It's a cold morning, 33 degrees--still not quite a frost, but we're getting close. The furnace hums and burbles; the cat leaps back into the house as if his paws are on fire; fresh hot coffee tastes like the best of all possible drinks.

I did pull myself into shape yesterday, mostly by doing hours of yard work . . . sorting out and bagging a pile of roots and sticks mixed with soil and ancient trash and shed detritus, which had been accumulating in the ditch beside the shed for years before we arrived. It was a dirty ugly mess, unpleasant to untangle and satisfying to delete. I rolled up hoses and stored them in the shed, and I raked leaves against the shrubs and into the flowerbeds, first round of several more mulching sessions as the enormous maples slowly shed their loads.

I came inside with blisters on my hands and dirt caked under my nails, and a much lighter heart.

This morning I'll be leading a revision workshop, but afterward I'll head outside to finish the ugly-detritus job. We've got a load of green firewood arriving on Monday morning, so I want to get space cleaned out and ready for wood moving. With our new woodshed we now have a neat and efficient pipeline arrangement: this year's dry wood in the basement, next year's green wood in the covered shed, no more snow-wet, tarp-flapping outdoor stacks, though we'll still have to move the burnable stack into the house each year. My Wellington friends have a beautiful arrangement right outside the back door--dry wood on one side, green wood on the other, a covered walkway for the wood mover--but this is our city compromise.

I'm still reading Denis Johnson's Already Dead. I'm working on poem revisions and even some submissions. I've finished an editing project, and timing-wise this small hiatus is really helpful, as the craze of my November schedule is looming. Starting next Friday I'll be on the road for a week, bouncing from Portland to Mount Desert Island to Monson to Portland to New York to New Jersey to New York to Portland. Already I'm wondering how I'm ever going to get my laundry done. 

I'm not going to waste energy fretting about that yet, however. Today: teach and then dig. Leftover pot roast for dinner. A baseball game afterward (go, Phillies!). A long night's sleep in my own bed.