Yesterday was exactly the day I've been dreaming of: a full day outside--hanging laundry, setting up my garden architecture, shopping for plants and seeds, prepping beds, sowing seeds, filling pots with soil . . . so much puttering, and all day long a fresh wind that made me lift my nose like a hound.

Now that I'm reducing my vegetable footprint to the five garden boxes, I've opened up a lot of space for flowers. At the same time I've got things like pea fencing and a bean trellis to repurpose. So, with luck, there are going to be a lot of climbers among the flowers. I do love to watch peas grow, and this year I'm going to watch sweet peas instead of shell peas. Last year I foraged four iron plant posts off the street, and now I'm going to use them as supports for mid- and late-summer vines--scarlet runners, morning glories, canary-creepers.

I feel pretty happy about this change. I wasn't sure I would, but I do. It's going to take a lot of pressure off me in a lot of ways--cut down on my groundhog angst for one thing, reduce the harvest and processing frenzy for another, but still keep my basic kitchen garden fresh and accessible, still let me revel in earth-things.

Glorious Saturday, how glad I am to see you . . . though Pester Hour was annoyingly prompt this morning. Young Chuck knows all of the ways to get me out of bed: licking my eyelids might be the very worst, though trying to put his nose up my nose is also bad. In any case, both are impossible to sleep through.

But now he is happily filled with breakfast, and I am happily filling with coffee, so all is forgiven.

Last time I looked, temperatures were supposed to get into the 50s today, which means I am going to plant. I'll set up the cold frame and sow lettuce mix under it. I've also got radish and cilantro seeds to sow, though I'll need to acquire arugula and spinach. I'll get a load of laundry onto the outside lines. I'll buy a new hose and some groundhog fencing. If I have time I'll start weeding out the first round of maple seedlings; those little monsters always start invading early.

I am so eager for a day of fresh air and puttering. Yesterday I celebrated my first outdoor laundry of the season. All day long I would glance out the window just for the pleasure of watching towels kick and flutter in the spring breeze. And then late afternoon: burying my face in the stiff clean shirts and snuffing up the scent of wind . . . There is nothing sweeter.

Spring always makes my blood tingle. It is my favorite season, an amazement every year.

Yesterday I had a two-hour zoom meeting with Julia, Maine's outgoing poet laureate, which was incredibly helpful. I asked her every little niggling question I could think to ask, and she was generous and open and so supportive. I'm grateful have her as a guide into this strange new laureate world.

Already I'm getting a lot of requests and invitations, which means that already I'm trying to sort out priorities, read situations, figure out how to be fair to others and myself. Public-facing introvert is a peculiar role, and I'm lucky to have friends with experience in the matter who can advise me when I become foolish.

Today I'll be back to ye olde copyediting, with a break for a late-morning meeting regarding some Monson Arts stuff. Tonight I'll go out and listen to my friends read--Merrill Memorial Library in Yarmouth, 6 p.m., if you want to meet me there. And then this weekend I hope to devote myself to Tom, Chuck, and the garden.

It was, as always, a refreshment to go out to write last night. One group member said that she tells her friends she "writes with luminaries" on Thursday nights, and I agree. I, too, write with luminaries . . . these bright lights, these bright voices; these explorers taking their first tentative steps into an unknown land. It is great good fortune to sit among them.

Taking yesterday as a personal day was a good idea. I managed to finish a couple of writing assignments for a project I'm working on with Teresa and Jeannie; I caught up with emails; I finished the McMurtry novel; and I cleared leaves out of all of the garden beds, plus raked, picked up sticks, and pruned the rose-of-sharons. I felt like normal, everyday me again, which was restful . . . though I would prefer that normal, everyday me didn't also have to deal with normal, everyday household debacles. This time it's the dishwasher, which refuses to drain and smells like burning motor when it runs. Presumably the pump is shot, and now we're trying to figure out if T can forage another dishwasher from his worksite or if we have to buy a whole new machine.

Today I'll be back on the clock. I have an early morning zoom meeting, and then I'll start sorting through piles of new editing. In between I've got to go to the grocery store; I've got to deal with laundry; I want to get out to write tonight. I need to bake for the poets, and maybe I'll also find a moment to work up the soil in my garden boxes and prep them for planting.

One thing I need to return to is my poetry manuscript. In the flurry of the past few weeks I've laid it aside and more or less put it out of my thoughts. Yet the poems in the collection are starting to trickle back into my awareness. I find myself idly repeating words and phrases; clusters of words rise up as visual memory. Clearly the book is begging for my attention, though I don't yet know what it wants from me. 

I drove home through snow, rain, and sleet, but fortunately nothing seemed to be sticking to the road so mortal terror was held at bay. Still, I was relieved to return to the rapturous paws of Chuck, to kneel on the hearthrug and light a fire in the stove, to sink into the couch and watch the weather swirl tamely beyond the panes.

