Last night after dinner we got into the car and Steve drove us down the dark gravel roads to Kingsbury Pond so we could look at the moon over the water. How long it's been since I've been out on these roads after dark! And the moon was a glowing dinner plate, and the dog quietly splashed in the shallows, and Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train" laughed to itself on the car radio, and the windows were rolled down, and a quiet wildness spread among us, because here we were. Here we were.

Meanwhile another friend is dying.

Meanwhile today is my 61st birthday.

 

When we lived in Harmony, we often climbed nearby Borestone Mountain on one of the weekends surrounding my birthday. Now that we live in Portland, we go to the ocean, most often the Wells Estuarine Reserve at Laudholm Farm.

Yesterday, on a blue-sky, soft-air October Sunday morning, we stood barefoot in the surging North Atlantic and watched flocks of piping plovers wheel over the sand, then suddenly land together and run back and forth into the foam like little windup toys. We heard the cries of a yellowlegs, glimpsed hawks among the reddening trees, watched distant seabirds ride the waves. Our lungs were full of wind, our eyes full of sun. The hour was sheer delight.

A visit to the sea was a good way to counter my next few stressful days of driving and teaching and dealing with car sorrows. Tomorrow is my birthday, and I'll be spending it in class and on the road--not my dream celebration by any means, but on the bright side I'm staying tonight with homeland dear ones, so that will make things much better. This morning I'll gather my bits and pieces around me. I'll go for a walk with a friend. I'll borrow a car that knows how to pass inspection. I'll remember those flocks of plovers spinning over the glittering surf like a single thought.

Yesterday for dinner I made stuffed shells for maybe the first time since 1980: cooked down a small batch of fresh sauce, hand-mashed a small batch of fresh pesto, then mixed the pesto into a filling of ricotta, diced chicken, and prosciutto. For salad we had our usual green beans and cucumbers--nothing new at this time of year but still delicious. And then we ate the last two slices of apple pie. So, as you can see, my not-thrilling week got off to an encouraging start . . . the ocean, the garden, a copy of Mansfield Park lying open on the kitchen counter.

Four jars of golden tomato catsup! I haven't canned anything for several years so was pleased by how smoothly the process went. Canning is always fussy and cumbersome, but a batch of neat handsome jars is extremely satisfying, and yesterday's project went off without a hitch. Homemade catsup is an entirely different beast from bottled red ketchup. It's real food, with a complex and delicate flavor and an airy texture, and in our house it's always been a rare treat because it requires a lot of tomatoes. I was lucky to have half a bushel of giant yellow fruits ripen in the house simultaneously . . . and to have time to simmer them down for two days.

In and among my canning project, I spent a lot of yesterday working on the Baron essay. Finally, after a week of poking hopelessly at the first two paragraphs, I've been able to let myself go and start really writing. As of now, I've got five pages of a draft. There's much more to come, of course, but I do feel like something's come unstuck in me, writing-wise. For a few days I was wondering if I'd be able to do it at all, and that was not a good feeling.

In a few minutes T and I are going to head out for an early breakfast in Biddeford and then take our seasonal morning hike through the seaside bird sanctuary at Laudholm Farm in Wells. Afterward I'll get back to cutting down perennials in the garden. I'll reread the essay draft. I'll listen to the Blue Jays trounce the Yankees (I hope). I'll make stuffed shells for dinner.

Tomorrow I'll be on the road again, with a borrowed car to keep me nervous. Tuesday is my birthday but I'll be in class and driving all day long. Wednesday I'll be bleeding money for car repairs. I'm fluttery and anxious, and trying not to be.

 At 5 a.m. Chuck turned on the bedroom light (it's touch-sensitive, unfortunately) and then began patting my cheek with his paw and licking my eyelids: "Just wondering if you're awake, Dawn. Are you awake? Are you, are you, are you?" Standard invasive cat behavior, but he sure does know how to cloak it in wide-eyed innocence. So, yes, the answer is, I am awake, and the kitten is now full of breakfast, and we are curled up together with a couch blanket, and everything has turned out exactly like Chuck hoped it would.

Yesterday evening I lit the wood stove for the first time this season--just a small fire to take the edge off the modest chill and also to see how young Charles would react. He was thrilled by the flickering flames but thus far seems sensibly wary about getting too close to hot metal. Let's hope that continues to be true.

We really didn't need a fire last night. I could have put on another sweater. But few things are as sweet as sitting by the embers with a beloved and a silly kitten. Coziness is a great comfort, and why not be happy.

I think I've finally blocked out the entire long-poem class. The syllabus will need refining, but it now, thank goodness, exists from beginning to end. This is among the more complex online classes I've invented--so much material to get through, as well as a great deal of planned interaction--so carving it out has been challenging. But the hardest part is now done, and I can let it stew for a few days before I start picking at it again.

I've also made a bit of progress on the Baron retrospective and hope that I can find time to do more on it this weekend. I still have to can the catsup I made earlier in the week, and I want to do some yard work, and T and I are going to drive down to the bird sanctuary tomorrow for a walk along the salt marsh. But with the Poetry Kitchen planning more or less out of my hair, maybe I'll have the wherewithal to make some real progress on this very difficult essay.

Life is kind of overwhelming at the moment. The car troubles are a heavy blow, and that sinus infection has kicked me in the head, and friends are in pain, and my work responsibilities are unwieldy. But it's Saturday morning, and I am sitting with my little cat under my new birthday lamp. I'm drinking my second small cup of coffee. Rosy dahlias adorn the mantle. The refrigerator is groaning in exactly the way it's supposed to groan. The books on the table smile at me. Oh, world. You are a mysterious lover.

Excellent news: T and I solved our refrigerator problem on our own. After I discovered that the air-flow ducts between the compartments were plugged with frost, T unloaded the food into coolers and we defrosted overnight. Now everything works perfectly. Also all of the frozen food stayed frozen, so I didn't lose any of my hard work.

Other good news: A stalwart friend has offered me her car for Monday and Tuesday so I can get to Monson without a rental.

Moderately okay news: I found a repair guy who promises to fix the car's steering next Wednesday, a week earlier than the dealer could even look at it.

Unhappy news: A rack-and-pinion job costs $2,000. Tom, who for some reason is playing Mr. Look-on-the-Bright-Side in this farce, points out that the dealer would likely charge twice as much. So we are pretending to be delighted.

I have been having fantasies of giving up the car altogether, but that isn't feasible, with my parents in Vermont and my job in the hinterlands. But I am not altogether unhappy to be carless for a few days. The library is today's only errand, and I can walk there. If I decide I need a few groceries, they are around the corner, but house and garden are already well stocked.

Last night for dinner I braised chicken thighs with Vidalia onions, sweet peppers, garlic, and oregano. I made a salad of two kinds of tomatoes: greeny-red cherries and bright-red Brandywines. I baked a chard tian. I steamed a pot of arborio rice. I made a quick apple pie, using leftover pie dough I'd stowed in the freezer. No need for driving anywhere. The food was all here.

I spent much of yesterday (when I wasn't housecleaning or blowing my nose or consorting on the telephone with various repair people) focused on my current editing project. And I did manage to finish the chapter, which means that I can devote the bulk of today's work hours to class prep and my Baron essay. The dream of working on a poem is still a dream.

