Remember, a few days ago, when I was moping about book reviews and my bad marketing stamina and generally behaving all woe-is-me? Well, this morning I am here to humbly apologize for being such a goon.

If anyone were to make a B-level Hallmark Christmas movie about the happy endings of poets, they could borrow some plot ideas from me. Because yesterday, I for some reason clicked the Instagram icon on my laptop. I rarely post anything on Instagram and hardly ever even look at it, so I don't know what I was up to there, but in any case I floated onto the site and saw that I had a notification. Eh, someone wants me to friend their cute dog's page, I thought. But I clicked on the notification anyway, and when I did I discovered I'd been awarded a prize: Scoundrel Time's 2024 Editors' Choice Award in Poetry. Huh? To add to the confusing hilarity, I learned that my good friend, the novelist Tom Rayfiel, had been been awarded the nonfiction award, so of course I immediately emailed him and repeated Huh? and he promptly wrote back pretending that we would soon be swanning around at an imaginary gala in crushed velvet, so that was a fine, if startling, entry into the day.

And then, in the afternoon, I got an email from the poet Rebekah Wolman telling me she'd just published a review of Calendar . . . and what a review! . . . long, and detailed, and thoughtful, and generous. I am, as I told my friend Gretchen, gobsmacked. I feel like a cat after a nice long brushing: electric and purring and wild-eyed. I mean, what the heck? This kind of stuff never happens. Winning a prize that I didn't even apply for? Receiving such a dense and careful book review? This is Christmas right here, friends.

Anyway, I am sorry you had to listen to me groan last week, and I'd like to swear it will never happen again, but of course I am human, so it will. I tender my regrets in advance, and give you permission to slap me around a little (via rhymed couplets only, please) if I get out of hand again.

* * *

Okay, now that the mea culpas are out of the way, let's talk about Christmas decorating. Christmas is basically a display of seasonal kitsch. I am a person who dislikes clutter and cutesy, so my approach to the season always strikes me as comic, because in December I am wholeheartedly devoted to sentimental knickknackery. Awkward little-boy-made ornaments, a rubber King Kong, strange styrofoam gingerbread men, a newspaper cut-out of Elvis, the nativity set my great-aunt Rose made in her ceramics class . . . all take pride of place. In about a week, the onslaught of stuff will be driving me nuts and I'll be desperate to pack it up again, but for the moment I am awash in delight with the silliness. Tomorrow our young people arrive, and so I am scrubbing candlesticks, assembling the candle chimes, setting votives in the windows. I'm not sure how my mind is working here: maybe This place needs is to look like it's on fire is a form of parental affection. Whatever the case, I am having fun laughing at Christmas, and maybe you are too.

For whatever reason, my writing group was especially fun last night. Everyone was in a party spirit, our dear Betsy had recovered well enough from her concussion to take part, and people were writing like fiends. Everyone's draft felt like a marvel. It was thrilling to listen to them, thrilling even to read my own.

I brought along a prompt based on the Swift poem I posted in the comments a few days ago. What that means is that the conversations I've been having with Teresa are now bleeding into the conversations I'm having with the Portland poets . . . i.e., my inner life is swirling beyond my thoughts into chatter and experiment, which is exciting. Poetry as social currency is a dry way to put it, but what I mean is that art-as-public-life doesn't need to have anything to do with publication or performance but may simply be "Hey, pals! The eighteenth century is talking to us!"

This reminds me: a couple of days ago the folksinger Dave Mallett suddenly died. Dave was a thorough Mainer, born in Piscataquis County and living most of his life there, but he was also a legend in the folk world--most famously for writing "The Garden Song" ("inch by inch, row by row . . . "), which Pete Seeger made legendary. He performed widely, and his children also became traveling musicians. (His sons are the Mallett Brothers Band, an alt-rock band with a wide New England following.) In the days when I lived in the homeland, I'd run into Dave often in the grocery store. We'd chat a bit; sometimes he'd appear at the shows I played with Doughty Hill. He was a presence--someone who had managed to become a national figure in his chosen medium while remaining a regular local guy.

I've been thinking of him this week. "How rare that is, to be both local and extremely serious," I started saying to myself, and then I thought, "Maybe not so rare." Alan Bray, who teaches the visual arts arm of the Monson high school program I lead: he's another one of that ilk--trained in Italy, selling his paintings in NYC, but never leaving home. Then there's my friend Steve Cayard, a nationally renowned birchbark canoe builder, tucked into his quiet shop in the woods. What I'm saying, I guess, is that art-as-public-life can be as simple as sitting around a dinner table talking about the grove where you harvested spruce roots for sewing birchbark or which local hayfield is most beautiful under the setting sun.

***

Speaking of art in the homeland--

Soon Monson Arts will be opening registration for the 2025 Conference on Poetry and Learning, and I'll be able to announce our guest faculty and talk about a few of the adventures that Teresa and I are planning for that week. Last year's conference was a real eye-opener for me, in lots of personal ways. But amazingly it also turned out to be a boon for Monson Arts . . . which is to say, our classes filled and we netted a small profit. Meanwhile, we've also made the decision to strictly limit class numbers to 15 people, which means that we will maintain the intimacy of the experience but will never be a giant moneymaker.

For those who are new to this blog: the Conference for Poetry and Learning (which I direct) is dedicated to helping teachers and other community builders bring poetry into their workplaces, into conversation with other art forms, and into the daily civil discourse this nation so desperately needs. Many of the conference participants have institutional support: that is, some or all of their tuition comes from school professional development funds. But others work in poor schools or outside of institutions altogether. Last year we gathered together enough scholarship money to bring in several people who would not otherwise have been able to attend, and I hope that will again be the case this year.

And as you know, I'm also devoted to Monson's high school studio art program, which allows a cohort of rural students to spend an entire school year focusing closely on their writing or visual art. That program depends on outside support to survive. So here, too, we would welcome anything you could toss into the pot to make sure that these kids, many from poor isolated northern communities, continue to have the opportunity to live in the world of art.

The Monson Arts donation button allows you to choose where you'd like to allocate your gift. If you're able to help us keep these programs going, all of us at Monson would be endlessly grateful.

Alarm didn't go off this morning, so we are floundering, elephantine, around the house trying to pretend we remember all of the steps to the get-Tom-off-to-work dance. But I did manage to make coffee, and now I am sitting here in my couch corner attempting to become awake.

I spent much of yesterday with my friend Betsy, who's recovering from a concussion and is highly bored by not being able to read, write, or even watch convalescent TV. We went for a long walk, and then we ate lunch at her place, and we talked nonstop, so I am hoping that at least I made her tired enough for a nap. Otherwise I had a pretty quiet day.

But what would a day be without car trouble? Would it be any day at all? On Wednesday, as I was coming back from Monson, a truck kicked a stone into my windshield, and the ding, which I considered ignoring, has turned into an expanding crack, which I cannot ignore, and so there goes another $400 into the pockets of the car guys (a cost that neatly slips under the insurance deductible, of course). Meanwhile, T's truck is still in the shop: we have yet to learn what that astronomical fee will be. [Cue teeth gnashing here.]

Well, at least I don't have to go anywhere. Tom can borrow my wounded car, and I can stay home and dust the shelves and polish the dining room table and work on my poem and read a sad novel and walk to the store. It would be nice to never need two cars again. Those days are not here yet, but maybe someday.

I did end up teaching yesterday; and though the day was shortened by the ice delay, most of the kids actually appeared, so that was a relief. We worked on self-portraits--via description, voice, favorite song, and ode--and it was such a pleasure to watch them burrow into their thoughts. Kids are so great.

Now here I am, home again, with three weeks of unemployment unrolling before me. Sometimes I do wonder what it would be like to have vacation and a paycheck. Still, I treasure these cycles of off-time, even if they are financially dicey.

Mostly I'm ready for the holiday. This week I'll shine up the house for company, and before long I'll be hanging out with my Chicago kids and completing my baking assignments for Christmas dinner. But otherwise my time is my own: no teaching, no editing . . . just reading and writing and walking. And traveling, of course: there are trips to Vermont and NYC to throw into the mix, and I'll be teaching while I'm in New York, which will be challenging--not to mention we'll be staying in Ray's apartment, so it will be emotionally draining as well. But that's a few weeks away. I don't need to focus on it yet.

I've started rereading Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day, one of the great novels of World War II London. I've written about this novel before: it is strange and difficult, and I love it deeply, but it is one of the saddest stories I know. I wonder if sad is a good choice, and I wonder what good means and also choice. Sometimes the books seem to fall off the shelf into my hands. Read me now. I am at their mercy.

Apparently last night it snowed up here in the homeland, and now it is pouring rain, and I slept through the whole thing so was confused when an email flashed on my phone: school delays, huh, wha? It looks like at least half of the schools that feed into Monson Arts have one-hour delays because of icing, so I guess my class will not be getting started quickly this morning, if at all.

Thus, here I shelter in bed, listening to trucks rumble past in the slush and considering the sad fact that the store doesn't open for another hour so I can't acquire any coffee till then. In the upstairs apartment someone's talk radio swoops and yawps, then suddenly falls silent. It feels odd to be in this place for work purposes and now suddenly have my day hip-checked. I can't decide if this is restful or a pain. I mean, I want to love a snow day. Doesn't everyone? But what about a snow day when I'm far from home in a coffee-less apartment and might not get paid, even though I drove all the way up here with a sheaf full of teaching plans? Kind of takes the shine off the situation.

