We got home late afternoon, much to the cat's joy and loud complaint. The flower gardens look beautiful: tulips everywhere, the quince beginning to bloom, carpets of violets. Today I will give everything a good watering, in between catching up with desk obligations and getting my hair cut and doing my exercise class and addressing the laundry pile and the housework. Tomorrow evening my next chapbook class begins: six Tuesday evenings covering what I usually distribute over three Sunday afternoons. So the classes will have familiar content but a new rhythm, and I need to spend time today figuring that out.

Our visit to Mount Desert Island was a respite, a real delight, and we are already planning a return in late October, when the cottage is uninhabited again. It's a dear place, much loved for many years, but our move to Portland has made it a bit harder to reach. Still, we can figure out how to get back more often. It seems important.

The roots we put down: I go up north to my friends' house in Wellington and I am embraced by the pines and firs of the homeland, though I am not on land that ever belonged to me. I go downeast to West Tremont and I step into a shabby fairy-tale volume: a little cottage by the sea, with its familiar windows and mugs and plates and crooked stairs, its wandering fields of forsythia and raspberries. I go west to Franconia, and there Robert Frost's musty little farmhouse waits, with its front porch staring into the mountains, its stars as bright as cities. None of these place are mine, but they all live in me.