Yesterday turned out to be a classic oh-for-fuck-sake day. First, our refrigerator stopped working; the repair guys can't come out till next week; I scrambled to borrow coolers and cold packs, and T and I tried to figure things out on our own, which maybe we did or maybe we didn't. In any case, we defrosted it over night and will turn it on again this morning and find out something.

Then what I thought would be a routine get-my-car-inspected day exploded like a bomb: my car won't pass inspection because there's a problem with the rack-and-pinion steering, which is too complex a job for my regular mechanic, which will cost the earth, and which means that the car is presently unsafe to drive.

I'm supposed to be heading north to Monson on Monday and Tuesday, so I guess I'll be renting a car?

I spent all day feeling unhappy, full of dread about dropping this weight on Tom, wondering how I can be almost 61 years old and still limping through vehicles like a teenager.

But when he came home, and I told him the bad news, he was calm, he was helpful, he was soothing, he was all of the things that I love him for. And then he gave me a birthday present: a new lamp for the living room, which we've sorely needed.

The two of us have been through so many shitty household emergencies in our years together. Sometimes I think that's our closest bond. We look at each other and say, What next?

That was a fantastic Yankees-Red Sox game last night: hard won, well played, with a happy Sox ending. I've never expected this team to go far in the playoffs, but yesterday's game had old-fashioned style, and I had so much fun listening to it play out on the radio.

And then I had a long elaborate dream about a tree-lined campus, famous poets in book-filled rooms, everyone writing or engaged in eager conversation, lots of children here and there doing interesting projects, including a boy I seemed to be in charge of, and, strangely, everyone knew who I was, which made me extremely nervous through the entire dream. Was this supposed to be heaven? Or was it purgatory?

Well, whatever the case, I've returned to my everyday land. Chuck is tucked up against my leg, and the coffee is hot, and T is upstairs thunking dresser drawers and sighing. It is Wednesday, the first day of October. The air is cool and quiet in the little northern city by the sea.

This morning I need to take my car to the garage for an inspection. I'll put in some time on the essay about Baron, then turn back to editing. I'll reread my plans for the long-poem class, which are now about half done. I'll start cooking down tomato sauce for catsup.

I'd like to think I'll work on a poem draft. Or mull over my next collection. Or do something for the sake of my own thoughts. But that may be too much to hope for.

It's the end of September, and the days are a last hurrah of summer. The drought goes on and on. The trees and gardens are exhausted. But warmth lingers on my skin, when I sit out on the stoop after dark.

Now, before dawn, a freight train squeals through the crossing at the bottom of the street. The kitten rattles around in a corner with a pretend mouse. A car door thunks; a motor grinds; a clock ticks.

Yesterday, for the first time in more than week, I managed to put in a full day at my desk. I finished editing a chapter and started the next one. I started blocking out my long-poem syllabus. I began roughing out my essay about Baron. It was a relief to feel my brain at work again.

Today will be more of the same, along with exercise and grocery shopping and garden watering and sauce making. I'm tempted to let the garden dry up at this point, but I would lose any chance of late autumn greens. Tomatoes are ripening in the house, but beans and cucumbers are still producing more than we can eat, though the plants are yellowed and weary. The harvest season has been strange.

For a week I haven't thought about writing poems, but maybe that desire will come back to me too, along with my desk stamina. It's amazing how much strength is required to fight even a minor infection. I look in the mirror and see how tired I am. And yet I've accomplished so little.

But clearly I'm on the mend, if not fully healthy. My mind has returned to me, in any case. Whitman's lines murmur in my ears. Woolf's sentences unroll behind my eyes. The words are alive . . . small birds fluttering, wings beating . . . each syllable a tiny heart, pounding.

Dare I say I feel better this morning?

Yesterday I came to the conclusion that I've probably been fighting a sinus infection, not just a regular cold. If that's the case, I'm actually doing pretty well--no antibiotics, my own body managing the argument, and now this morning maybe a little less congestion and sinus pressure, at least so far. There seems to be no point in going to the doctor. If this sinusitis is viral (which, given its link to the head cold, I assume it is), the doctors aren't likely to give me antibiotics anyway. So why pay money for someone to tell me to drink a lot of fluids and get plenty of rest?

Sunday was pretty quiet. I finished reading Baron's ms, made some progress on The Waves, even did a bit of editing. I baked an apple cake and prepped various foods for our cookout. I picked beans and cucumbers. I watched the Bills game and checked in on the Sox. In the soft evening air we sat around the fire with our neighbor and ate and chatted as Little Chuck wailed in the house.

But now I have to gird myself for work. I'm behind on my editing, behind on my writing and class planning. Being sick has slowed me down a lot. Fortunately I'm not traveling this week, so maybe I can catch up.

T went out to see a show last night, while I got into bed at 7:30 and stayed there until nearly 6 a.m. Will my purposeful bedrest take a bite out of this stupid eternal head cold? We can only hope.

This morning I feel kind of better, maybe. Anyway I don't feel worse. Yesterday I simmered tomato sauce and froze green beans and prepped dried dill, mint, and Thai basil for jars. T and I went for a walk. I made good progress on The Waves, definitely a sign that my brain is resuming normal reading function. But I was still congested and slow, and so far I don't think that's changed much.

Well, I will plod forward. We've invited our neighbor over for our final cookout of the season this evening: marinated flank steak and halloumi on the wood fire, and I'll make black pepper rice, an apple cake, and some sort of vegetable side dish or salad (green beans, cucumbers, chard, lettuce, tomatoes: my choices overflow). I might watch the Bills game. I might listen to the Sox game. I hope to keep making progress on my considerable reading obligations. If I'm going to have a head cold for the rest of my life, I'd better get used to working around it.

Good morning . . . a bit late as I was wakeful in the night and then fell asleep hard at dawn. That's one of the many nice things about Saturday morning: awkward sleeping hours are just fine.

While I was in bed, the Red Sox clinched their postseason berth. They'd been losing to the Tigers when I turned off the radio, so a win was a pleasant surprise. This team gives me heartburn. They're not at all reliable, and I can't imagine they'll go far in the postseason, but every once in a while they behave like contenders. And now Chuck and I can enjoy a few more evenings of radio together.

I don't have much planned for the weekend, other than various garden-related activities. I'd been planning to freeze kale--until that damn groundhog stripped the leaves--but I still have green beans to deal with, chard to pick, bunches of dried herbs to put into jars, tomatoes to sort. I'll probably forage for mushrooms, and I've got a lot of reading to do. And Chuck is hoping for plenty of family fun. Presently he is pressed up against my leg, occasionally reaching over to pat my typing hands with his paw, not to interfere so much as to remind me how much he loves me. He is the sweetest little guy, all black velvet suit and round baby stare. How can I not forgive all of his crash-bash clattering and litterbox mistakes?

Though the head cold still lingers, my energy is finally beginning to pick up. This past week has been a challenge, stamina- and concentration-wise. I did what I needed to do, but the circumstances weren't ideal. It is good to start off the weekend with a late rise, to sit here with young Charles nestled against me, to slowly drink coffee, to do nothing other than wake up quietly with these few words.