Monday, and another chilly morning in the little northern city by the sea.

Unlike Saturday, which was sheer laziness, yesterday was productive, in a housekeeper sort of way. I plowed through a giant laundry project, extending even to washing the bed pillows. I scrubbed the bathroom walls and ceiling. I did the grocery shopping and I made a ragu and I watered my houseplants. It was a prosaic day, but a useful one.

This morning I'll go for a walk with friends, then finish the week's vacuuming before embarking on my final work trip before Christmas. The weather looks decent, and I'm not afraid of my car (for the moment, anyway), so it should be an easy-enough journey north.

Once I get back, I suppose I should try to restart my book promotion. The events of the fall pretty much kneecapped me in that regard. I'd been hoping for a few more reviews, and maybe they'll still appear, but I can't afford to send out any more free copies in hopes that someone will decide to write one. It's a conundrum. I do have an interview scheduled for early February and a few more readings in the works. If you have other ideas, let me know.

In the meantime I just keep writing more poems. I am the faucet that won't stop dripping.

Another cold dark morning, and I had the good fortune to sleep until 6:30, so I am feeling holidayish, sitting here in front of my little lopsided Christmas tree as the furnace mutters and the coffee steams. Now the cat shoots in from outside and starts loudly crunching his chow. He may be twelve years old, but he is full of pep, having dumped over the tree twice this season as well as a glass of red wine. He is swaggering around the place like a petty dictator . . . the king of Maine, as my future daughter-in-law likes to coo at him, despot of all he surveys.

Tomorrow I'll be on the road again, heading north for my final Monson class of the calendar year. So today I'll do a bit of housework--clean bathrooms, wash sheets and towels, maybe catch up on the dusting. I want to put together a ragu, a slow-cooked Italian meat sauce that I'll eventually ladle over bucatini. I might watch some football late in the day. I want to take a walk, and I want to read. Miraculously I have finished all of my Christmas shopping, wrapping, and mailing, so my only prep will center around slowly getting ready for the kids, who will arrive next Sunday. Given how much I usually dread these weeks (oh, how I hate the shop-and-glop), we're in pretty good shape. And the young people are coming! That makes everything shine.

Yesterday afternoon T and I drove into town for a couple of beers and a shared bowl of poutine, then came home and watched a dreadful Barbara Stanwyck flick (Ladies of Leisure, an early Frank Capra film with a beastly romantic hero who makes the girl fall in love with him by deriding her as a cheap floozy) and ate bibimbap, which I'd never made before and now will make all of the time--such a good recipe, with bits of various vegetables (thinly sliced sweet potatoes, kale and wild mushrooms from my freezer, slivers of red onion), all roasted on a sheet pan and served in big bowls with oven-baked rice and eggs and spiced with gochujang, kimchi, and sesame oil.

I also spent time scratching away at my current poem draft, which is beginning to assume a more definite shape. It's arisen from the notion of disappearance, the prompt word that Teresa, Jeannie, and I gave ourselves during last week's zoom confab. This will be our third round of collaborative prompting: the first two words were edge/archway and ledge, and the results were surprising. The words themselves are vague and open-ended, and we don't consult with one another as we write, yet the echoes within the results have been notable. I'm not sure what will eventually happen with these pieces, but I know we are beginning to imagine some sort of collaborative collection or performance. It's exciting.

It's winter this morning in the little northern city by the sea: 15 degrees with an Arctic breeze, and the cat is appalled. Thank goodness for cozy Alcott House, where the furnace growls and the lamps glitter and the coffee is hot. A beautiful unstructured Saturday looms. There's not one single demand on my calendar, and I'm still feeling fizzy from yesterday's poet conversations.

In the morning I hung out with Betsy and we mused about syntax and grief; in the afternoon Teresa and I also mused over syntax, this time in relation to our surprised pleasure in revisiting the poems of Pope and Swift. As I said to Tom in the evening, in Harmony I never spent the bulk of any day socializing via conversations about syntax. I never talked to anyone about syntax. What is this undiscovered world?

Teresa and I have been trying to prepare ourselves for a deep dive into Lyrical Ballads, the original published version of Wordsworth and Coleridge's collaborative collection. But first we wanted to revisit the eighteenth-century poets, and now we're feeling that we need to embark on a side trip into the proto-romantics Cowper and Southey. It's taking us a very long time to get going on this project, but I have to say that Swift and Pope delighted us--a thrill for me, as I remember slogging through Pope in high school and thinking that I might have to poke out my eyes with pencils. I love to be wrong.

Swift, though, I've always adored. As I said to Teresa, his poems are a straight arrow into the novels of Dickens: cluttered comedic observations of London life, nearly cinematic in their sensory clarity. They are a joy. And now it turns out that Pope is clear, intelligent, witty, and precise--as a critic much more interesting to me than, say T. S. Eliot. What a discovery! Who knows: maybe Cowper and Southey will be wonderful too. I can only hope.

So I had an exciting day, lit up by conversations with two of the finest poets I know, diving into the poetry of the past in ways that made the past feel muscular and alive. Betsy and I wandered along the river-edges of Dante and Milton. Teresa and I couldn't stop talking about the prosaic old rhymed couplet--how Swift and Pope unreeled the form so immaculately, so uniquely, each to such different purpose.

For me, these kinds of conversations are a love language. I don't know how else to put it. I come away from them feeling like my heart has cracked open. I get overwrought: I pace around the house: I want to slip Valentines under my friends' doors; I want to sketch little pictures of them in the margins of my notebook.

And still to come this winter: reading Lear with my younger son. So much to look forward to.

Take that, horrible incoming president and your pack of hyenas. We read the hard books over here. We read them, and we talk about them, and then we read more. You fuckers. Just try to stop us.

Yesterday afternoon I took a small side path into cooking--baking a batch of chocolate crinkles, putting together a beet salad--but that was just a blip. The bulk of my hours were spent reading and writing: a marathon day, devoted to words. I wrestled with my long poem, I finished rereading The Years, I studied a short story I admire to try to figure out why it works so well, and then in the evening I went out to write with my friends. Of course I also accomplished a few pedestrian things, like laundry and dishes, and I did go for a walk and I did help Tom get his truck back from the mechanic. But words were the feature of the day, and I tried to make my hours count.

Today won't be quite as focused as I have errands to run, but I will still carve out some morning hours for myself, and then in the afternoon Teresa and I will chatter on the phone about Swift, Pope, Johnson, and the poets who swam in their wake. I'm quite looking forward to what she has to say because I enjoyed rereading those 18th-century guys far more than I expected to.

Swirling in the world of letters . . . pacing the floors of the Alcott House, alone with my bookshelves and my notebooks, new lines unrolling under my fingers. What a dreamy few days I've had.

Yesterday's weather was truly nasty, and I spent too much time driving around in it, mostly because T has to borrow my car today so I needed to get my errands done while I could. As a result, grocery shopping in a nor'easter. Ick.

Thus my house felt particularly pleasant after a morning spent wrestling with ice and sluice and gale and grocery bags. I simmered minestrone, I made strides on a new poem draft, I read Virginia Woolf beside a wood fire, and meanwhile the roof creaked in the wind and rain dashed against the panes. I'm guessing a few trees came down around town last night. It was a wild storm.

But all is quiet this morning, and I have a peaceful day ahead of me. There's nothing on my calendar except my writing group tonight. I hope to keep working on the poem draft, make a batch of Christmas cookies, go for a long walk now that the ice and slush have washed away, discover another novel to read.

My editing hiatus arrived just at the right time--not for my financial well-being, of course; but given the uproars of November, these few loose days have been a kind of cloaking device: a cover for convalescence disguised as idleness, thought disguised as blankness, work disguised as self-indulgence. My long slow hours, mostly spent alone in these rooms, have been both medicinal and expansive. There's been no television or radio chatter, nothing to erode my inner concentration, nothing but the click and shift of house and body. And now I am writing what may be a long poem. I am reading The Years, one of the great books of my heart. I am living inside an ebb and flow of thought and feeling, that mysterious tidal sensation of making.

[And I think over again]

 

anonymous Inuit poet, translator unknown

 

And I think over again,
my small adventures,
when with a shore wind I drifted out
in my canoe,
and thought I was in danger—
my fears,
those I thought so big,
for all the vital things
I had to get to and reach.

And yet, there is only one thing,
one great thing—
to live to see in huts and on journeys
the great day that dawns,
and the light that fills the world.

Freezing drizzle this morning; high-wind warning for the afternoon: I like most weather, but this sort just seems mean. Poor T didn't get home till 9:30 last night, so he's already tired, and now he has to wake up and drive in this. Ugh.

After work yesterday he went straight to the gallery and spent the evening installing display panels for his photo collective's giant annual auction. So I had a long day by myself. I shoveled snow, worked on class plans, read Swift, Pope, and Johnson. I mailed Christmas boxes. I made jam-filled cookies and read Virginia Woolf. I lolled by the fire and ate a baked potato and a leftover piece of chicken and watched North by Northwest. I baked an extra potato, just in case nobody bothered to feed Tom at the gallery, and when he came home unfed, I was very happy to produce it, along with more leftover chicken, and set him up with a hot dinner, a couch blanket, and a cold beer. I may not be able to improve the weather, but at least I can coddle.

This morning I am going out to meet a new person, a mandolin player. I'm not exactly nervous, but I am prepared for failure. Not everyone can endure my playing style; traditional bluegrass musicians can be particularly unbending about it. They think I'm too highfalutin. So we'll see what transpires: maybe nothing, but maybe something. I am prepared for anything.

