Yesterday morning I transcribed, rewrote, revised, and refined four poems . . . four! . . . all from blurts I'd scrawled in Monson in response to prompts from Teresa, Maudelle, and myself. Clearly it was a brain-on-fire week in more ways than one. No wonder I'm still wandering around in a daze and sleeping like I've been blackjacked.

Supposedly the torrid weather will break tonight or tomorrow, which will be a relief. But my extreme-heat behavior does bear a certain resemblance to how I act when I'm holed up in the house during a long blizzard. Reading, writing, and cooking become the pivot of my days. Yesterday, as the temperature climbed into the 90s, I finished (mostly) four new poems.  I gorged on a Dorothy Sayers mystery novel. I baked a loaf of Swedish rye. I made a batch of peach frozen yogurt. I made cold sesame-peanut noodles. I made a watermelon salad. I made three quarts of ice tea. I pondered the early trajectory of Keats. In a blizzard all of that food would be stews and cakes, but you get the picture.

Today will likely be more of the same . . . this time with lime-marinated chicken instead of noodles, a new batch of blurts to transcribe, another weatherbeaten Sayers mystery pulled off the shelf, and the constant miracle of Keats. Why mess with a winning formula?

Of course laundry is never-ending; I'll need to pick blueberries early before the scorch sets in; I may run an errand or two; I have to get some sort of exercise, either on foot or on my mat; and I have doubts about that rye loaf. Still, this week of heat has helped me settle fully into my writing, without the distractions of got-to-weed-the-gardens, etcetera.

I love to write at home. That is always, always where the real work happens. So uncovering such rich yeasty starter material has been an enormous boon.