We got more than an inch of rain yesterday, and thank goodness. I'm anxious to venture out for a walk first thing so I can see how the fall mushrooms are liking this new weather. Maybe, just maybe, I'll come home with another haul of hens.

I'd like to say I'm feeling better, but I'm still breaking into coughing fits, still snorfling and choking like a Lewis Carroll beast. Ugh, head colds. Anyway, at least I'm sleeping well, which is a giant help. And Little Chuck is an enthusiastic nurse.

Today is recycling day and sheet-washing day. I've got stacks of editing, I want to start plotting my essay on Baron's work, I need to buckle down and read The Waves, but I continue to feel semi-crappy so probably at some point the red lights will start flashing and I'll crash.

For the moment, though, I am perched cozily in my old familiar couch corner. Chuck is draped against my shoulder, stuffed with breakfast and purring sweetly into my left ear. Tom is upstairs, yawning, creaking across floorboards, opening and closing drawers. I might be a cold-ridden hag, but these guys I live with are still pretty friendly. It's nice of them.

It must be raining lightly. I hear drops tapping on the vents, swish of tires on the street. I hope it will fall all day and all night and that I'll wake tomorrow to a dripping, sodden, satisfied garden.

Gretchen and I had a good trip north. On Tuesday afternoon, we wandered around the town's biggest abandoned quarry, then later sat outside on our deck in the oddly balmy air, drank wine with Lulu the chef,  played a couple of games of cribbage, and then I fell asleep like a rock. So my state of health was improved by the time I actually had to deal with kids . . . only a manageable amount of public choking and snorting.

The day went well; students, for the most part, seemed excited and eager; and it was fun to hang out with the teaching crew again. Then back we went to Portland, where Little Chuck awaited, longing for company. Despite his eager joy to see me, he'd been well behaved during his two long workdays alone. I found no giant messes upstairs or down. So for all concerned, the inaugural trip to Monson was a success.

Today I've got housework to deal with, a phone meeting midmorning, a stack of editing . . . the usual demands. The head cold still clings, and I am tired of it. But clearly I am not in charge.

Amazingly I just woke up from a solid all-night's sleep, a rare thing in a strange bed. All I can think is that the cold put its foot down (ooh, how's that for a mixed metaphor?) and demanded full surrender. Anyway, already I can tell I'm feeling a lot better, and just in time, jeesh, with those kids busing up the road this morning.

First day of school! Wish me luck.

Supposedly we've got rain coming in tonight, then more rain off and on for the rest of the week--a forecast that seems mythical, but I suppose anything's possible.

I'll be heading north with Gretchen this afternoon, and tomorrow will be day 1 of Monson Arts High School, season 6 (or season 5? the Covid gap is confusing). In the morning Gretchen will put on her let's-make-some-stuff show for the whole crew, and after lunch I'll siphon off the writers and start casting the spell.

Ideally I would be healthier than I am, but such is life. I feel like I might be less congested than I was yesterday, and surely tomorrow will be even better? I can only hope.

Yesterday, on my walk through Baxter Woods, I found my first maitake mushrooms of the season. Given the drought, I'd resigned myself to foraging nothing at all, so this was big excitement--a gorgeous cluster, in perfect condition. Now we've got two quarts of choice wild mushrooms in the freezer, to add to the other delights I've been stowing during the past few weeks: peaches, green beans, salsa verde, corn cobs for soup base, chicken broth, tomato puree, kale. The dining room is decorated with baskets of green tomatoes. Cucumbers and green beans are still thriving in the garden. Tom brought home a sack of apples from his co-worker, to add to the wealth. Despite our drought struggles, we are basking in harvest luck.

Because my cold-ridden brain has been too dumb to concentrate on The Waves, I've been rereading Pride and Prejudice, always a comforting, hilarious, satisfying experience. It really is a funny book, a treatise on awkward love affairs and aggravating family life. One thing I like (among many) is the ending. After Jane and Bingley and Elizabeth and Darcy settle their romantic hash, Austen gives us a fat glimpse of their futures: who visits them, who continues to be a thorn, etc. She also offers this portrait of how Darcy's younger sister Georgiana fits into the new menage:

Pemberley was now Georgiana's home; and the attachment of the sisters was exactly what Darcy had hoped to see. They were able to love each other, even as well as they intended. Georgiana had the highest opinion in the world of Elizabeth; though at first she often listened with an astonishment bordering on alarm at her lively, sportive manner of talking to her brother. He, who had always inspired in herself a respect, which almost overcame her affection, she now saw the object of open pleasantry. Her mind received knowledge which had never before fallen in her way. By Elizabeth's instructions she began to comprehend that a woman may take liberties with her husband, which a brother will not always allow in a sister more than ten years younger than himself.

I read this passage aloud to Tom, with much satisfaction. "Sportive" as a recipe for wedded happiness: Austen is not wrong. 

Monday. T forgot to set his alarm so we are groggy and disoriented. He is making his sandwich. I am making the coffee. Chuck is making googly eyes. I stagger around the kitchen, snuffling, my ears plugged--a combination of my cold and last night's excellent show. Though I rested up well beforehand and had a great time, I could have done with about three more hours of sleep this morning. But Monday will not be stayed.

Now the coffee is doing its work: the grogginess is starting to fade, and I am becoming more resigned to the idea of daylight. I've got a busy week ahead--editing, travel, teaching--and this horrid clingy cold must disappear sometime, don't you think?

**

Okay, I'm back, after a flurry of kitchen cleaning. T has headed out to work, Chuck is crunching up some chow, and I am beginning to feel less zombie-like and want to tell you about Swamp Dogg, a little old man in his mid-eighties, about 5 feet tall and dressed in a bright orange suit and a bright orange hat and a bright orange shirt and bright orange suspenders, and he was dancing and singing and wailing and testifying, and if I have to be groggy today, it was 100 percent worth it to see him at work.

Yesterday, to Chuck's thrilled consternation, I brought up the firewood boxes and the kindling basket from their summer home in the cellar. Now they sit at the ready, piled with logs and sticks. This morning the air is chilly outside, in the low 40s, but it's not cold enough inside the house for me to justify lighting a fire. Upstairs the windows are still open, and sunshine will warm the downstairs soon. So I will curl up under the couch blanket and breathe in the steam rising from my coffee cup, and that will be cozy enough.

Between the two of us (though Tom did way more than I did), we got all of the green firewood out of the driveway and into the woodshed. I filled buckets and boxes with wood chips for kindling, then swept the rest into the flower gardens as mulch. T lugged the air conditioner into the basement. I picked the big tomatoes and carried them into the dining room for ripening. I processed green beans for the freezer. Between times I read Teresa's poems and Baron's poems and thought about them and took notes. I read a few pages of Pride and Prejudice. I meant to also read a few pages of The Waves but somehow never managed to pick up the book. I coughed and snuffled, in a minor-league way. I made an early dinner (roasted mackerel, corn salad with baked feta) so that T could go out and see a band. I sat on the couch with Jane Austen and ate peach pie and listened to the Sox game. I went to bed early.