In the interstices I'll work on class plans, finish the Woolf novel, get onto my mat, make minestrone, haul firewood, work on a poem, fold laundry, take a walk if the streets aren't too icy, maybe make another batch of Christmas cookies, return a library book, pick up a few groceries, stare out the window, wince at the news and then try to focus ever harder on my own work, which is what? . . . cooking? being an affectionate partner? messing around with words? In the air they sound thin and unimportant, but they're all I've got.

Yesterday's visit to the doctor was ridiculously slow (I read a whole lot of Woolf's The Years while waiting in that office), but in the end it turned out to be uplifting. I appear to be in surprisingly good shape, and I got the good news that I'm continuing to slowly but steadily lose weight. (I don't own a scale, so the annual weight reveal is always a mystery to me.) Turns out my only obvious problem was a giant lump of ear wax.

Good health can be dumb luck, and I acknowledge my dumbness in that regard. I am no paragon of fitness or diet. I'm just accidentally fond of walking and vegetables. But it seems that hauling firewood and heavy wet laundry and the stupid vacuum cleaner is lifting weights, that gardening is core work and yoga, and I guess everything adds up. The small steps I've taken to drop pounds have been small steps indeed, but for some reason they are working. The dumbness of luck is hard to explain. And of course one of these days that luck will run out.

But it hasn't yet. So as the year of my 60th birthday draws to a close, I acknowledge my affection for this dogged body. She's hanging in, despite gray hair and sagging skin and sore feet and Coke-bottle glasses. She still runs up and down the stairs without thinking too much about it. She still dances around the kitchen. She still climbs a mountain now and again. Yes, she huffs and puffs and takes a lot of breaks. But she still manages to get to the top. I'm kind of proud of her.

With the extremely minor exception of my football team losing its game, the weekend shook out just as I'd hoped it would, and I woke up this morning rested and calm and ready. It should be a fairly quiet week. I've got a doctor's appointment this morning and various errands to run afterward. I'll need to work on teaching plans, and I have to catch up on my Pope-Swift-Johnson homework so that Teresa and I can talk about it on Friday. On Wednesday I'm meeting a mandolin player to try out the possibility of playing music together. Maybe it will work, maybe not. I'm no fiddler, but something interesting might happen anyway.

A couple of days ago Tom not quite but sort of seriously suggested we join a bowling league. I'm a terrible bowler, so you know he's grasping at straws here, but I take his point. We could use some goofiness. Playing music in an unfamiliar setting isn't exactly goofiness, but it's a chance to experience something I haven't had access to since I moved to Portland: a circle of sound. I've been lonely for it.

I woke up to Portland's first snow of the season--beautiful thick flakes and they're sticking fast. We aren't forecast to get much accumulation, but already grass and roofs are covered, and first daylight light exudes an eerie phosphorescence, pallid and cool, sky as elegant gaze.

In celebration, I lit a fire in the wood stove, and now here I sit in winter Eden--Sunday morning, no place to go, snow falling, flames dancing, hot coffee in my cup, a Virginia Woolf novel in my lap.

To add to the pleasure, I stayed in bed till almost 7--partly because I went to sleep a little late (we spent the evening at a dance concert at Bowdoin), partly because I was lolling in our crisp new sheets, partly because these days my body adores unconsciousness, partly because for some reason the cat decided not to torment me into getting up.

Snow--such a glorious phenomenon. How lucky we are, here in the north, to live in its embrace. Yes, it snarls travel and exhausts shovelers and rapidly disintegrates into dirty gray lumps. Yet what could be lovelier than a snowstorm? . . . white air whirling, everyday earth magicked into radiance. Gratefulness for home overwhelms me during a snowstorm: roof, windows, and firebox; lamps and cookstove; how fortunate to be here, looking out and looking in. And soon another eagerness will arise--the eagerness to rush out into it, lift my face into the falling flakes, scuffle my boots in the fluff, turn to peer back at my little cottage, poignant and unfamiliar in its new landscape.

And it's only 8 a.m. A whole day lies ahead. I might bake bread. I'll likely clean bathrooms. I'll wrap a few gifts. I'll water houseplants. I'll think of something to make for dinner. I might watch the Bills play, if the so-called TV antennae decides to do its job. I'll read my Woolf novel, and I will not do any paying work, and I will not worry about not writing, and I'll go for a walk in the snow, and I'll lug firewood, and drink many mugs of tea, and play cards with Tom. December. Sunday. Snow. Home. 

Coffee tastes really, really good this morning. That's one thing about drinking so little coffee these days: my delight in my small cup has increased exponentially. I enjoy it so. And on Saturdays I get two small cups! 

There's nothing extraordinary about how I make coffee--just freshly ground beans poured into a French press--and I drink it black. It's the plainest of beverages. Still, it can feel like an elixir--not because of the caffeine jolt, which for me is minimal. I think the magic arises from an olio of fragrance, bitterness, warmth, and ritual.

I detest ice coffee. Occasionally, when I'm out, I'll drink a cappuccino, but mostly I'm not too interested in coffee as lusciousness. I like the starkness of black coffee, the bite, the lack of fussiness. Heat of a rounded cup in my hands. Click of cup against saucer. The privacy of the moment . . . the only body awake in the house, breathing into steam and scent. The friendliness . . . carrying a hot cup upstairs to set beside drowsy Tom.

Last night we walked up to the new local barbecue place with our neighbor. The restaurant was packed with families and couples; we were glad to see such a buzz since the previous occupant (another barbecue joint) had been a dud. Portland overflows with great restaurants, but most are on the peninsula (the busy part of the city: downtown, Bayside, the East and West ends, the waterfront). Our neighborhood, Deering Center, is city-residential--not suburban but not densely urban either: houses close together but most with small yards; a mix of single- and multi-family structures, sidewalks and schools and big trees--walkable, busy, people of many ages. It's a low-key Mainer version of old-timey Brooklyn, yet oddly there are not quite enough interesting places to go out to eat, given that it's got a population that's definitely ready to do so. Thus, it was pleasant to walk around in the cold for a while, talking of this and that; then tuck ourselves into a cheerful, crowded room and eat brisket and drink beer and overhear a hundred other neighbors also being jovial.

I've decided that this weekend is going to be my turning point: I am going to figure out a way to cheer up, and so far I'm doing well in that regard. Brisket! Followed by good sleep! Followed by the best coffee! Yesterday I did a little holiday shopping and managed not to torment myself too much. I bought a set of good-quality sheets for our bed--Merry Christmas to us. I drove a car that didn't make any strange noises at all. I listened to one of Ray's mix CDs as I drove and I cried in a happy way. In the afternoon I talked hard with Teresa and Jeannie about the poem-writing project we've embarked on. Look how well things are going! Look how many exclamation points have shown up in this letter . . . well, perhaps that's the coffee talking, but try to take it as hope and good intentions.

I did not want to wake up this morning. The alarm was a shock: I could easily have stayed in bed another hour, maybe more. I don't know why I'm so sleepy these days; I suppose it's a continuing body reaction to general stress and sadness, but my bed seems like the nicest place on earth.

However, I did my duty. I got up and made coffee and let the cat out, and now here I sit, slowly beginning to ungroggify.

It's Friday: recycling day, errand-running day, poetry-talk-with-Teresa-and-Jeannie day, going-out-to-the-new-barbecue-place-with-our-neighbor day . . . certainly plenty of things I am glad to be awake for. My car is not one of those bright spots, however. Yesterday I paid yet another hefty repair bill--this time, for a wheel bearing--and afterward John at the garage solemnly wished me happy holidays and said he hoped he would not be seeing me again soon. You and me both, pal. Cheaper than a new car, cheaper than a new car. But the mantra doesn't help much, especially now that T's pickup has also entered repair hell. We are in the grip of two aging vehicles, neither of which we can afford to replace. It's not a soothing situation.

Anyway, for the moment, my car has limped back onto the road. So this morning she and I will venture out to do some mild Christmas shopping, and then I will talk about poems with my friends. On paper it sounds like an undemanding day.

Still, last night, when I went out to write with friends, I suddenly got overloaded, suddenly had the feeling that I really just ought to go home. That's been happening to me lately, in a variety of friendly situations--again, a normal reaction, though I wish it wouldn't. I know that I'm still sad. I feel dull in public because I'm still sad. It's boring for everyone else to keep being around someone who is sad about the death of a person they didn't know, whose relationship to me doesn't have a clear label: not like the death of a direct family member . . . everyone would understand that.

But I did see an excellent happy movie on Wednesday! It's not like I'm straight-up miserable. Just melancholy, in a fitful way. I'm living alongside, sometimes inside, the drip of slow grief. There's nothing wrong with sadness, no shame in saying What is this new world, without you?

Home, and traveling nowhere for the next two weeks. Home, with no editing project hissing on the burner, and no housecleaning today because I already did that earlier in the week, and walking out to the library to pick up a new novel to read, and baking something or other, and going out to write tonight with my friends, and also, admittedly, driving the car to the garage to find out what-the-hell with the continuing loud noise, but at least I am home and not stranded on an unfrequented route in the wilds of the central Maine forest.

