One thing about an accidental weekend at home is that I have unexpectedly gotten a lot of yardwork done. Friday morning, before we left on our abortive mission, I'd frantically weeded and trimmed everything in the front yard. Then Saturday turned out to be cool and occasionally misty, so it was perfect for weeding (and thus for not perseverating about cars). I cultivated and tidied all of the backyard beds, refreshed the hummingbird feeder and the bird bath, watered seedlings and young transplants, and ran the trimmer. I even hacked weeds out of the gravel patio.

Today will be another cloudy, vaguely showery day,  Now that the front and back yards are (temporarily) lovely, all I have on my mind garden-wise is the long semi-naturalized strip between our driveway and the neighbors'. In gardener-speak, naturalized means a bed that's designed to mimic the natural spread of plant life. The plants don't necessarily occur in the wild, but they fill in as understory and spread in a casual-seeming manner. It's a useful strategy for difficult-to-cultivate areas such as this one, much of which is a tangle of tree roots.

But enough of this boring garden talk. Let's be overwhelmed by car decisions. Yikes.

I am not in Vermont. Yesterday evening, on route 93, just north of the Hooksett rest area in New Hampshire, my car suddenly lost power. I coasted to the shoulder, all of the engine's emergency lights flashing. The car would not move forward or backward. Traffic was flying past. It was scary, and there was nothing to do but call AAA and have the car towed back to Portland. So T and I spent the rest of our Friday evening in the cab of a tow truck. We got home a little after 8, and now Tina the Subaru is dead in my driveway, and I fear that this may really be the end for the old girl. I'll have her towed to the transmission shop on Monday, but I doubt we'll be able to face the cost of replacing it at her advanced age (and this is not her first transmission). Which leads me to the fearful situation of having to acquire another car. Which makes me want to put my head down and cry.

Obviously, things could have been much, much worse. Tina could have died in the middle of a lane. Our vehicle could have been clipped by a semi. As it happened, we failed just at the edge of the ramp from the rest area, so we were slightly protected from the onslaught of traffic. Still, it was an awful moment, and I never want to experience it again.

This morning will be all bustle-around-and-batten-the-hatches as T and I are heading to Vermont as soon as he gets home from work. Garden and yard stuff first; then packing and house stuff; then lug the Big Kitten to the cat kennel. Not a poem-filled day, but I've had a pack of them lately so that's probably just as well.

I've started rereading Austen's Persuasion, and it will be a good travel book: familiar but demanding--my favorite sort of comfort reading. I have little patience with milquetoast prose, even when I'm in need of rest. It's no relaxation to spend time with sloppily conceived characters, mechanized plots, and tone-deaf sentence style. When I read these kinds of books--and I do sometimes, for exploratory reasons--I'm at work: I'm paying attention to what I don't want to replicate in my writing or encourage in my teaching. I'm not resting.

For me, reading is often a joy, often a comfort, often a mystery, often a challenge. But it is never an escape.

Yesterday I lay in the hammock for a few minutes, in the late afternoon, staring up into the massive canopy of Norway maples whose roots and branches tangle the neighborhood's separate little backyards into a leviathans' grove. Their hugeness is startling, impressive, unnerving: the maples are a family of wooly mammoths peering down at a doll's picnic. But their intense green shade, watery sun-flicker as a breeze ripples among the broad leaves, their sky-reach . . . I know they are trouble, those trees. But they are also extraordinary.

I'm making good progress on my Poetry Kitchen plans. And by the way, there's still one open spot, so if you're at all interested in experimenting with prose-to-poem influence, do join us. It's been fun to choose passages and poems, to grapple with conversation possibilities and prompts for new drafts. I like creating these classes; I like the way the passages and poems fizz together in my thoughts, how the writing prompts become inevitable, like a chemical reaction.