Today I'm going to tear out the tomato plants, a task that will also include stripping out the remaining immature tomatoes and simmering them down into salsa verde. I'll make oven-fried chicken for dinner, and baked red tomatoes, and maybe an apple Brown Betty. And then tonight we are both going out to see a show: Swamp Dogg, a soul and R&B legend, described on Wikipedia as "one of the great cult figures of 20th century American music."

I hope the snuffling and coughing will dissipate. Really, this is not much of a cold, and I'm sure I'm no longer infectious, though I'm still feeling slow and dumb. Nonetheless, we managed to accomplish a batch of fall chores, and I managed to think about poems. The mule keeps trudging up the hill. 

Saturday morning, 45 degrees. We're nowhere near a frost yet, but the tomatoes seem to have stopped ripening on the vines. So this weekend I'll start filling baskets with tomatoes, start tearing out plants. I haven't yet touched the pile of firewood in the driveway, so that's another chore waiting. Although I did edit yesterday morning, I felt too crappy and cold-ridden to exert myself beyond laundry and cooking and blinking over a Jane Austen novel. But today I do feel somewhat better, and I expect I'll return to my mulish ways soon.

Young Charles allowed me to stay in bed till almost 6, and now I am dawdling over my coffee as he digests his breakfast upstairs alongside sleeping Tom. That little cat has been such a sparkle; we are both smitten, despite his pesty ways. I don't know when the gut issues will be fully resolved, but I try to remember that he is young yet, and babies always have wild intestinal excitement even when they're not recovering from giardia and neglect. Next week will be the first big test: Can Chuck manage alone for most of a day while T and I are both away at work? Or will we be mopping up a terrible mess? Stay tuned for the next thrilling episode of "Kitten Innards."

In addition to my outdoor chores, I've got a stack of friends' poems to read, an essay to start outlining, my Whitman class looming, and now this new editing project to wrestle with. I'm trying not to panic: this is normal, it's the freelance way, I've been in this situation a thousand times. Still, I do sometimes wonder what it would be like to just go to work and come home instead of whipping crazily back and forth between spaciousness and hysteria. Someday, maybe, I'll be able to start saying no to the editing projects. Someday, when I'm 90. Sigh.

Late yesterday afternoon I got very bad news about a friend's health, so I'm feeling somewhat blank and stricken this morning. The fact that I seem to be coming down with a cold isn't helping, though I did scribble some decent blurts at my writing group last night, so that's something.

Today I need to get started on a new editing project; I've got a cord of firewood to stack; class and writing and home obligations dangle and sway; but mostly I just feel like putting my head under the covers and waiting for some kind person to bring me tea. That is not going to happen, however, so I will blunder forward.

Meanwhile, Chuck "Mr. Enthusiasm" Van Pelt is bouncing around the house, eyes as big as pennies, making his little conversational chirp noises, occasionally stopping by to lean his cheek against mine, then leaping off again. He woke me at 4 a.m. by way of excessive snuggling. And, yes, he's a dear little good-tempered pest, but losing an hour of sleep was unfortunate.

My friend's bad news is very much darkening the day. But I will go for my walk. I will put clean sheets on the bed. I will make my own cup of tea and I will stand at my desk in my tiny sweet study and listen to the Carolina wren sing in the backyard maples. I will do the work I said I would do.

Everything has arrived simultaneously: a load of firewood, a basket of peaches, and a new editing project. Well, the editing project will have to wait till tomorrow because those peaches will not. I picked out enough for a pie yesterday and could see that the rest would be calling me today. So I may be baking a second pie (for my poetry group) and I'll certainly be scalding, peeling, slicing, and bagging peaches for the freezer.

What a gift, though! Local peaches in northern New England are a rare commodity as the trees are difficult to nurture and often die without warning. Of course, compared to the southern beauties, our northern varieties are lacking. They tend to be small, pale, and tart: no golden globes of sugar here. But they still have a peach's heavenly scent and texture, and the ones I'm dealing with are fairly easy to peel and slice, which is not the case with all.

So peaches are my day, and housework, and maybe I'll start hauling firewood, or maybe that will wait too.

Teresa and I talked about Brigit Kelly's The Orchard yesterday, and it turns out that neither of us liked the collection. Kelly is a revered poet, and many of my favorite people adore her work, so I feel unhappy saying that I just cannot. On the other hand, as Teresa argues, figuring out what doesn't move us clarifies some of the needs in our own work and heart. She and I have both succumbed to Whitman this year; we're both in a chaotic quandary about the direction of our next collections. But wherever we head, it cannot be where Kelly was pointing: that private preciousness, the interiority of the grotesque, an imagination that does not care if mine follows or not.

I spent much of yesterday morning driving around--first, out to Cape Elizabeth, to T's worksite, where I got a tour of the unnerving mansion, met some co-workers, and left with a half-bushel of ripening peaches. Then I drove to mall land and bought new bath towels to replace the old ones that are starting to split. And then I made myself do the grocery shopping, though by this time I was very ready to stop being surrounded by conspicuous consumption. So the afternoon was soothing: I processed beans for the freezer, made fresh pickles, cooked down a big pot of sauce, finished reading The Orchard. Homestead tasks may be demanding, but they also make me feel more humane. 

Today I'll be back at my desk--with luck, finishing an editing project, though that may take longer than I expect. This afternoon I'm meeting with Teresa to discuss The Orchard and no doubt a thousand other things. And somewhere in the midst of all this I'll be scribbling notes about the long-poem class. I don't know how quickly those peaches will ripen, but that's another big job looming. I suppose I'll slice them up for the freezer, though I could can them instead. I guess I'll decide later.

I am looking at poems and beginning to imagine a new collection. Sunlight glitters on clusters of unripened tomatoes. Tomorrow the green firewood arrives. Everything is caught. Everything is in motion.

I like coffee fine, but I'm not devoted to it. I enjoy my small cup each morning, my two small cups on the weekends, but I wouldn't miss it that much if it were gone. I could easily drink tea in the mornings. I could easily skip the caffeine altogether. But every once in a while, a cup of coffee is exactly perfect, and that's the cup I am drinking right now. Dark and bitter and steaming. Luxury, plain style.

Yesterday I walked down to the drugstore and got my Covid and flu shots, so now I'll have some protection before I dive into the public school petrie dish next week. Thank goodness we have a fantastic governor. Last week Janet Mills declared that all Mainers can receive free Covid vaccines, so I no longer need to fret about whether or not I can convince a doctor to give me a prescription.

I think I'm ready for my high schoolers, and I'm almost ready to talk to Teresa tomorrow afternoon about Kelly's The Orchard, and now a fresh stack of editing has appeared in my inbox. Still, though I've got plenty to keep myself busy at home, I may take a field trip to Tom's worksite today to check out the final manifestation of the massive house project he's been engaged on for more than two years now. Rumor has it that one of his co-workers is trying to give away some of her peach crop, which could add foraging excitement to my outing. The drought has made it a tough year for foraging. I will likely get no wild mushrooms at all (sob), so a peach windfall would be a thrill.

What else? I should get onto my mat. I should simmer another batch of sauce. I should make refrigerator pickles. I should read The Waves. I should mess around with my long-poem class plans.