On Tuesday my friend said, "You look tired," and my response was "I am always tired"--for the past month everything has been exhausting, whether or not I've been sleeping solidly. But last night, after T and I came home from the movies, I realized that I suddenly felt light and joyous again. We'd gone to see It Happened One Night, a hilarious pre-code flick starring Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, much of it set in 1930s Greyhound buses and motels, and it was just so goofy and sweet, and the crowd gathered around us in the dark was so happy to be watching it, and T and I were cuddled together on a couch, also so happy, and afterward, as we drove home through the rain, with the city Christmas lights puddling in the wet reflections of the windshield, I was giddy with pleasure . . . thank goodness for the small joys--a happy movie, a wet night, a warm hand in mine.

It's cold in Wellington, with snow expected here tonight, but fortunately I should be able to slip home before the weather starts. At the moment, though, I am still in bed, recovering from an unpleasant teaching dream in which a crowd of "experts" invaded my class while I haplessly fumed and the students sat bewildered. I feel like I've had an abnormal number of teaching-anxiety dreams lately, which is interesting and also annoying because in real life I'm not really that anxious about teaching so I find it unfair that my brain wants to dig up one more way to make me worry. Surely my conscious brain does that well enough on its own.

Still, maybe my brain needs some tough love because it seems to be having trouble remembering how to pack: I almost forgot my toothbrush yesterday, and I definitely forgot my notebook. I'm not sure why I'm so scattered: just chalk it up to the overwhelmingness of the season, I guess. At least I remembered my coat.

Yesterday I finished an editing project, finished working on a friend's manuscript, finished my weekly house chores. Thus, even though I have to head north this afternoon, I will return tomorrow to a mostly clean plate, and one that will stay mostly clean till after the new year.

I don't know if that's good. Since my essay explosion, I haven't written much worth saving, so maybe I would be better off just plowing forward into paying jobs. Still, I can't help but be happy to have a bubble of open time ahead of me. Of course much of it will clog up with Christmas obligations. But some of it won't. Some of it will be mine.

This morning I'll go for a walk with a friend, then do a tiny bit of copyediting for another friend, then head to Wellington to spend the night with still other friends before ending up in Monson tomorrow morning. A friend-filled day: a refreshment.

Our little fat crooked Christmas tree glows in its corner; a few select ornaments perch on mantle and shelves. I am not a fiendish holiday decorator but I am sentimental about the King Kong that Tom bought for me at the top of the Empire State Building, about the paper houses he taught our little boys to make, about the weird styrofoam gingerbread men that my parents bought from the Five 'n Dime in 1962 for their first Christmas together. Every year I'm glad to visit with them again.

I've almost forgotten about holiday baking. No time for Emily Dickinson's black cake this year: Ray's death scuttled that. But maybe I can turn out a few batches of cookies. We'll see if I want to. I refuse to feel obliged.

I set up our little tree yesterday and, by late afternoon, did manage to get lights onto it, though no ornaments yet. Still, even in half-baked splendor it's a cheerful sight in the living room corner. Nothing says early December like tree lights, a wood fire, and the fragrance of slow-cooking stew. 

Today I'll return to editing, then finish up the housework and fill in around the edges with this-and-that obligations. I'll get onto my mat, get outside for a walk, read my book, be plain and unspectacular, be dreamy and inefficient, be whatever happens.

The hours unroll. Juncos skip and peck among the fallen leaves. Far above them a posse of gulls wheels in the restless sky. 

We got home a little after 2 p.m. yesterday. So, after assuaging the cat, we went for a fast walk in the cold air, rediscovering muscles and lungs after days of sitting and rich food, before hunkering down with our books by the newly lit wood stove.

Not a flake of snow in Portland but it's cold: a scarf day, a house day. Today I need to catch up with laundry and housework and groceries, reacquaint myself with routine before pouring myself into next week's duties. Already the washing machine is churning; already I'm trying to remember what's in the freezer, what's on the list, what needs to be scrubbed and soaped.

But for a few more minutes I can sit here quietly with my coffee. I'm almost finished with Nabokov's Pale Fire, looking forward to starting the used novel I picked up in Amherst on Friday: Edmund White's Hotel de Dream. I'll rummage mildly among my household tasks, make a stew, maybe, or a ragu--something fragrant and slow. I'll clean bathrooms and wash sheets and read my books and go for another walk, and maybe after dinner I'll look at the Bills game before I fall asleep.

The little house is an embrace . . . tiny rooms and shabby furniture, Tom's bright photos on the walls, dried garden flowers on the mantle, woodbox piled high, the small and glossy kitchen; upstairs, our desks, our bed, a swish of wind in the eaves.

Last night snow squalls whirled through Amherst, and this morning the ground is coated with a rough half-inch of white, my first snow of the season, glimmering faintly under the black pines beyond the window.

Yesterday we went on a desultory outing to the college natural history museum, to the used bookstore; we drove into Northampton for dinner; we dropped like stones into bed as if we'd actually been working hard at something.

And now, today, we'll head back north, the children will head south, and Holiday A will fade into the frantically marketed antics of Holiday 2.

I'm not gloomy, though I may sounds gloomy. I guess I'm just tired, though I'm not under-slept. Maybe I'm not even tired; maybe there isn't a word for what I am.

But the snow is a kind of antidote.

Greetings from early morning western Massachusetts. The pines that surround this house are barely visible through the windows, nothing more than slashes of shadow. I sit here alone at the kitchen island, listening to coffee drip, listening to the hum of the refrigerator, feeling a bit as if I am on an island--just a trick of the lighting, I think, which swans over the white countertop but has no power over the dark that presses against the tall windows, the dark that is poised beyond the doorways.

Yesterday we drove all morning through rain, accompanied by yet another weird noise from my car, but the roads weren't icy, traffic wasn't oppressive, so we made decent time. A long day ensued of cooking, eating, and game playing--Thanksgiving in its traditional garb--and now today, post-holiday, the kitchen has a wan and wary look, as if no one should expect anything more from it.

I didn't know what book to bring, so I snatched Nabokov's Pale Fire off the shelf. I'm still under the spell of Elizabeth Bowen's The Little Girls, which I reread in a rush over the past couple of days . . . I love Bowen so much; I hunger after her strange sentences, her intense, oblique characters, her thick inscrutable emotions. Nabokov may be a bad follow-up, or not. But he is what I have.

This week I did a thing I don't do much of these days: I submitted a stack of work to journals--sent the essay off, sent a bunch of poems off. For some reason I keep thinking about the fact that I actually did it. I am surprised at myself, and also I am surprised by my surprise: why have I gotten so hermit-like about my new work? I know I write well. I don't feel at all shy about sharing it. But submissions: ugh. The process is so uninviting. Why not just stick a fork in my eye?

With Thanksgiving (sort of) behind us, December looms. I've got two more Monson sessions before Christmas, though my editing obligations will likely slow down until the new year. We'll be traveling to Vermont for the holiday, then in early January heading back to Brooklyn, where I'll be zoom-teaching amidst a big gathering to celebrate Paul's NYC directorial debut and two family birthdays, plus doing whatever I can do to help Stephen deal with Ray's legacy of stuff.

 

I am a bee in a field of clover, bumping and lurching.

So far I have celebrated Thanksgiving by sleeping hard and late and waking up to coffee, a good way to enter a long day of traveling and feasting. As of now no rain is falling, but I expect it will start any time. I have no illusion that this will be a pleasant drive, but at least we will be heading south and the traffic should be fairly quiet.

Maple chess pie is done, tiny chocolate tarts are done . . . I have fulfilled my baking assignments, and let's hope they taste okay, as I've never made either of them before.

In a moment I'll hoist myself off this couch corner to deal with various loose ends, but I'm lingering a bit, curled here with my hot coffee, warmth rising from the registers: click and tap of the household, furnace and refrigerator, miracles of modern living. I seem to preserve a naïveté about appliances. I never quite take them for granted.

In a few hours, holiday! Our boy and his partner, in-laws and nephew, bustle of kitchen, card games and chat, walks to the reservoir and football muttering in a faraway room . . . the whole nine yards of Thanksgiving.

I hope you have the day you long to have.

I am murmuring, running through, running through, a small river of things, snagging on roots, silting up,. . . kettle, notebook, earring, thought . . . A skim of ice frames twig and stone, but underneath the current tumbles forward, it chatters and swirls, it swings downstream, racing cloud and sun, all night long it complains and sings--

Today will be filled with small things: pie making, home tasks, desk work. It is hard to know what counts as important, yet the brooks keep rushing toward the Kennebec, the Penobscot, the Androscoggin, the big rivers roll into Casco Bay, Penobscot Bay, the Bay of Fundy, the bays surge into the Gulf of Maine, the gulfs flatten into the vast North Atlantic. It is hard to know what counts as important, but the names are a litany, a rosary, a shape, and there is nothing like a death to make motion feel alive.

Here, in the little northern city by the sea, our houses cling to the stony edge. Beyond us, water and water and water. I imagine snow falling into the ocean, sky and waves occluded, the repetitions of no-silence: splash and roar, endless sift of snow.

For some reason I'm not feeling very glib of tongue this morning. Or is it glib of finger?--I'm never quite sure.

Just now, when I sat down to write to you, my hands instantly began typing the the the the the the the . . . a long strip of nothing, yet visually tactile, yet pleasingly patterned, yet urgent. Sometimes the act of writing becomes a stutter: symbols themselves flitting into amoebic motion, a kind of vibration, words without meaning, only the surface glittering. Sometimes, at least for me. I don't think I've every talked about this with anyone--about the way in which the physical presence of letters and words can take charge. I suppose it's related to synesthesia and other physical experiences with symbol and image.