Today I'll keep messing around with class plans. I'll try to fit in some gardening as I didn't end up accomplishing much outside yesterday. I'll keep reading Philip Roth's novel Indignation and finish Alice Notley's collection Mysteries of Small Houses. Maybe I'll take another look at my manuscript.  I'll listen to birdsong. I'll go out to write tonight.

Meanwhile. Trees.

T and I went out last night for an early movie and a late dinner, which is a date we should maybe have more often. As we were pleased to discover, it's easy to find a table in the Old Port at 8 p.m. on a weeknight, even in June. Mostly I tend to avoid the Old Port in the summer months, when it's the bastion of tourists and bar crawlers. But there are good restaurants in that neighborhood, and they are a pleasant stroll from the movie theater, through the briny night air, and a short drive home, along the lights of the cove. And it is nice to hold hands in public on a Tuesday.

Yesterday I got a chunk of work done on my Poetry Kitchen packet: all of the prose samples and most of the poems. I'll make a few more decisions today, and then I can start working on writing prompts. I also ordered a new printer. You may recall that a couple of years ago the roof leaked into our old one, and the machine has never recovered from the shock. For a while the left margins were still readable on the printouts (meaning that most poems were mostly legible), but last weekend, as I was printing out my manuscript draft, it gave up the ghost. Thus, I am spending yet more money on mechanized insentience. Blah.

Still, despite my luddite grumpiness, I am looking forward to a pretty day--sunny, mid-70s: an excellent day to hang sheets outside, listen to warblers in the woods, eat lunch in the garden; to cut fresh bouquets for the mantle and pull weeds in the shade; to sit by an open window in my blue chair, a book of poems in my lap, and watch robins splash in the birdbath. The Alcott House has its dreamy moments, and they are in bloom.

My dreams made me sad, though I can't remember details other than a room with two beds and the certainty that a task was looming.

Now, as I look out into the cool and cloudy morning, I can't shake the feeling that I am forgetting an obligation, letting someone down.

A cardinal whistles, pauses, whistles. Traffic growls in the distance. The air is very still.

In this darkened room, flowers shimmer . . . a jar of golden irises, a flagon of bridal veil and pale peonies.

Sunlight slashes through the heavy maples, streaking the neighbors' vinyl siding. A gray squirrel scuttles across their driveway, vanishes under the abandoned SUV whose tires are slowly sinking into the backyard earth.

Dream-sadness is nothing but loose ends. 

Except for eventually replacing my spring pansies with hot-weather flowers, I think I've finished my plant shopping for the year. I'll do some transplanting, and I'll keep sowing succession crops of salad greens, but I'm not buying any big-ticket shrubs or trees. I picked up a few last things as my neighbor and I wandered through nurseries and plant sales this weekend, and earlier last week I bought a raspberry plant . . . at the grocery store, of all places: a variety I've been looking for for years--compact, thornless, and non-spreading, perfect for a tiny homestead. Tom and I had a fantastic raspberry patch in Harmony, but there is no way to manage such a sprawling situation in this little garden. So finding the Glencoe berry bush was a score.

A thunderstorm came through yesterday evening, and rain must have kept falling through the night because everything is sopped again this morning. I've got my weekly housework to deal with today, and I'll go for a walk with a friend, and of course there's my manuscript to prod. For the moment I'm still mostly on employment hiatus, though I'm expecting an onslaught of new editing to show up soon, and the conference is rolling ever closer. Paperwork-wise, I'm prepped for Monson, but this week I'll start plotting out the syllabus details for my July Poetry Kitchen class.

Looking ahead at my calendar, I am already feeling a twinge of nerves about the amount of traveling I'll be doing in the fall. I know, as an introvert with a performance career, that I need to let myself keep soaking up this temporary peace. If I don't, I'll be a mess in the long run. But I've always found it hard to tamp down my guilt about my earning gaps.

So I scrub toilets and tell myself that I am contributing. Ah, the things we put ourselves through. No one else is griping at me. I can do all of the griping myself.