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.