Today the young people arrive! Their flight from Chicago will get into Boston in the early afternoon, then the easy bus to Portland will bring them into town before dark and the holidays will begin. The cat is already electric with excitement. Ruckus is a fiend for parties, and he adores his young people. He knows something's up as soon as I start setting up the guest bed, and he cannot wait for the fun to start.

My jobs today center around cleaning bathrooms and the downstairs floors and making eggnog ice cream. As you may know (the recipe is floating around somewhere on this blog), I have honed over the years a particularly delicious version of homemade eggnog, and this year I am going to use that recipe as the base for a batch of ice cream. Thus I need to make the nog early in the day so it can be well chilled before I embark on step 2.

Otherwise, I haven't done any fancy planning for meals. Tonight I'll fry up some hake and make a roasted Brussel sprout salad and maybe a batch of biscuits. For the other days I figure the kids and I will have the fun of deciding together what we want to eat: everyone in this family is a cook and a lover of food. We'll be heading to Vermont on Christmas Day, so the big dinner is out of our hands anyway. We will just play with the small ones.

Yesterday the glass dude showed up to replace my windshield, and then I waded into the ridiculous arena that is pre-Christmas grocery shopping. It was a scene, but I persevered, and now today I will comfortably drive nowhere other than the bus station. Our young people are coming! The only thing better would be if the Brooklyn young people were coming as well, but that set is far away in Oklahoma, where they are performing different family duties. As well they should, the dear ones. They are all so family-oriented, these young people. It is touching, how devoted they are.

I am still a-flutter about my big day of public poem stuff, but the holidays are bringing me back to earth. It is not my job to be a poet at Christmas. It is my job to be a mother and a daughter and a sister. Picture me on my knees scrubbing toilets. Picture me bent over a wet mop. The poet vanishes slowly, like the Cheshire Cat: smile last to go.