Today, hard as it is to believe, I am a person with a car that has a working air conditioner. My parents gave it to me as a gift, the garage was able to do the work quickly, and voila: cold! 

I don't think I'll be playing with the A/C much today, however. We've got another rainy day looming, and I've got nowhere hot to go. Maybe this afternoon I'll do some wet transplanting--cutting back the encroaching phlox and moving chunks of it into the rock wall--but mostly I'll be at my desk, or phoning my family, or getting phone calls from my family, or texting madly with my sister, or gnashing my teeth. Yesterday I finally got a start on my conference prep, but I still have a lot of work to do in that regard. Kerrin and I talked in the afternoon and sussed out who would handle what. No surprise: she'll take the lead with contemporary work, I'll take the lead with the old. So I'm immersed in Frost and Marvell and thinking hard about strategies for leading participants into creative/analytical collision with that work. And I've got a big editing project to finish and a bunch of emails/queries/administrative stuff to deal with . . . but I've also decided that tonight I'm going to the salon to write. It's been weeks since I've drafted anything new, and I'm in need.

I look back at that paragraph and see that it's a big messy knot, which just about sums up my head, and I'm not going to edit it into prettiness. Paragraph = state of mind.

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. . . and just now I've learned that my dear friend, the great poet Betsy Sholl, has written about my poem "Mr. Kowalski." I'm overwhelmed and tearful and very, very grateful.