Last night for dinner we had maple-miso baked salmon, potatoes roasted with sage, a chard tian, a tomato and green bean salad, apple cake . . . nothing fancy, nothing difficult, but it all tasted so good together. Tonight, maybe sauce and noodles, cucumber and red onion, another slice of apple cake . . .

Here's a bit of excitement, at least between my younger son and me. The Minnesota Twins have just called up the relief pitcher Cody Laweryson from the minors. Cody's a kid from Bingham, Maine, population 600-something, who used to play against Harmony's middle school basketball and soccer teams. P was pretty friendly with him, as these kids from the sticks can be: seeing each other season after season in one another's school cafeteria-gyms, watching each other suddenly sprout from kid to gangly teen. Cody went to UMaine, then was drafted into the Twins system, but at age 27 had never yet pitched in the majors. This week he finally got his chance, and he pitched two excellent innings against the Diamondbacks. Now the Twins are playing the Yankees, and P and I are so thrilled to imagine a kid from Bingham facing the great Aaron Judge. It is just the sort of story we love.

Yesterday was a fine day for driving down to the wharf--window open, singing along to Springsteen's Rosalita, paddling my left arm in the breeze. And it was a fine day for finding a parking place, a fine day for bringing home a treat. I spent just over $50 on four meals (three with leftovers) for two people. Whole Atlantic mackerel, as always, is a fabulous deal, and I also bought a pound of chowder mix--bits of cod, sole, flounder, hake. I stowed both in the freezer for later. But for tonight I bought Scottish salmon (not cheap but not ridiculous), and for last night I bought two soft-shell lobsters on sale. So we enjoyed a big Sunday-night feast: boiled lobster, melted butter, freshly baked bread, a green bean and cherry tomato salad, apple cake for dessert.

During the day I spent some time working on an essay for Poetry Lab Notes, the (maybe) name of the future Substack journal I'm designing with Jeannie and Teresa. I picked beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers. I watered the backyard gardens. I kept track of the Bills score. I read Arundel. I baked a couple of loaves of bread. It was a mild puttery day, and I'm sorry it ended so soon.

This week will be busy. I need to buckle down and get myself prepped for next week's high school opener. We've got a load of green firewood arriving, so I'll be back to wood hauling soon. I have to finish reading Brigit Kelly's The Orchard. I should start reading Baron's manuscript. Probably my calendar is scribbled with a passel of other obligations that I'm not instantly remembering.

For me, this is the last week of summer. The rest of the teachers have long been back in school, but I've had this extra month, and it's been sweet. So despite whatever is yammering at me on my calendar, I want to cling to that ease, even if only to stand idly at a window, to walk idly through the woods.

In unheard-of news, young Charles has allowed me to sleep past 5 a.m. two days in a row . . . well, not really sleep, though he I did let me lie on my back in a semi-dozy state while he sat purring on my sternum, now and then leaning forward to press his cheek romantically against mine.

But all semi-tolerable positions come to an end, and at this moment Chuck is crunching up his breakfast chow and I am drinking black coffee in my couch corner, and gray flat dawnlight is carving seams into the neighbors' vinyl siding. A robin bursts into complaint, then hushes. Crickets squeak squeak squeak squeak, without cease, without variation.

Yesterday I tore out one of my tomato plants, which was yellowing, and pruned the rest so that the remaining green fruit might have a better chance of ripening on the vines. But probably this year will be like all the others, and I'll soon be decorating the dining and living rooms with bushel baskets of green tomatoes. I did make a batch of sauce yesterday, and a batch of pesto, all of which went into the freezer. I also baked a caramelized apple cake, which we never ended up tasting because we decided to go out for German food and overstuffed ourselves with sauerbraten and potatoes and spaetzle.

During the day I worked for a few hours on Substack formatting, and now I know how to basically manage the platform and have drafted some sample entries to share with Teresa and Jeannie. I read Kenneth Roberts's Arundel, and I listened to the Sox lose to the Yankees. I watered the garden and harvested hydrangeas for drying. I did laundry and dealt with a kitten litterbox mistake and won a game of cribbage and lost a game of Yahtzee. I whipped through a couple of New York Times Sunday crossword puzzles. I was constantly busy with something or other, but in a desultory, semi-vacation, semi-homesteader, semi-bellelettrist sort of way. There are worse ways to spend a Saturday.

Today will likely be more of the same. I want to take a trip to the fish market so I can restock our freezer. I might bake bread. I should prune the faded blooms on the dahlias, coneflowers, and marigolds. Maybe I should run the trimmer along the edges of the browning grass. I'd like to cut fresh bouquets for the mantle. Little chores, none of them crucial . . . and yet as Angela and Carlene suggested in their comments on yesterday's post, our small busyness is life's embrace.

As always, an afternoon with Jeannie and Teresa makes me feel as if, maybe, possibly, I am doing the work I ought to be doing. What a gift it is to have such minds in my life, not to mention the model of their commitment, their persistence, the sheer hard work they do, day in and out. Of course, they can still (inadvertently) make me feel like a dilettante. Oh, Dawn, she's the one rereading Kidnapped and watching Mary Tyler Moore reruns. Meanwhile, Teresa and Jeannie discuss brain chemistry and Thomas Mann.

We are beginning to cogitate about bringing some of the work we've been doing privately into a more public sphere, possibly through a shared Substack journal that would include commentary about our conversations and readings as well as poems we've written under one another's influence. So that's another thing to add to my to-do list: figure out the details of the platform and discover if it might possibly work for us.

One interesting element of yesterday's conversation concerned publishing. We discovered that all of us, over the past few years, have significantly reduced our engagement in journal submissions. In some cases, that's because journals that once reliably took our work no longer publish (Gettysburg Review, Scoundrel Time). Sometimes new editors have changed a journal's focus and our work is no longer of interest (Sewanee Review). Print-only journals have almost no circulation, so publishing in them can feel like graveyard work.

But as Jeannie also pointed out, at this stage in our lives, the three of us don't need journal publication to pad our resumes or comfort our egos. It's only purpose is to give us a public voice, so why not create a place where we can do that for ourselves, in our own way?

It's okay if you tell me I need another unwieldy project like I need a kick in the head. I know I'm already overloaded. Soon I'll be on the road teaching high schoolers. I've got an online class on the long poem to design. I'm editing academic texts. I'm writing my own poems. I'm researching for a big collaborative performance with the Monson Arts conference faculty. I'm mulling a new collection. I've got to write a giant critical essay about Baron's oeuvre. I have homestead chores. I have fragile parents who live five hours away from me. I'm raising a lively kitten with gastrointestinal trouble. My kid is getting married next summer. I'm turning 61 in less than a month.

All I can say in my defense is that being around brilliant, curious, fire-hearted people is energizing. I spent my apprentice years largely alone as a writer, and now I am basking in a community of poets and other artists. I scrabbled across an ice floe and fell into a warm bright sea. 

Yesterday was a surprisingly warm day, and this morning the mildness lingers, though today's temperatures aren't supposed to rise out of the mid-sixties. Little Chuck sits next to me beside the open window, washing his face. Last night he and Tom enjoyed boy time together, while I was out writing, and then both beamed at me when I walked through the door. How he worms his way into our affections, despite our broken Ruckus hearts. Oh, these little souls.