In any case, writing about it has broken the urgency, which is interesting.

It's nearly 6 a.m., but still a thick darkness seals the windows. Lamps burn, furnace mutters. The day resists dawning, and the little house is an eggshell, a milkweed pod, tautly solid, frail as sleep.

Today, what shall I do today? Laundry and dishes; get onto my mat, meet a friend for a walk. I'll do some editing, I'll make pie crust . . . Make strides, take steps, move forward, inch ahead . . .

In the distance a siren wails. Night clings to the windows, but blood and breath insist, they demand. It is their job: "Eyes, blink. Thoughts, wander."

Look at all I have written, when I thought I could write nothing.

My February revision class is now full, wait list only. It is such a relief to me that people sign up for these things quickly. Hawking my wares is not my favorite thing to do. And now, with that chore done, I can turn my attention to this busy short week. I'm still beetling away at an editing project. I need to apply for a grant today and send Teresa some materials for our Monson reunion class in January. In the wings, I've got a friend's ms to format, another friend's ms to blurb, my high school class to prep. And last night my mother-in-law asked me to make a dessert for Thursday, so I've got that to figure out as well. Probably there are other things on the list I wrote out yesterday, but my brain isn't quite awake enough to remember them yet.

Anyway, Monday. I'll go for a walk this morning, and I'll try to marshal my internal forces into some version of attention. I gave myself a bit of practice on Sunday, which was more of a work day than collapse-on-the-couch Saturday was. I did some research for my upcoming class with Teresa, and I packaged up my last batches of dried herbs for the year, and I raked a few leaves. I made a good dinner: a spicy Portuguese-style fish stew alongside a salad of minced fennel and greens. None of this was strenuous, but it was practice for being strenuous.

I'm still harvesting lettuce from the garden, which pleases me. And the kale is hanging in, of course, and some of the herbs. But mostly the season is over. I've got carrots and fennel stored in the refrigerator, lots of dried herbs in the cupboards, a freezer full of wild mushrooms, kale, tomato sauce. The little homestead came through for me, but I know it's glad to have a few months off, a chance to sleep under leaves and snow.

Last night I had my first dream visitation from Ray. He was attending his own funeral, which was being held in a strange cavernous room, and he looked great, slim with all of his curly hair. I was supposed to play the violin, but one of my pegs snapped off so I spent the entire dream begging people for a violin peg, which no one had and why would they. Still, despite the dream's anxious undertones, I was happy to see him. Every moment together is precious, even when my own brain is making the whole thing up.

 from Possession by A. S. Byatt--

It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or sex. . . . They do not habitually elaborate on the equally intense pleasure of reading. . . .

[Yet] now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark--readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.

* * *

I woke this morning feeling, for the first time in weeks, rested, alert, focused, calm. The sensation is so new that I can hardly stop marveling over it. Certainly I have been working steadily toward this end--setting traps for sleep and solace--yet a generalized hopelessness has shadowed my efforts, an expectation of failure: similar to the way in which, when I'm really sick, I can no longer picture health.

But in fact the traps I've been setting seem to have worked. I am better: fully rested, mostly over my cold. My sap is running again, reviving the vigors of mind and body but also the silly dogged optimism that I have somehow managed to tote around for much of my life.

* * *

Outside the sky is barely blue, and a pale crescent moon floats among wisps of moving cloud. T has just headed out to take photos, the cat has just headed in to crunch up his breakfast, and I, like a fat spider, am sitting in my couch corner thinking about books, thinking about warmth, thinking about Ray's tragicomic playlist, thinking about the swirls of friendship and time, and about my faithful sons, and about this long sweet unstructured day that lies ahead of me . . . thinking also, with gratitude, of my eagerness to enjoy it.

I grew up in a glass-half-empty household. Always, fear and dread; always, an assumption that life is out to do us wrong: "Why bother? Why get my hopes up? No one cares. The deck is stacked against me. Let me wallow in my failures." Et cetera.

It's notable how hard my sister and I have resisted that state of mind, how appalled we are when we find ourselves slipping back into the mire. We share a horror.

* * *

I'm not sure if writing that essay about my history with Ray was a deliberate element of my "set a trap for recovery" plan. It's hard to tell with writing. I resort to words so automatically; they are what I do; they are my frame, day by day, decade by decade. Writing isn't therapy; it's greed, an obsession with making.

Still, I try to say what I see. What I feel. Even when I'm lying, as I often am. Though I don't think I was lying in that essay.

* * *

To go back to the Byatt quotation: the writer, too, has moments, when "every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark." What melodrama in that claim! But writing--and reading, and sex, and long-acquainted love, and dear friendship . . . and food, too, and making a garden, and listening to music, and also grief: these glories of body and mind and heart, these sentimental arcs, these greeds and ecstasies . . .  Why else do we live, if not to leap into their arms again and again and again and again?

So far this day is performing exactly as I'd hoped it would: a slow 6 a.m. wakeup after mostly unbroken sleep; air filled with quiet rain; a cup of hot strong coffee on the table; a wood fire slowly beginning to catch in the stove; my dear one upstairs, not rushing off to work but sleeping for as long as his body needs sleep; the white cat curled up next to me on the couch.

Saturday-morning dreamland . . . thank you for arriving on cue.

I don't have plans, other than letting the weekend do with me what it will. T and I might go to a movie, we might wander into town, we might occupy ourselves at home, we might go for a walk, we might do something useful, we might not. Mostly all we want is to be alone together and to not be running on anyone's else's schedule. My little cold is mostly gone, and T never caught it. Now, if we could only vanquish this bone-weariness, we could step onto the holiday train with a bit more enthusiasm. I am not excited about the holidays. I'm longing to stay home, but I have to travel. I despise shopping, yet I have to shop. I love making the big meals, but I don't get to make the big meals. Such is our life, but at least we have this weekend.

Meanwhile, odd poetry-biz stuff has been bubbling up around me, seemingly without my volition. First, there was that little review in the Boston Globe. Now a Massachusetts-based TV producer wants to feature me on her show, called Write Now, which is mildly syndicated around the state. A festival organizer reached out to invite me to take part in an on-stage dialogue this spring. I did no work for any of this stuff . . . the emails just show up in my inbox. I feel a bit like seawater, washing back and forth over pebbles. I am bemused, but I guess I am willing.

The fire in the stove has fully caught now, flames greedily licking the firebox, crackle of logs, low roar of heat, the click and snap of iron expanding . . . How I love a wood fire. Watching it, I feel tension leach out of my bones, feel my muscles relax, soften.

I am still reading zero news. I do not watch any television or listen to any radio, other than occasional sporting events. On Thursday, talking with my poet friends, we discussed what to do next, and all of us, as a unit, agreed that the community would have to be our mission. So after I nurse myself back to stability, I am going to track down some regular local volunteer work--soup kitchen, food pantry, refugee shelter, whatever makes sense. The resistance starts at home.

I know these weeks of deliberate self-protection have also been necessary. Yet it feels good, slightly good, to have reached the stage of figuring out a next step, at least as regards my private politics. What is my purpose on earth? Loving my work, loving my people, loving my place. Putting words to that love.

I woke up to rain, rattling, swirling against panes and roof--the first real rain we've had in months, and it's supposed to continue all day and night and into tomorrow. It is a beautiful sound, even better because I'm not driving north or south or east or west. I'm staying home, under my own lamp, beside my own fire.

Gradually sleep has been chipping away at the deep exhaustion. The little head cold hangs on, in a small way, but my body is finding its rhythms again: walking, working, lifting, balancing.

Last night I went out to write, and that, too, was a rest and a release--eating chicken soup with friends, then snatching words out of the air, another step toward regaining my lurching sturdiness, the unpredictable predictability that seems to be my natural habitat.

All week long Tom and I have been craning toward this weekend: "We'll be alone, we can do whatever we want . . . " I have no idea what reality will ensue, but the anticipation has been a tonic in itself.

In short, I am trudging through the border country that is convalescence. I am taking shelter, out of the rain.

Those metaphors look pompous and dumb, written down. Still, they feel true. There is a space between grief and no-grief--at times a broad and vacant DMZ, at others a narrow winding track among the hills. 

**

While I'm thinking of it, I should mention that I've got a new class posted in the Poetry Kitchen. The participants in the class I taught a couple of weeks ago asked me to run another revision weekend, and this is it. However, you don't need to have attended the first one to attend the second. As of this morning, there are only two spaces left. So if you're interested, sign up quickly.

I woke up this morning feeling that I had finally reentered a space of quiet. After close to three weeks of turmoil--including three weekends spent either on the road or in class, including two weekday overnights to Monson, including death and election and horrid aftermath--I have finally lurched back into my own house and am here to stay . . . for a few days. A weekend without teaching or an absurd travel schedule or a funeral or a looming election; a weekend without demands: I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to this.

Of course, rest will be evanescent as we'll be on the road again next week, driving south on Thanksgiving morning. But something is better than nothing, and nothing is what we've had for too long.

Today: A walk, a small editing project, a poem draft. Housework, laundry, a haircut. Chicken soup simmering on the stove. A night out with the writers.

A book, a warm coat. Rain and a brisk wind. Day as plainsong.

And here I sit beside the window, staring out into the blue-black morning of Monson, Maine. I'm happy to report that the little cold has morphed into an even littler cold, though it could easily have done otherwise. Thus, I am sort of well rested, sort of ready to step into the classroom, and this feels like success.

