The morning is wintry and dark--freezing fog a-glimmer under the streetlights, snowpack crusted like sugar. It's Thursday, another work day in my endless week of work days: editing, then housework, then this evening I'll go out to write. I would have been happy to stay in bed a bit longer, to burrow back into my blurry dreams about circus tricks and sunscreen. But here I am, awake, sipping my black coffee, learning to be upright again, listening to the sighs of a yawning house.

I've been rereading Woolf's last novel, Between the Acts, which is so extraordinary, so filled with light and wry affection, though her own life was smothering in shadow. I went out last night to watch 42nd Street, a pre-code musical featuring a very young Ginger Rogers in a supporting role, starring Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell, packed with a strange mixture of Depression-era desperation and lavish, bizarrely filmed chorus lines, as if "We have no money, but forty pairs of legs will save us." I got a haircut and felt like it might, in fact, save me--which is the mystery of haircuts, the clean bounce over the brow, the sudden optimism that arises: "ah, now everything is better!"

And now, this morning, I am thinking of a long walk, I am thinking of clean laundry, I am thinking of a notebook and a teacup and my new desk, gleaming with paint and varnish. I am thinking of my brisk body, still holding up after all these years, and I am trying very, very hard to not fear the unknown.

And, now on another note: Hey, you should come to Monson, Maine, this summer! Spaces are filling in the Conference for Poetry and Learning; new people and familiar people are already signing up. It is such a lovely site, and Teresa and I are plotting and planning for a magnificent week, and we want you to be there. Interestingly, I've only received one scholarship application thus far. So if you are hesitating because of money matters, please be in touch. I think I can solve that problem.