I wrote two poem-blurts last night: one a hideous mess that I won't revisit, but the other might be real. This morning, after I deal with recycling and dishes and laundry and my mat exercises, I'll see what daylight says about it. I do hope it's a poem. Writing has been so hard for me lately.

This afternoon Teresa and Jeannie and I will meet to talk about To the Lighthouse and Nevermore and Ruden's I Am the Arrow. We always share a recent draft or two, and I think maybe one of the ones I'll be sharing is all right. But writing has been so difficult for me that I barely trust myself.

I know this will pass; it always does. And I am dogged. I always plow straight through my dry fields, kicking up dust. 

In the cemetery, one of my favorite gravestones reads Homemaker. Drummer. Maybe on mine someone will etch Mule. Poet.

Yesterday I did a thing I've never done before: I signed us up for an autumn farm share--six weeks' worth of local organic vegetables, which I can pick up at a delivery point on my own street. As a recovering homesteader, I of course feel weird about this. But my garden was wretched, I won't have much to process for the freezer, and it turns out that the cost of the CSA is probably less than I would spend at the grocery store. It's certainly no more, and we'll be supporting a local farmer and eating interesting food. If we like it, I'll sign us up for a winter share.

I'm trying to think of the CSA as I think of the freezer lamb we buy every winter: a sensible way to acquire high-quality food, support farmers, and save a little money by buying in bulk. But for a gardener, it does feel like a come-down. Ah, well. You'd think after a nearly a decade in this city, I'd have conquered my woodsy snobberies. But they linger.

Today is housework day, and going-out-to-write evening, and this afternoon I've got a zoom meeting with Monson staff about the conference scholarship program. Here's hoping we can come up with a good plan for filling that hole. If you can donate, in any amount, we'd so appreciate that. But we're also trying to figure out ways to guarantee a regular and predictable scholarship fund, given the implosion of public support.

I drove to mall land yesterday, not a favorite activity, and bought new pillows for our bed as ours had reached lump stage and I kept waking up with a stiff neck. And I bought another pair of jeans in the new smaller size I now magically seem to be. Yes, it's school-clothes season: new jeans, new boots, new Goodwill leather jacket. Add loud earrings and maybe some lipstick, and I am all ready to put on my high school show. I might as well be cheerful and vivid because, no matter what, I'm still going to look like I'm 60 years old.

[You notice I haven't mentioned yesterday's assassination yet? You notice how impossible it's becoming to condemn violence while also noting that the man who was killed encouraged this exact same violence as long as it was inflicted on people he didn't care about? You notice how we can't talk about irony? You notice how we can't talk about truth?]

Another morning in the 40s, with highs not forecast to get out of the low 60s. It really is fall; and though I'm often elegiac about summer, this year I'm ready for a new season. We had such terrible wrong weather this spring and summer, not to mention a groundhog infestation and of course losing Ruckus, which greatly affected my pleasure in being outside in the garden. I'm ready to turn my thoughts to brisk walks and cool air and lighting an evening fire. I haven't filled the upstairs woodbox yet, but that time is coming.

Yesterday was ridiculously busy. I went for a walk with Gretchen, then lugged Chuck to the vet, then came home for an unexpected visit from my homeland friends Angela and Steve, then rushed off for a haircut, then rushed home for an emotional phone meeting with Teresa about a new writing project that I didn't even know I was conceiving until we started talking . . . and then I made chicken chili with cornmeal dumplings for dinner, alongside a cucumber and yogurt salad and apple crisp with cream, all the while feeling kind of hung over from my overemotions with Teresa. I'm grateful for friends who can exist in that world with me, but it shakes me, too.

Anyway, the upshot is that Teresa and I and possibly some other poets may be collaborating on a collection together, or maybe not. We don't have anything yet, except feelings and landscapes and scattered thoughts.

Good news about Chuck, though. He now weighs six pounds, and the vet staff is so pleased. Clearly he's starting to absorb his meals better. Yet there are still lingering gut issues, so now he's on a probiotic that we hope will solve them. The poor guy has been so cheerful throughout this ordeal, but you know how bad an intestinal problem feels.

Today is my dear sister Heather's 59th birthday. And this morning the furnace guy is supposed to show up, for real this time. In the afternoon I'm being zoom-interviewed by a high school student, and in between I'll probably run errands and make a batch of sauce and start looking at poems, keeping my conversation with Teresa in mind. I'm also in the midst of a Beethoven listening project with Betsy, and it, too, may or may not turn into some sort of collaboration. Teresa and I are reading Brigit Kelly's The Orchard together and now we want to read Virginia Woolf's The Waves as well. I've got to start thinking about that daunting essay on Baron's oeuvre. I've been copying out "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." There's so much to do! Yet I'm also feeling fairy-tale frozen. Some spell has been cast. What will break it?

It's cold this morning! . . . 46 degrees: no wonder Chuck slept curled underneath my chin and I spent the entire night trying to warm my bare feet on Tom. The sad days of sock time are upon us.

Well, I have just bought myself a new pair of boots, so perhaps the sock transition will be more enjoyable this year. I do always feel sad when sandal season is over. On the other hand, lighting the wood stove is a celebration, and if this weather keeps up, I'll be hauling firewood upstairs before you know it.

Yesterday morning, as soon as Tom backed out of the driveway and left for work, the washing machine hose separated from the drain and began spewing water all over the basement. Fortunately I quickly repaired the breach, but I was not sorry to then get a call from the oil company telling me that the furnace cleaning guy was out sick and would have to reschedule. I did not want to picture him kneeling in the flood.

So I ended up with a quieter-than-expected day--did the grocery shopping, finished Cat's Eye, then began copying out "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" so that I can carefully study the transitions between sections. If you're taking my upcoming Poetry Kitchen class, you might consider doing the same: I won't assign that task to you, but in my experience copying out long poems is hugely helpful when I'm trying to figure out how they work and what I might borrow from them. It's also a great way to sideswipe writer's block.

This morning I'm going for a walk with Gretchen, then hauling Chuck off to the vet, getting my hair cut, phone-meeting with Teresa about her current writing obsession . . . a tap-dancing-up-the-walls-and-across-the-ceiling kind of day: I don't know exactly what I mean by that comparison, but certainly it evokes split-second timing and splintery, sparking concentration . . . also, so much talking: the overexcitement of poems mixed in with hairdresser small talk and cat digestion. I might need a nap afterwards.

And here we are at Monday again. I've got a busy week ahead: furnace cleaning (aka kitten wrangling), vet appointment (ditto), four zoom meetings (yikes), and whatever else is scrawled on the calendar that I'm not recalling at the moment.

None of that is paying work, but soon editing projects will start reappearing. I'm on the countdown to my Monson classes. And yesterday I was asked to write a big critical retrospective of Baron Wormser's work--an almost overwhelming assignment. Of course I can't turn it down, and I wouldn't dream of doing so. Nonetheless, nerves kept me awake last night. Writing essays, especially review essays, always exhausts me, and writing essays about my teacher's work is particularly grueling. Even though I've written about Baron's books several times already, I'm still anxious about getting things wrong. Yet it's an honor to be asked, and I know I'm probably the right person to do the job . . . Anyway, whatever the case, I said yes, and now I have to figure out what the task will require of me.

