I'm enjoying a slow start today: a treat, given my usual early-morning extremes. It's already full daylight outside. Goldfinches are chirping among the bachelors' buttons, and an angry squirrel is sputtering why you oughta, no doubt a walnut-related tiff with another squirrel. That walnut tree does not promote neighborhood harmony. The local squirrels spend all day every day being furious with each other over who's eating a walnut, who took the other's walnut: gripe, gripe, gripe from dawn till dusk. They'll have a lot of fences to mend once the season is over.

I did manage to get to my haircut appointment yesterday, thanks to my neighbor's car, and I also messed around with poem revision and even, to my surprise, submitted a few pieces to a journal. I don't know what came over me: usually I'll scrub toilets rather than submit poems. But now I need to turn my thoughts to yard work and errand running, and no doubt I'll be juggling phone calls and emails about wedding stuff and wrestling with the impossibilities of packing and trying to remember to do dull things like get the mail held.

Anyway, for the moment, I'm not doing anything other than write to you, which is restful. One large issue about this long trip is the question of how many books do I bring? We've got two 20-hour train rides to fill, which I calculate as requiring at least four books. They need to be paperbacks, for reasons of weight and space, and they must be the sort of books one can enjoy in distracting circumstances: thus, no Henry James or Moby-Dick.

The idea is to pair two paperbacks for each leg of the trip. Plus, I've got a writing project I'll be working on, some shows to watch, probably some baseball games to listen to. Tom and I will play cards and eat snacks. Possibly we'll even sleep a little. But the book choice is central.

Thus, last week I ordered Colson Whitehead's Crook's Manifesto from the bookstore (though now  I'm starting to worry that it won't come in on time). I felt it would offer the correct level of enjoyment for a train trip: familiar likable characters in a situation I haven't yet read about, in a landscape I enjoy; some snappy prose and a little suspense along the way. But I needed three more books, so I went to the library yesterday morning to see what paperback novels might be available. My library branch is very small so I knew the choices would be limited. On the other hand, my criteria were simple: I haven't read it before; the quality of the prose won't drive me to drink; the book will immerse me in a place and a situation that I find interesting in some way. 

This is what I came home with:

Ruth Moore's Spoonhandle (1946): Moore grew up on Gotts Island, a fishing community off Southwest Harbor, Maine, and became a fine regional novelist. This is her second book, set in the Depression, and dealing with locals versus summer people. I know the landscape well because this is where T and I go twice a year when we stay on Mount Desert Island at our friend's cottage. Downside: slightly too fat for backpack comfort. Plus side: Moore is a good prose stylist, and knows how to dispense irony.

Annie Ernaux's A Man's Place (1983): Ernaux won the Nobel a couple of years ago, but thus far I've only read one of her books, which was about big-box stores in contemporary France. This one is older: a memoir about her father, born into a laboring family who, according to the back cover, made "a slow ascent toward material comfort" while remaining difficult and distant with his wife and children. Plus-and-minus: very thin, so ideal for a backpack but not for enduring entertainment. Also, I didn't adore the book of hers I read before, though I do think about it often, so I am willing to try again. And I like learning about France.

Louise Penny's The Cruelest Month (2007): You already know who Louise Penny is, but I've only read one of her mysteries before. However, I did read it on vacation, so I can attest that it held up very well during a week of cold wet weather in a drafty cottage, a week punctuated by three naps per day and too much red wine with dinner. Like most of her procedurals, this one is set in Quebec, and I recall enjoying the immersion in its landscape and its French-English cultural push-pull. Also, the characters were various and easy to tell apart and I didn't instantly figure out the ending, so that was entertaining. Downsides: Slightly cringy prose style that may force me to exclaim "Why aren't you John Le Carre?" Also this copy is kind of beat up. Can it endure an overstuffed backpack?

Another heavy, sticky morning, but as far as I can tell, no rain fell overnight. Our drought goes on and on. 

And this household is back in vehicle limbo for the foreseeable future. Tom can't get anyone to look at his truck's power steering till after we return from Chicago, so once again I am carless. I know I shouldn't be grouchy about this, but I am a little. I've already spent too much of this summer borrowing other people's cars and begging for rides, and I hate having to start all over again. But Tom needs to take my car to work, so I am stuck.

