to do this morning, but also a few errands to run, and I'll get onto my mat before breakfast and I'll get out into the garden after lunch, and it will be a household day, it will be a day to carry firewood and fold laundry and stir a vat of sauce on the stove, to read about the buildup to the French and Indian War and fiddle with a poem draft and dream up some writing prompts, and shuffle through the unraked leaves as a thread of woodsmoke rises from my chimney.

I want to thank everyone who listened in to last night's reading. We had a crowd--more than fifty people from all over the place, some strangers to me, many of them very dear . . . not bad, really, for two people who aren't great at hawking their wares. Maybe we sold a couple of books, and maybe we introduced a few people to each other's work, and without a doubt I am taking a deep breath and crossing Nerve-Wracking Event Number 1 off my list.

It's extraordinarily difficult to sit still and be praised. I think that is the hardest thing about these sorts of occasions. I am so glad that people care about my poems, that a poet of Jeannie's stature admires them, but I want to sink into the earth when anyone says so in public. It's so dumb.

I do like reading in public, though. It's an interesting conundrum, being an introvert who is also a performer. I get keyed up beforehand and am wrung out afterward, but the actual act is absorbing and exciting. I've talked to numerous other public performers who have a similar relationship to their shows, perhaps because off-stage preparation often requires deep solitude, hours and years of it.

Anyway, this morning I am tired and little headachy, but that's okay as I don't have any pressing obligations for the day. I'll go for an early walk, I'll work on some class plans, and in the afternoon I'll get into the garden: tear out tired plants, put in some tulip and daffodil bulbs, and maybe my garlic too, if the order arrives today.

Last night, after my reading, I was washing dishes and thinking, This is what it means to be successful. I write poems. I run water. It's as simple as that.