We got more than an inch of rain over the weekend, thank goodness. The grass is still brown and burnt, the shrubs still tatty and shabby, but the air is cloaked in the scent of wet leaves and earth, and there is a sense of ease in the garden after months of tightness and stress. On my walk I'll keep an eye out for mushrooms--it was a terrible summer for chanterelles but maybe the autumn maitakes will have a chance.

I've been reading Atwood's Cat's Eye, such a painful book about childhood, and thinking about how it echoes and diverges from Elizabeth Bowen's The Little Girls. I wonder if Atwood read that novel before she wrote her own.

Childhood is such a wilderness.

A two-day rainstorm is a magnificent gift. So far, close to an inch has fallen, and the shrubs and garden plants look drunk. No wonder: after a two-month drought, I feel kind of drunk too.

I managed to soothe Chuck into letting me sleep in a little this morning, and now the two of us are cozily curled up together in our couch corner, listening to the slow click and tap of raindrops. Sunday morning. Rain, hot coffee, a bowl of kitten chow, and a pal. What could be more luxurious?

Yesterday's lunch at the seafood warehouse was delicious and also very amusing. The company is Japanese-owned and specializes in processing urchins (uni) and sea cucumbers for the Asian market. But they are also open daily for lunch. We bought trays of sashimi, whelk, some cooked rice, some nori, and carried them all upstairs to the employee break room. The price was reasonable, the fish was off-the-boat fresh, and most of the other diners appeared to be Japanese. A sign on the wall informed us: "Do Not Drinking." I can't wait to go back.

Look how wonderful it is to spend time with the gifts of other cultures. Yet while I'm peacefully eating Japanese food in Maine, the residents of Pilsen, my son's Chicago neighborhood, are petrified. The area is majority Mexican American, and people know that Trump is targeting them--these modest families, pushing their grocery carts through the aisles, walking their children to school. I love that neighborhood so much, and I am sick over the thought of ICE agents and National Guard troops terrorizing it. And of course I am scared for my son and future daughter-in-law, who are white American citizens but also highly likely to intervene in any wickedness they see.

Well, what can a parent do but quietly stand back and say, I raised a righteous child. And now his righteousness is being put to the test.

The morning is dark and mild. Through the open windows I hear crickets creak and, beyond them, the low growl of the highway.

I am up far too early on a Saturday morning, but Chuck is irrepressible. He is four months old now, and we are firmly in toddler land. I wail, "Can you deal with the cat? He's trying to climb me while I'm peeling potatoes," and T, like a good partner, swoops up the pest and takes him away. The living room floor is covered with cardboard boxes. We're woken at 3 by a joyous monster. Our conversation is dominated by discussions of bodily functions. We've both found ourselves automatically doing the baby-joggle when we hold him.

Of course, now that he's forked me out of bed, Hasty Stan himself has gone back to sleep. He's curled up next to me on the couch, little bat ears nestled against my hip, a portrait of Good Boy. Hah.

We're supposed to get some solid rain this weekend, starting midafternoon. T and I have plans to go out to lunch with our neighbor, at a seafood wholesaler she's learned about: apparently you can get platters of fresh sashimi and uni and eat them in the company breakroom, and we are eager to check it out. Then, if the rain holds off,  the three of us might mosey along Congress Street . . . look at a book fair, go to some vintage stores, investigate the flea market.

I'm still reading Ozick's Trust, recommended by my novelist friend Tom. I'm also looking again at Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, and I need to get started on Brigit Kelly's collection The Orchard, which Teresa and I will be rereading together. With Betsy, I've starting a listening project: Beethoven's late string quartets. Valerie and I are watching the new season of the British baking show together. Gretchen and I go for walks and imagine performances centered around slate and ice. T and I are team-raising yet another crazy little boy. Hey, friends, it's so good to know you all.

It's raining!

Chuck, confused by the unfamiliar tap and click, has been wandering wide-eyed around the house. Now he has settled on the back of the couch, perplexed but lulled, staring into the dark maw of the window.

We're supposed to have off-and-on rain for the next few days, and I fervently hope for more on than off. How beautiful it would be to enjoy a weekend of wet. 

Yesterday I chipped away at five different poem drafts, read a chunk of Ozick's novel Trust, got the house cleaned, went out to write. Today is recycling day, sheet-washing day, probably errand-running day; but then I can turn my thoughts back to the drafts. I can't tell what I think of the Ozick yet: it seems to be too aware of its own irony, but it was a young person's novel so that's forgivable. It is vast and messy and surprising and exuberant; also judgmental; also ridiculous, especially in its figurative language and its stock characters: "lawyers," "poets," "society girls," "rich people." Reading it feels like living inside the head of an imperfectly observant but very opinionated, ambitious, performative, and overreaching 1960s-era young woman novelist, so in that way it is a complete success.

Shopping

Yesterday, after unloading a few bags of things at the Goodwill, I went inside to see if I might want to bring home any previously owned stuff to fill the gap left by the removal of my own previously owned stuff. Ah, the vicious Goodwill circle . . . Though I am not in general very tempted by shopping, I do enjoy moseying through the crazy disorder of the books and housewares, and yesterday I found the complete poems of James Wright and two sturdy plain drinking glasses of the sort that Tom had recently broken. Success! So then I thought I'd take a look at the clothes--these days almost always a waste of time at the Goodwill, now that the vintage buyers skim everything off first. But magically I found a beautiful red suede jacket that fits me like a glove and will look grand with the jeans I bought a few weeks ago . . . and get this: they are jeans in a size smaller than my usual one. I mean, what's with that? I'm almost 61 and I've dropped a size? What is this miracle?

Names

As you know, Little Chuck's full name is Charles Snowball Dirtball Van Pelt. But naturally he's acquired a few more, to be deployed in special circumstances. When he sits around sweetly, Tom pats him on the head and says, Aw, Charles. When he is his everyday spunky self, he is Hey, Chuck, stop that. But during periods of hysteria, when he is pushing silverware on the floor and climbing on the counters and worming his way into the open dishwasher and galloping up and down the stairs like a lunatic, he is Hasty Stan Stanwood, star player for the Black Sox. We had some serious Hasty Stan action last night, when he dumped a water glass all over the dining room table, just as I was getting ready to serve dinner. My son refers to this as velociraptor behavior: those moments when a kitten almost seems to become airborne. Put Hasty Stan on first and he'll steal third in the blink of an eye. It makes for an exciting mealtime.

Books

I finished rereading Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, one of the great book loves of my life. And then I finished reading Sarah Ruden's I Am the Arrow, in which she uses six Plath poems as a way to talk about Plath's writing and life. I've already read a great deal about Plath, and I've already spent a lot of time with Plath's poems. Is it wrong to say that I've reached the stage when I no longer care about anyone else's close readings?

This is the apple pie I baked yesterday afternoon, the first apple pastry of the season, and I have to say that I am smug about its good looks. For reasons best known to itself, the crust behaved beautifully--no rips, no sticking--and the filling was tender but not soggy. (I dislike a gluey, flour-packed filling but I do like a pie I can slice.) Now, if I only knew how to center a photograph. . . .