In a few minutes, the general store will open and I'll step across the street to fetch my coffee and yogurt. Meanwhile, lemony streaks hem the fading night sky; log trucks mutter down the road; the bare tree branches are pencil scratches.

In this stray moment between dawn and day, my thoughts feel drained of color. Yet today's class will be all about details: creating images, tracing images, conjuring up a dense materiality in words. I'm curious to see what my pen will make of this. Nothing, maybe. Or something strange and wonderful.

I woke up with a little cold--tiny sore throat, sour mouth, both very minor, definitely not Covid, not nearly severe enough to cancel class for, presumably linked to travel and being overtired, will probably be gone by tomorrow when I have to teach: but still, they're just one more blah to add to the chain of blah. I've been trying to hype my enthusiasm about driving three hours this afternoon in my great "new" car--new brakes, new rocker panels, and now a fabulous new exhaust system and shiny new catalytic converter--but my enthusiasm is not falling for the hype. No surprise, but I do need to snap myself out of this state of mind and refocus myself on my work.

What I really mean is refocus myself on different work because I've been completely absorbed in writing a very painful essay-memoir about Ray and our times--painful because it's been complicated to write, painful because it's been like picking a scab. But it's done now, I think. It it took me into some shadowy places. It had to be written. And now it is sitting on my desktop asking, "What next?"

I have no answer to that yet. What I have is a tiny sore throat and a sour mouth, a day of obligation and driving, the fear that I will never again sleep purely and simply.

But I'll go for a walk this morning. I'll figure things out--figure something out, or let the breeze do it for me . . . watch a bird or two, watch a dog, maybe begin to watch myself.

I write to you from home. We got in last night about 7:15; dropped our stuff, then immediately walked around the corner so we could get drinks and dinner before the restaurant stopped serving. Probably it would have been wiser to stay home and heat up leftovers, but wise hasn't felt like a coherent philosophy this weekend.

We did go straight to bed as soon as we came home again. That was as wise as we could get.

Anyway. Here we are at Monday. Tomorrow I've got to drive to Monson, so today is my day for figuring out how to function. Groceries, laundry, a walk . . . I haven't glanced at the calendar. I have no idea what other obligations lurk there.

Forgive this rattled note. Tired doesn't begin to describe our state of mind.

As expected, it's been an insanely exhausting weekend.

Yesterday morning the alarm went off at 3 a.m., and we began our long trek: a 4:15 bus to Boston, a 7 a.m. bus to NYC, then straight to Brooklyn, a quick meal, and then two and a half hours standing in the blocked-off street beside Commonwealth Bar talking to people I hadn't seen for 40 years, or had never met before, or had seen but under wonky circumstances, or had just seen a couple of months ago when I was in New York, or talked to all of the time every chance I could get, or were my own beloveds . . . and this was punctuated by a bagpiper playing "Amazing Grace," and Ray's impeccable playlists unrolling from the speakers, and a bright blue sky, and sudden gusts of tears . . .

Afterward our posse gathered--Tom and I, both boys and their partners--and trudged the long blocks to Paul's apartment, where we sat together and mulled things over as Paul whipped up chili and cornbread and salad; we wondered what we might do all evening . . .

And then my phone buzzed and it was Steve, Ray's husband, asking us to meet him at his apartment, so our posse said yes and rode the train to Gowanus, and when we arrived, we realized that this wasn't the larger, multitudinous gathering we'd pictured but the apartment was full of Steve's family and Ray's family and two lone guys from foreign lands, and now us, which was the most touching thing that had happened to us all day because, as we said afterward, a person can feel like family but the family doesn't necessarily see things that way, nor should they . . .

But there we were, sitting and standing around amidst a shifting collection of brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, everyone's heart on their sleeve, everyone eager to take comfort, ask questions, make jokes, tell the funny stories: it was the sweetest thing, and we were so tired, but so was every person in the room, weary and open-hearted . . .

And now here I am, still so tired, not well slept but sort of slept, lying in my son's living room listening to the traffic on the highway and the subway rumbling underneath the street and the whoop-whoop of a passing cop car, girding myself for the next things: breakfast with the boys and their partners, then splitting away again, back into Manhattan, back onto the bus, the long drive back to Boston, then on to Maine, and our house, and Monday morning glowering ahead of us like a piece of dented sheet metal . . .

Friday. Recycling day, leaf-raking day, packing-for-New-York-in-the-smallest-bag-possible day. This will be a dreadfully compressed trip for us, but at least the boys and their partners will have an actual weekend to hang out together--a glint of cheer amid the sorrow.

I did manage to get stuff done yesterday: returned an editing project to the press, wrote a blurb for a poetry collection, finished my Monson plans, formulated my next Zoom class, plus walked to the dentist, did the housework, proofed a kid's grad-school application, probably did other chores that I can't even remember now . . . and then in the evening I went out to write, which was such sweet relief after a long and sucky fortnight of not being together. For some reason everyone was writing really well; the drafts were just pouring out; it was tonic to be sitting in that room feeling the sparks fly. I love my writing group.

So today I have a poem draft to look at and I have my essay to look at. As far as I can recall, I have no other pressing desk obligations, nothing that can't wait till next week. There are worse ways to enter into a weekend of hard things.

You likely won't hear from me again till Monday. We'll be leaving the house tomorrow at 3:30 a.m., and wifi on the bus is always wonky. Sunday morning I might have a chance to write, but I also might not: we'll be crammed into my son's tiny apartment, and I can't be sure I'll have any waking moments to myself.

Then again I could surprise you, and myself, with a rambling picaresque narrative of my travels. We'll see what happens.

The days this week have been cold and windy and bright--late autumn in its glory, lungs filling with breeze, hair blown into rat tails, warm boots kicking leaves.

In the garden kale reigns supreme, but the tough late-season herbs also hang on: sage, thyme, oregano. I'm still cutting snippets of mint, posies of cilantro and parsley. Even the salad greens linger: more bitter than in their youth but still lovely with balsamic and feta, apples and fennel, roasted carrots and red onion.

In the kitchen I turn out pumpkin pudding with hard sauce; spaghetti squash with butter, parmesan, and cilantro; roasted kale and cherry tomato salads. I carry firewood and empty ashes and scour the glass door of the woodstove until it gleams. I arrange bouquets of dried grasses and hydrangea blooms in vases all over the house. I take care. It is a thing I know how to do. It is useless it is not useless it is useless it is not useless.

Yesterday I cranked through an editing job. I readied myself for next week's Monson class. I answered emails and filled in dates on my calendar and went to the gas station and lugged returnables to the bottle bank, and the essay sat quietly at home, breathing to itself.

This morning: dentist. This afternoon: work phone call. In between: mopping and vacuuming and toilet scrubbing and laundry. The usual slog of obligation. 

What does self-preservation mean, and is it selfish? The answer is "depends," of course. Do no harm is a sweet thought, but we all do harm. Every time we buy a cup of Dunkin' coffee sourced from Central American plantation conglomerates that exploit their laborers and their environment. Every time we set a match to a twig,

The tentacles of evil strangle our good intentions.

Still, there is this day, this house, this body. An essay waits for me. Tonight I'll go out to write poems for the first time in weeks. And, oh, these bright, bright days of wind and sun.

I worked all of yesterday morning on my essay, which continues to be unwieldy and disjointed but at least there is now more raw material to consider.

It's been so long since I've written willingly in this form. Outside of a few small review-essays, I've produced nothing but poems for more than a decade. So there's no sense of ease in pouring out my material. All I can do is acknowledge a need to write prose and trust that some version of synthesis will happen in its own time and manner.

I feel like Gretel in the witch's oven; I feel like a beat-up old mixtape that's been rattling around under the front seat of a car for time immemorial. I'm swamped in responsibilities I didn't know I had. Yet as my son said to me on the phone yesterday, isn't that an artist's response to grief--the urge to make? He is 27 years old and smarter than I am, which is such a comfort. I am the dumbest person in town when I am in the midst.

But I've got to plug the faucet and and turn my attention to actual paying work--an academic article to edit, an author to coax, Monson class plans to dredge up. I've got schedules to fix, materials to pull together for a teaching day with Teresa . . . and then there are the unpaid obligations: blurbs to write for two poetry collections, materials to gather for teachers in need, notes to send to friends in grief . . . the myriad tasks of community care--

We are huddled together in a small glass house. We are fenced in by malice. I am tired. But so what.

My first full night's sleep in ten days or more. I did not budge till the alarm went off at 5. I did not wake at 2 or 3 and have to coax myself (or fail to coax myself) into another thin hour of doze. Now I am groggy and heavy-eyed and shuffling around the kitchen in pursuit of coffee, and I could not be more relieved. One solid night won't mend everything, but it will surely help me cope.

Yesterday I worked on my essay. I finished a batch of sharable teaching plans I had to do for the state epistolary-poem project. I got onto my mat, and I went for a walk with Gretchen. I harvested my fennel crop in anticipation of the ground freezing later this week. I read Olivia Laing's The Lonely City--which is stunning: a book I barely know how to speak about; a book that is a mirror for the world I am living in and writing about at the moment.

I am still not looking at any news. I feel as if I am in a state of self-defense. I am writing and reading about matters that are deeply raw, matters that, despite my logorrheic tendencies, I haven't written about before. They are matters that must be dealt with. I cannot allow the national wickedness to blight my work.