Thus, today I'll be driving my generous neighbor's car across town so I can get my hair cut. Under normal circumstances I might just cancel the appointment, but that's not really an option on wedding-countdown week.

Otherwise, the day is fairly open. I'm working on a poem draft as well as web copy for next summer's conference. I'm rereading Byatt's Whistling Woman. I may start sussing out my November Poetry Kitchen class or the workshop I'll be leading at the Belfast Poetry Festival in October. I've got a couple of smaller appearances to prep for: a morning at a Jersey City high school in September, a morning in a Bates College class in October. And my Monson Arts high school classes begin in late September.

Yesterday I met with my friend Gibson, who's the executive director of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. He wanted to talk about how the organization can support me--specifically, through grant writing and promotion and helping to set up programming around the state. It was a really helpful conversation. Of course I need all the aid I can get with that sort of administrative work. But it was also good just to talk to a knowledgeable friend about the odd discomforts of the position: its amorphous expectations, its political undertow. I have a fairly clear idea about who I am as a poet in private life. But the public role remains mysterious.

What he made clear was that I need to do what I already know how to do: work with kids and teachers, work with community members . . . but also read books and write poems and continue being a striving, active maker. I already knew this internally, but it was good to hear it from someone else. A lot of people have a lot of ideas about what I should be doing, and I haven't always been able to align them with my actual capacities. Imposter syndrome is incurable. But it is possible to stop paying attention to it.

Last night's dreams have left a blur of sadness. They weren't scary; more, poignant, elegiac. But suddenly what arises most vividly is a bright bowl of freshly harvested, high-bush cranberries sitting on a table in front of me, and my hands in them, cleaning out stalks and stems. The jewel red of the berries, the pallor of my hands. I wasn't the main character of these dreams, more like a Nick Carraway kind of observer. Other family members came and went, ages all mismatched, old ones young, young ones aging, and the place was the Pennsylvania farm, setting of my summer childhood, but I was only a watcher, cleaning cranberries at a kitchen table, though the fruit has no real-life association with that place. Dreams are so very odd.

Yesterday ended up being a mishmash of errands as I spent way too much time driving around mall land trying to track down a few small items for next week's adventure. But wasting hours in South Portland turned out to be the right choice because, as T was pulling out of our parking space after last night's movie outing, the power steering in his truck suddenly died. He did manage to get us home, but not easily, which means that Gloria the shiny Mazda is going to have to take over as construction vehicle for the next few days. The timing isn't terrible as I'm not on the road for work until after we get back from Chicago. But I do have to figure out how I'm going to get across town for my haircut tomorrow. I guess I'll think of something.

Today I have two afternoon meetings scheduled, but the morning will be quiet. Maybe I'll look at notebook blurts or start drafting web copy for next summer's conference. I could start putting together class plans, but I don't think I'll worry about that quite yet. Maybe I'll work in the garden, if the sun's not too hot.

I'm unsure, undecided, unmoored. I don't know what I want for the hours or what will happen. It's not a bad state to be in. Maybe the dreams are still dreaming. Outside, a flock of gulls spirals overhead, screeching, complaining. Inside, Young Chuck paddles a paw in his chow dish. Upstairs, T sighs. The bed creaks as he turns onto his side. The small sounds of home life, layering against dream life, the private, inscrutable country of ghosts.

This morning I'm feeling sad about Dolly Parton's death, yet what a good life . . . a model for how to nurture both the self and generosity of spirit. I was a child in 1970s Appalachia, so I have a fish-eye awareness of the details of the world she sang about, and dramatized, and embodied, and performed. How does one portray trashy with love, not with condescension or self-loathing? I use the term here because my own family wrestled with it directly, veering between comic embrace and shame. I remember, after first meeting my dear friend Ray, he asked me if my relatives were trashy. He himself was from Appalachian Kentucky: for him, the term was a secret handshake. We would know something precious and vulnerable about one another if we faced it.

Dolly figured this all out. And how to laugh and be deeply serious at the same time. How to celebrate but not sugarcoat a heritage. How to change her tune when change was necessary. I am honored to have shared the planet with her.