Today, finally, will be a personal day: I've got a few obligations to sew up, but mostly I'll be reading, writing, and gardening. There'll be laundry to deal with, as always, and dinner and dishes and firewood and emails. But I'm not going to look at the new editing projects until at least tomorrow. If I'm feeling wild, I might even postpone them till Monday. I need to catch my breath.

The poet laureate announcement has been, among other things, extremely emotional. I've spent 30 years working in what has felt, more or less, like obscurity. Rural public school students, small gatherings of K-12 teachers, poets striving out of the limelight: this has been the bulk of my cohort. I have little experience of the poetry business on a national level. I have no academic network. But suddenly I am awash with responses from people who seem to have noticed what I was doing. It's an awkward feeling to suddenly discover one isn't invisible. Gratifying, of course, and humbling. But also bewildering.

Thank goodness for my little shabby house; for Big Chuck breathing affectionately into my ear; for Tom in his worn Carhartts, smiling at me. Thank goodness for cups of tea and my tiny study and daffodils and a brisk spring wind.

It's cold and windy and unspringlike in central Maine, which is pretty typical for early April but annually disheartening. Two and half hours down the road, in Portland, crocuses are blooming, daffodils are budding, but here the lake is still patchy with ice, road dirt spins in little tornadoes, and the gray breeze is raw and urgent. I haven't driven on any gravel roads yet this season, but most likely they're rutted and potholed and greasy with thaw. That's spring in this neck of the woods: raw wind plus mud. I have written a hundred poems about central Maine spring, and all of them are amazed by its pigheadedness.

As always before dawn, log trucks are roaring through town. A little snow is forecast. I am lying in bed thinking about words and the fact that I forgot my gloves at home. 

This is the poem my son wanted me to read at the statehouse:

Spring on the Ripley Road

 

Knick knack, paddywhack,

Ordering the sun, 

Learning planets sure is fun.

                        —Paul’s backseat song

 

Five o’clock, first week of daylight savings.

Sunshine doggedly pursues night.

Pencil-thin, the naked maples cling to winter.

 

James complains,

“It’s orbiting, not ordering.”

 

Everything is an argument.

The salt-scarred car rockets through potholes,

hurtles over frostbitten swells of asphalt.

 

James explains, “The planets orbit the sun.

Everything lives in the universe.”

 

Sky blunders into trees.

A fox, back-lit, slips across the road

and vanishes into an ice-clogged culvert.

 

Paul shouts, “Even Jupiter? Even foxes?

Even grass? Even underwear?”

 

Trailers squat by rusted plow trucks;

horses bow their searching, heavy heads.

The car dips and spins over the angry tar.

 

James complains, “I’m giving you facts.

Why are you so annoying?”

 

The town rises from its petty valley.

Crows, jeering, sail into the pines,

and the river tears at the dam.

 

Paul shouts, “Dirt lives in the universe!

I want to be annoying!”

 

Everywhere, mud.

Last autumn’s Marlboro packs,

faded and derelict, shimmer in the ditch.

 

James says,

“When you get an F in life

it’ll be your own fault.”

[from Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)] 

Monday has rolled around so quickly: I feel like I was packing for Vermont just moments ago, and now it's a week later and I need to pack for Monson.

Fortunately the weather looks decent for driving. Our class can't afford any more snow days: we're rushing to get work finished for the kids' gallery show, though I have to say the kids themselves have been incredibly responsible about submitting their chosen pieces, which is not always the case. Tomorrow we'll be considering titles for individual works, doing last-stage revisions, and meeting with the visual art students to discuss an overall title for the show. Then, during our off-weeks, I'll copyedit and format everything and we should be ready for the public.

The end of a school year is always poignant: I like being around young people, like getting to know them as writers and thinkers and bundles of emotion. Yet within a few weeks they'll scatter and I'll likely never see most of them again. That's the tale of teaching, but it still makes me a little sad.

This morning I'll finish the housework I didn't finish yesterday. I'll go for a walk, and I'll read my McMurtry novel and some Aurora Leigh. I'm briefly between editing projects, so I've been trying to stuff in a few other tasks while I've had the chance. One is to schedule a new Poetry Kitchen class for midsummer: "Syntax as Spark: Poets Learning from Prose." I posted it yesterday afternoon and it's already half full, so snag a spot soon if you're interested.

Once I get back from Monson, I'm hoping to have some plain open hours this week to write and to garden. I haven't had much opportunity to do either, and I'm in need of both.

Oh, and before I forget, I want to tell you about an event on Friday evening, when several members of my Thursday writing group will be reading at Merrill Memorial Library in Yarmouth, Maine. I'll be in the audience, not performing, but all of us will be available to talk about our community writing practice and to offer tips for creating a circle of your own.