Today I'll trudge the streets again. I'll cook. I'll wander into the sleepy garden. I'll hang clothes on the cellar lines and haul firewood up the stairs. I'll wash dishes and I'll think. I'll think and I will find a way to write a sentence or two, a paragraph or two, a page. My words are disjointed. There are no transitions yet in this essay, no suave links, no mimicking of intelligence. Thoughts burst into language, like blots of wet snow thunking a windowpane. It is an ugly form of making, but it is making, and that is all I ask of myself right now.

I keep forgetting that today is supposed to be a holiday. In my household it's the usual Monday routine--alarm erupting at 5 a.m., T trudging out to his truck before 7.

I had another terrible night's sleep, but they're so normal now that I don't even get frustrated anymore. Just wistful.

But anyway here I am. At home, with the week's tasks ahead of me--a few lesson plans, a small editing project, the essay that I'm trying to drag into the light.

Turns out that little review of Calendar did appear in the Boston Globe: a friend sent a photo of the clipping. A bright spot, to know that it's in the world. And my weekend class went so much better than it might have gone. I was fortunate to have a group that was eager, eager, eager to work. And so we did, which was undoubtedly the best thing for all of us.

While I was in class, T was in the kitchen installing another batch of cabinetry, this time drawer fronts and side panels. The elegance increases. I don't know how to reconcile it with my distinctly inelegant state of mind. I feel a bit like the help working in someone else's house, but I expect I'll get over that.

So today: laundry, a walk, my desk, the kitchen. I want my body to do the thinking. I want air. I want to discover something . . . hear it, touch it, let it be.

I'm sure you're sick of listening to me talk about sleep or the lack thereof, but honestly it feels like insomnia is my body's central preoccupation these days . . . so when I tell you that last night I woke up only briefly at 3 a.m., then slept till 5:30 and lolled till 6, you should take this news as a major success story.

Now, on this cold morning, I am sitting in my warm couch corner in my warm house. I'm wrapped in my old red bathrobe and I'm drinking black coffee from a white cup and saucer and my beloved and our silly cat are upstairs in our cozy rumpled bed, and, sure, the nation is going to hell and all, but for the first time in days I don't feel like a zombie, so I will take my minor joys where I can find them.

Supposedly Nina MacLaughlin's review of Calendar is in today's Boston Globe, but I can't track it down online, and the Globe has impenetrable paywalls anyway, so I may never see it. If any of you are print subscribers, let me know if it's really there. I suspect it's embedded in a roundup of New England literary news, but I don't know.

However, I can share Ray's obituary with you, in case you didn't see it on social media and/or are intrigued by the obituaries of strangers, which I am, so I understand the impulse.

Day 1 of my class seemed to go well enough. With little sleep and much grief, I know I'm not at the top of my game, but so far that seems to be coming out via stupid kitchen mistakes (e.g., forgetting to do obvious things such as line a roasting pan with parchment paper and thus spending 45 minutes scouring scorch) rather than giant public teaching flubs.

Of course I still have plenty of time to screw up day 2. We'll see.

Yesterday, while class participants were working on their poem drafts, I was paging through the photos in Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and slowly beginning to tap out an essay about Ray and our swirl of friends and lovers. It's not a topic I've written about before, and it's a hard one to grapple with, but my brain says try and so I am. For the moment it seems to want to emerge in small bursts of prose. Maybe it will eventually be a long poem. I don't know anything about it yet, except that it seems to want to be written.

Meanwhile, I have been reading Olivia Laing's memoir-essay The Lonely City, I have been reading Lori Ostlund's story "Just Another Family," I have been ploughing through hard crossword puzzles, I have been raking leaves, I have been talking talking talking to sad people, and so go the days, as the nights wrestle among themselves. 

It's a cold morning out there--in the 30s, with a sharp wind. The trees still have leaves, but most are on the ground now, billowing into crackling heaps, skidding in solitary droves down the pavement, swirling against fences and foundations.

I slept badly of course, but not too badly. And I did manage to stay in bed until 6. So all in all, I'm in moderately good condition to undertake this weekend of work that lies ahead.

Yesterday I managed to reenter some version of my routine. I cleaned the house. I went to the grocery store. I baked salmon brushed with lemon and maple syrup. I cooked wild rice and put together a salad with greens and kohlrabi from the garden. I made a batch of lemon squares.

While I cooked, I listened to albums that I had listened to with Ray . . . Tammy Wynette, the Smiths, Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run . . . and I wept, as I knew I would, as I intended to do. It was the first time since his death that I was finally able to let myself go. When Tom came downstairs, he looked at me and said, "If you don't want to do that, don't listen to the Smiths," and I laughed through my tears.

There is gift and pain in being with the one person who knows. We were both there in that borrowed living room, sprawling on couches in the middle of the night, listening to Morrissey mourn and desire. In the end, we became the only people from those days who didn't split away into other partnerships. Our life together arose from those long nights of music. Our children arose from that past. My son tells me that he, too, has been crying to the soundtrack of Born to Run.

I purposefully set myself up to weep last night because I knew that, if I have to spend all weekend in a class full of hurting poets, I'd best get my own grief into the air. I'd best bring it into a place where I can use it for my work.

Because now, more than ever, that work had better get done.

I spent most of yesterday alone, at least physically. Tom was at work, and I was in the house; and though I went for walks and smiled at people, and though I dealt with yet another horribly expensive car problem, and though I was texting/Google Doc'ing all day on a collaborative obituary, and though my sons and various friends texted and called, I had more solitude than I've had for a week. For the first time in seven days, T and I spent our evening alone--no long talky meals, no bonfire musings: just the two of us, awkwardly exhausted on our own couch, trying to play cards, trying not to get too upset about the bill for the car repair, trying to parse confusing bus schedules, trying to eat dinner, trying to fall asleep as soon as possible.

I won't say that I slept well last night, but I slept better than I have been sleeping. I still jolted awake at  2 a.m., my heart pounding over the horrors of the nation, but eventually I was able to soothe myself back to sleep and stay that way until the alarm went off at 5. So all in all, it was not the worst day--not the best, not close to the best, but nobody can expect the best right now.

I'll be teaching all weekend, meaning that today is my day off, such as it is. I won't do paying work, but I'll get the housework done and do the grocery shopping. I'll get onto my mat, and I'll rake some leaves. One thing I haven't been able to do is read--you know life is bad when that happens to me because normally I read like I breathe. So I'm hoping today to find a way to fall back into the necessary patterns of my mind. Little steps, little comforts. Hell yawns before us but we still have our work and our loves. I can't let myself lose them.

This has been a hell of a week. There's no way to sugarcoat the pain of losing my oldest friend and losing the American experiment within the same handful of days.

The amazing thing, though, are the lights that keep glowing, the steady beacons--the friends and family members who are holding us up, holding each other up . . . Weslea in West Tremont, Angela and Steve in Wellington, who fed us and housed us and sat around the table and pressed us to tell the stories. Valerie, our next-door neighbor in Portland, who left meals in our refrigerator and assuaged our cat. Gretchen and her family, in the throes of tending their dying mother, who lit a bonfire and asked us to come sit by it in the gloaming. My sister and my parents and my in-laws, reaching out from afar. My sons murmuring I love you, day after day. College friends embracing over miles and time. My students, grappling honorably with confusion. Poets breathing words.

The work is so simple, so profound. We hold one another up.

And so, today, I will pick up my battered hoe and go back to work. I've been assigned to co-write Ray's obituary: that's my number-one obligation for the day, but I will also return to reaching out to sad people, I will finish an editing job, I will do laundry, I will send birthday greetings to my father. I will walk out into the city and make eye contact with strangers and smile. I will fill my beloved's cup with coffee. I will rake leaves into the garden beds, and I will tease the cat. I very much doubt I will write poems, but who knows?

Yesterday, amid the grim aftermath, I received a piece of extraordinary news: a review of Calendar will appear in the Boston Globe on Sunday. This will be the largest review venue I've ever had, and the opportunity came about almost by accident. I'm intensely grateful, also extremely nervous. Still, the timing has been yet another small gleam in the darkness.

Thus, we stumble forward, with hands outstretched.

Love.

Courage.

Thanks to death and the time change, I have not been able to stay in bed past 4 a.m. By midday yesterday I could feel myself getting ready to crash, and I did loll around for most of the afternoon, but I never napped. Well, whatever. Someday I'll sleep again. Presumably.

In the meantime, here we are at Election Day. Five days ago I thought this was going to be the week's major stressor. Now it's no more than a hovering cloud of doom. Granted, a very big hovering cloud of doom.

My son spent yesterday evening with Stephen so was able to glean more news: about how he's holding up, what tasks he's dealing with, how he needs help. Stephen's good friend Chris was also there. Chris is a union organizer, and who could be a better aid for funeral arrangements than an organizer? This morning I got a text from Chris saying that Steve wants the two of us to collaborate on an obituary. So that's step 1: something solid I can do. And P says they are beginning to sketch out plans for a funeral celebration--which will be a massive undertaking. Hundreds of people are likely to show up. There are thoughts of getting permission to block off 12th Avenue for a few hours. Ghost Ray must be rubbing his hands with glee at the idea of having a party so big that his friends have to shut down a New York City street.

T and I did get into the park for an hour or so early yesterday morning. My energy level is spotty at best, but it felt good to clamber over granite and stare out into the glassy sea. We watched an eagle; we watched a sinuous swimming harbor seal. Then we came back and did a few jobs for Weslea: sorting out junk, insulating windows, throwing down cardboard on the weedy garden. I kept thinking: surely, this will make me sleep; surely this will make me sleep. But no.