**

Yesterday's school thing at Merrill Auditorium seemed to go well enough . . . at least, the listeners laughed and sighed in the right places, so I'm hoping the poem got across okay. It was very odd to read to such a massive audience. I couldn't help but recall my own entree into the world of Maine education: as a long-term substitute music teacher for 90 kids in a K-8 school in rural Somerset County--a far cry from 1,500 staff members across multiple sites in the biggest city in the state. Of course, in the grand scheme of city schools, the Portland system is tiny, not a patch on New York City or Chicago. But I daresay my Monson high schoolers would have been flummoxed at the sight of so many faces. The difference between our rural schools and our urban schools is vast. 

After I got home, I did manage to finish and ship that editing project. So today I'll be catching up on some smaller desk tasks, running a few errands, maybe weeding a flowerbed, maybe working on a poem draft. Tonight T and I will go out to watch an old Robert Mitchum noir called Out of the Past. It's nice to have a looser day ahead, a clear-ish desk, an evening to anticipate.

It's a touch cooler and less humid this morning than it has been. A breath of autumn sifts through the screens, and the wren's tea kettle tea kettle tea kettle is a little more subdued. One ripe walnut, then another, clonks down from the neighbors' tree, a sign that as soon as night lifts the local squirrels will hurl themselves back into harvest hysteria.

This morning I've got my big school event to get through, and afterward maybe I'll manage to finish the editing project--if not today, then certainly tomorrow. Given that it's a 500-pager, I'm relieved I've been able to plow through it so steadily. But it needs to be off my desk, and soon.

Suddenly the neighborhood falls silent, the only sound the bare murmur of the highway in the distance. Even the wren is mute, even the crickets. But now a cardinal speaks--cheer, cheer, chip chip chip--a cricket responds, in the half-dark a squirrel scuttles toward the walnut tree, and the day resumes.

I'm thinking about today's big event but I'm not feeling too nervous. Schools don't tend to make me anxious, though government events apparently do. I more or less know where I am with teachers, even when they're crabby. And surely a tale about a hapless middle school basketball team will lift a few spirits. That's my intent, anyway. To tell a good story. To help them forget to be scared by poems.

Night-morning, soft, black, damp. All windows open; air waves dense with cicadas and crickets. Above their thick racket a single whistling cardinal: Cheer, cheer, cheer, cheer. 

But already the black is moderating to gray. The neighbors' pale house looms. Sky flickers among branches. The cardinal falls silent as the insects drone on.

This will be a packed week: the big Portland Public Schools event tomorrow; meetings on Thursday; and all the while cranking away at that editing project; catching up on harvest stuff; undertaking the frivolous chores of wedding prep, like making sure I get my hair cut.

And Monday, as usual, is housework day--wrestling with bathrooms and floors, then buckling down to desk work, though I am going to take a break for a midmorning walk with a friend.

Yesterday I dealt with grass and watering; harvested another bushel of chard; baked a plum cake. I've still got my herb crops to work on this week: I need to freeze basil and parsley, cut sage for air-drying, pack up the already-dry oregano and thyme. Thank goodness I didn't plant a real vegetable garden this year. I would be insane right now, and I'm already a little bit crazed as it is.

We got a spit of rain yesterday afternoon, but nothing that counts as real moisture. We might get a few more drops today but they won't be the deep, days-long rain we need. Drought is settling in, and it's disheartening.

Still, without rain I was able to finish the firewood job yesterday. I trundled the rest of the seasoned logs from shed to basement hatch, tossed them in, then stacked everything, organized kindling, swept the bark mess up from the floor, and now chilly nights can arrive whenever they feel like it. I will have another round of firewood chores: in a couple of weeks we'll get a delivery of green logs that will need to be stacked in the woodshed, where they will dry out for next winter's use. But the basement transfer always feels especially big. I love the sight of a swept floor, tidy stacks, everything neat and utilitarian and ready for winter.

Today I'll deal with grass, such as it is. The only thing green in the lawn is straggly crabgrass, but it sure does like to grow, even without water. Then Tom and I will work on wrapping wedding gifts, which is more complicated than it sounds because we also need to figure out how to carry them in our luggage. And our luggage situation will be extra complicated, not only because of the gifts but also because of wedding outfits and the two overnights we'll be spending on the train.

For the moment, though, I'm just happy to be enjoying Sunday morning--two cups of coffee instead of one, the pleasure of knowing that T is upstairs in bed instead of flying out the door to work, a comfortable idle alone in my couch corner . . . 

Firewood in the cellar, sauce in the freezer, poems in the notebook. Let the winds howl.