The central Maine mud-season artist at work.

It's 17 degrees this morning in the little northern city by the sea, the coldest it's been for quite a while. But the sun is supposed to shine, and temperatures are supposed to rise, and perhaps the plants will get less crabby. 

Yesterday I washed floors, packed up some stuff for Goodwill, cleaned out a couple of closets, read the Aeneid and James Baldwin and Wendell Berry, and went grocery shopping. I made a delicious dinner for myself of spaghetti squash, spinach, and chicken breast marinated in lemon and garlic. I drank tea and ate Icelandic yogurt for dessert and watched a pre-code movie called Hot Saturday starring a very young Cary Grant as an incorrigible roué.

This morning I'll do a bit more spring cleaning, a bit more reading, endure my exercise class, and such, and then in the afternoon I'll drive downtown and meet up with my high school poet and we will spend a couple of hours trying out different ways of ordering her book manuscript.

This new life as single-woman-with-long-distance-romance has a notably different pace from the life of married housewife. I am not used to simply pleasing myself. Cooking what I want for dinner. Eating that dinner when I want to eat it. Such a little thing, but it feels so self-indulgent after so many years as the family cook.

It's a funny thing: I am gleefully independent and self-indulgent as a reader and a writer, but in the household I am always thinking about what everyone else will thrive on: clean clothes, good food, a welcoming space. I like those things too, but my psyche addresses them as caretaking, as mothering, as doing chores. When I'm the only beneficiary of my caretaking, life feels strange.

Of course I can't help but compare my state of mind now with how I felt during my last year in Harmony, when I was alone and so incredibly sad. Tom and I have swapped places geographically: now he is back up north, and I am in the south. We are both focusing on our art. We are cheerful about the separation, and the separation has a distinct end point.  But I also think about the longer, inevitable, permanent separation. The final divide, that one of us will need to weather alone.