And here I am, home again, after a fun overnight in the north  country with friends, then a busy energetic day in class, and a long drive home. I was so tired last night that I collapsed into bed at 8:15, yet my brain still kept ticking away: thinking about how the class had gone, what I might do with the kids next time. I find teaching so absorbing and all-consuming. I have no idea how anyone can do it full time; I am mush after every class.

The theme for the day was change, and we looked at two poems: the Inuit lyric I posted here a few days ago and Fady Joudah's "Mimesis." The kids are adept conversationalists about poems: they spent a great deal of time concentrating on the heavy lifting that the repetition of "and" does in the Inuit poem . . . and this was not something I needed to coax out of them. Likewise, in the Joudah poem, they immediately latched onto the the notion of cause and effect, the power of the "if-then" turn. Their responses to prompts were great too, and this time I had them do some group work as well: playing with "if-then" statements; pairing up with one another to read and comment on new drafts and then present their partner's draft to the rest of us. It was a lively day, and already they're starting to tease me, which is an excellent sign for the future.

Today I've got to cope with a pile of laundry and a pile of editing, plus do my exercises, plus clean the upstairs rooms, plus run errands: hunting down a ham bone for split pea soup, preordering a turkey for Thanksgiving, acquiring a few supplies for my NYC jaunt. The day will be busy busy . . . if I can hoist myself out of this couch corner.

If I can't: well, that will be another sort of story.