So I trudge on. Today we'll be on the road again, heading inland to Wellington. Tomorrow I have to be in class all day. And then finally, finally, finally, we can go home.

Tom thinks it's good we're not home. I think he's right but also wish I were home. Still, I do agree that these few days on the island have allowed us to be fully with each other and our emotional turmoil, and we couldn't have done that if he were going off to work every morning.

The evenings have been a bit of an Irish wake, no doubt. Wine and storytelling, too much of both, but Ray would have done the same for us. And our friend Weslea is a magnificent listener, with her own griefs. Yesterday morning she and I played some music with a local ukulele band at the Southwest Harbor food cupboard. In the afternoon Tom and I climbed Beech Mountain. In the interstices I've been fielding dozens of texts and emails, many from people I haven't seen for 40 years, many from our tight family knot, all of them drenched in sorrow and anecdote. As the writer I am responsible for writing, it seems. And thus the days have been weirdly cathartic, perpetually distressing, oddly ridiculous, immensely touching.

Today will be our last full day on the island; we'll leave after lunch tomorrow for Wellington. One of the great strangenesses, for me, is the fact that this loss has literally taken place within the confines of the three couples to whom I dedicated Calendar: Ray and Stephen, Weslea and Curtis, Angela and Steve. Ray died in Brooklyn, and Stephen called to tell us while we were at Weslea's cottage by the sea--which had also been Curtis's until he died last year. And tomorrow we are going into the woods to spend the night with Angela and Steve--who are both fully on earth, thank God. The synchronicity of this embrace makes me shiver a little.

In 1984, I was a junior at Haverford College when my then boyfriend (let's call him MTB) decided to sublet a house for the year with a couple of guys I'd seen around campus but didn't know at all: Ray Gish and someone named Tom. I wasn't yet 20 years old, unsettled both socially and academically--overwhelmed by the institutional wealth that seemed to permeate the other students, uneasy about my blue-collar roots, my unremarkable education, my non-academic obsession with books (e.g., I was absorbed in a private project to finish all of Charles Dickens's novels before I graduated from college--one that had absolutely nothing to do with the college reading I was supposed to be focusing on). I had made a few women friends--one, in particular, Jilline, who was gradually opening my eyes to the fact that I was an artist. But I was also completely distracted by being in love--an intense volatile affair with MTB that fed on melodrama. I was self-conscious, awkward, badly dressed, romantic, and way too full of feelings.

So when MTB signed a lease with these unknown guys, I was nonplussed. What would they think of me? Would they be more of the same--jovial private-school dudes outfitting themselves for law school or med school while playing a little lacrosse on the side? To a degree, MTB himself fit into that mold, though he was more of a mess than most.

But then I met the new roommates, and my life opened.

Ray Gish was tall with a mop of curly hair. He wore big boots and band T-shirts and thrift-store trenchcoats. He drank beer like water and smoked incessantly. As soon as he woke up, a record would drop onto the turntable--classic country, hardcore punk, early folk, the blues . . . his record collection was massive and detailed and music played constantly in that house. Going to class was not important to him, yet he was brilliantly well informed. He was from Appalachian Kentucky, where his parents ran the Mountain Eagle, one of the most famous small newspapers in the nation. They chronicled coal mining, union busting, poverty, local corruption. All of the kids in the family worked on the paper. All of the kids knew how dangerous that job was. Ray, the youngest, recounted many scary moments--not least when the county sheriff set their office on fire.

Ray's quiet friend, Tom . . . it took me longer to get to know him, But I fell hard for Ray: a version of a love affair, but one that was new to me--because Ray was the first gay man I had ever met . . . or so I thought, until I began to realize what I hadn't been seeing all of my life. The two of us were romantically involved with other people, but we also became entwined with one another. Sometimes we stayed on the phone together all night, whispering syllables of nothing, back and forth, little hums of comfort. Sometimes we quarreled, and had huge dramatic arguments, and flounced and carried on. The feelings were all; they were the centerpiece.

Well, of course things couldn't last like this. Ray failed out of school and went home to Kentucky. MTB started carrying on with other women. Quiet Tom and I took the train into Philadelphia in the midst of Hurricane Gloria and returned to campus sopping wet and euphoric.

The brief college idyll had morphed into our adult lives. But Ray never left us. In 1991 he was the best man at our wedding. He moved around a bit, eventually settling in Brooklyn, opening Commonwealth Bar in Park Slope, meeting the magnificent Stephen, becoming a version of steadiness--but only a version. When our children entered the picture, he and Stephen assumed yet another role: they became uncles, devoted, adoring. Nearly every summer we traveled from the Maine woods to Brooklyn, and the boys threw themselves with delight into the joys of the city, the charms of Ray and Steve. As did Tom and I. Without those trips to Brooklyn, I don't know how we would have maintained our sanity in the isolations of Harmony.

As the boys grew into men, Ray and Steve continued to be huge parts of their lives--helping with apartments, welcoming their partners, buying a few meals . . . behaving exactly like generous and loving uncles, though there is no blood link, only our long and goofy trajectory of devotion. Every time I came to Brooklyn, I stayed with them--all I had to do is text, "I'm coming!" No invitation necessary. No need to pretend that we were anything other than family.

Monday, October 28, was my son Paul's 27th birthday. He stopped by Commonwealth that night and Ray gave him a big hug. On Thursday, Halloween, he stopped by again. The bar was hopping with its usual Halloween party, but Ray and Steve were nowhere to be seen. Everyone thought this was odd: Steve, they knew, had gone on a trip to Iceland, but where was Ray? He wasn't answering his phone.

I don't know exactly how the next events transpired, but by Friday someone got a key to the apartment and let themselves in and found Ray dead, apparently in his sleep. The next events are a blur to me: I know the medical examiner was called; I know someone called Steve in Iceland and broke the news that his husband was dead.

What I do know is that on Friday evening, as Tom and I sat on the porch of this little cottage on Mount Desert Island, listening to the slow swish of the tide in the cove, Tom's phone rang, and Steve was stammering out, "He's dead, he died in his sleep, I'm in Iceland."

***

Our youth. Suddenly it's been kneecapped. With Ray dead, Tom and I have lost the one person who knew us at our messiest, our most melodramatic; who knew our sloppy eagerness, our stay-up-all-night feeling-everything-there-is-to-feel past, our silly quarreling, all that music we listened to, and the conversations, the love affairs: our need, so raw and sloppy.

And my sons' childhood: also kneecapped. They are in deep mourning for the joie-de-vivre, the city opening its arms to them, these two beloved caretakers, now suddenly amputated to a single loneliness.

We all knew that Ray would not live to old age. He was a severe alcoholic, a heavy smoker. He never exercised or watched his diet. He lived recklessly. This death is far better than the slow tortures of lung cancer and cirrhosis. But it was so sudden. And Steve was so far away. And Ray was only 59. And we loved him so.

This will be a short post.

Last night, Tom and I got bad news. Ray Gish, one of our closest friends, beloved since college, best man at our wedding, devoted uncle to our sons, our home-away-from-home in Brooklyn, died in his sleep. He was only 59.

We are stricken. Maybe tomorrow I can write about him more clearly, but I've been awake all night, so words aren't my best medium at the moment.

It's bizarrely warm outside--62 degrees at 5 a.m. on the first of November. I think temperatures will drop into the normal range after today, but this small blip of heat is peculiar and unnerving. My body doesn't know what to make of it.

I ended up ensnarled in desk work and housework yesterday so have done almost nothing to prepare for our departure downeast. Thus, today will be a flurry of lists and groceries and packing: five days away, all of our food, hiking clothes, teaching clothes, teaching materials, books, cameras, violin, tools . . . the car load is always ridiculous. Fortunately I have all day to accomplish this as we're not leaving till T gets home from work. And then we'll embark on a three-hour drive, requiring a whole new layer of stamina.

At least this fuss means we'll wake up beside Goose Cove tomorrow morning.

Though I've been to Acadia many, many times, the park never ceases to amaze me. It really is one of the most beautiful places on earth. Granite and wild sea. Sharp jut of mountains. So many birds. And because we almost always visit outside of tourist season, there's quiet too.

A few days of slow waking, of clambering and bright air; evening wine and chatter with our friend beside the fire.

The election still looms, of course. 

Some days my freelance life is a jumble--hours spent circling aimlessly, waiting for a reply to a query before I can move on with a project, and then suddenly the reply arrives, but late in the day, when my mind has already turned away from paying work and is focused on home obligations . . . so by evening I am wondering, What the hell did I get done?

And thus today, when I thought I would be mostly concentrating on housework and errands, I will instead be cramming in editing hours . . . which is fine: it's a typical freelance situation, one I am so accustomed to, but it's always a drag. What I want is less hysterical flurry in my life, not more.

Well, anyway. So be it. A fat morning of editing, and afterward I'll get done what I get done. At least the laundry can churn while I check files.

Last night, as I basted a pork roast, Tom installed another batch of finished cabinet doors. The sudden sleek quiet is startling. No more under-the-sink clutter staring out at us; instead, an expanse of polished fir, silken to the touch. These doors are heavy, elegant, magnificently plain. The kitchen, always beautifully functional, is becoming a showplace. It feels very strange to possess such a room. (Fortunately, hideously inept bathrooms and dog-eared vinyl siding keep us grounded in reality.)