It was a big kitchen day: in addition to the pie, I roasted a chicken and made gravy and a big corn and vegetable salad. Now we'll have cooked chicken to work with for a few days, and today I've got another round of tomatoes to simmer down into sauce, chard to prep for a tian, and lots of leftover apple pie. Seems like a reasonable start to September.

I need to run a few errands today, and I need to get back to my desk and look hard at some poems. Yesterday my friend Betsy dropped by with a present she'd bought for me as thanks for reading her manuscript . . . though all I had said to her afterward was "This is a great poetry collection! I have nothing to recommend! It's wonderful!" So I do feel as if I wasn't in fact all that helpful, though maybe praise is good enough on its own. It was a manuscript that didn't need me in the slightest. But Betsy brought me a present anyway.

The task did remind me that I ought to gird my loins and start looking at my own piles of uncollected poems. Do I want to make another book? I guess I do. Right now I just don't know how to get myself ready to start. Eventually, if the past is any indicator, I'll be seized with a sudden organizational idea and then I'll tear into the project. For now, though, submit submit is too weighty a chant. Ugh. 

Yesterday's ferry hop out to the islands was perfect--beautiful soft weather, no crowds, and we timed our trip for low tide so we could walk across the sandbar from Little Diamond to Great Diamond. We ate a picnic lunch in the shade, we picked our way over a beach where the only other visitors were three women reading books, we wandered gravel roads and paths, and we got home in time for an afternoon nap.

It's sad that the work week returns so quickly, but thus is time and here we are again. Little Chuck, who had a spurt of badness yesterday evening (pushing silverware off the dining room table, sneaking onto the counter in pursuit of cheese), is curled up on my shoulder in the guise of a good little boy. But such laziness cannot continue. I need to grocery-shop today, and send in my passport renewal, and deal with a pile of laundry. I ought to start thinking about high school class plans. I have two poem drafts smoldering and a box of stuff to cart to the Goodwill.

Yesterday I finished reading Toibin's The South, and for the moment I'm passing the time with Stevenson's Kidnapped till I step back into serious concentration.

Today is the first day of school in Portland, and my walk will be crowded with parents and children. A few leaves are changing color; a few are beginning to fall. My Poetry Kitchen class is full (actually too full, amazingly). I've got so much work looming. But for the moment I will idle, watching the families hurry by, watching the songbirds strip the last of the berries from the bushes. I feel invisible. It is not so bad.

I've just woken up from a very disturbing dream-visitation featuring a Harmony friend who was murdered more than a decade ago. In my dream I had no recollection of her actual fate: we were just two people walking sociably around a fair together (the fairground was my Harmony land), talking and laughing and watching our neighbors bustle among rides and buildings. But as soon as I woke, I was appalled.

So now I am sitting here in my couch corner with a weight on my heart. Poor tragic Amy. Her children were also murdered, but in my dream there were no children, neither hers nor mine. It was just the two of us and, far off, a glimpse of her father talking to Tom. "Let's go see your dad," I remember suggesting. We tried to make our way through the crowd. But we never got there before I woke up.

I should write to her mother about this visitation. If Amy has come back from the dead, even so fleetingly, her mother must be told.

Well, that dream will color the day, no question. Tom is going to take our photos this morning so that we can send in our passports for renewal. We are planning a midday picnic and stroll on the Diamond Islands. But in the meantime Amy will walk beside me across my lost land, and her father will never get to see her.

Good morning from the chilly Alcott House, a little late because Chuck woke me by climbing on my head at 2 a.m. and I ended up downstairs on the couch trying to recoup my lost hours . . . successfully, as it happened. Once we settled onto the couch, the kitten for some reason became docile and let me fall asleep and stay that way till 6:30. So I am well rested in a non-sequential way, thanks to the no-pressures of a Sunday morning.

It is the last day of August. Outside the sun is awake and shining vigorously, and 50-degree air creeps through the window I left open in the living room last night. My feet are cold, and Chuck's paws are cold on my neck, and if I had any sense I'd close that window. But the crisp freshness is such an uplift after months of limp heat. Cold feet are the price to pay for this clean sharp swirl, with its hint of winter and new apples.

Yesterday turned out to be a kitchen day. I made refrigerator pickles with sliced young cucumbers, a handful of shredded cabbage, and a few slivers of red onion. I processed green beans for the freezer. I marinated a lamb loin in white wine, garlic, lovage, thyme, and oregano. For dinner I seared the lamb, served it with caramelized Vidalia onions and fresh mint; potatoes roasted with sage and olive oil; and a tomato, basil, garlic, and breadcrumb salad. I baked chocolate-chip scones for dessert. Summer at its finest.

Today I'll cut another few herb bouquets for drying. I'll simmer a batch of tomatoes for sauce. I may process kale or chard for the freezer. It's so pleasant to spend morning hours in my pretty kitchen, so pleasant to come in from the garden, bowls piled high with produce.

As I worked yesterday, I thought about my upcoming Poetry Kitchen class--began puzzling out various scenarios for prompts and conversations, trying them out on myself, imagining them in the minds of participants. I got notice of another signup last night, meaning that there are now only two slots left. Clearly changing the date solved my slow registration problem, and I am only too glad to stop beating myself up for focusing on a topic that few people seemed to care about. This would have been my first class failure, and naturally I was prepared to excoriate myself. Fortunately I can now put that project off for another day.

Update: Now there's just ONE space left in the long-poem class. Make it yours?

After discussion, I have changed the dates of my upcoming Poetry Kitchen class on Whitman and the long poem. The original October date was a sticking point for several interested people, so the first weekend is now November 1 and 2; the second remains November 15 and 16. Already I've had a flurry of new sign-ups, and there are currently just three spaces left: grab one while you can.

I'm very happy to be home with Tom for this three-day weekend. Last year at this time I was in New York--my unknowing final sight of Ray, a big Manhattan blow-out meal, a Mets game, my son's engagement. The visit was crowded and expensive and momentous, and next Labor Day will be even more so: we'll be in Chicago with hordes of family and friends for the wedding. So this time around I am ready for the not-momentous: an unhurried holiday at home with my beloved. Our only plan is to take the ferry out to Great Diamond at low tide, probably on Monday, so we can walk across the sandbar to Little Diamond and find a picnic spot in some quiet beach nook.

Yesterday I finished moving firewood into the basement, and now the cellar is swept, the logs are stacked and tidy, the kindling is stowed, and I am basking in the glow of accomplishment. The wood is in: there's so much satisfaction in that small dry sentence. Let the darkness creep forward! Let sleet clatter at the panes! The lamps are lit, and the wood is in.

And we got our first steady rain yesterday, a cool autumn rain, hinting at sweaters and socks and couch blankets and hot tea and tomato sauce simmering in the kitchen. For dinner I made bluefish en papillote, steaming the fillets with black beans, shredded cabbage, and sprigs of thyme; serving them with freshly made salsa and a salad of cucumbers and green beans. I played a My Bloody Valentine album and thought sentimentally of the time my boys and I were car-shopping in Bangor, and we test-drove a car we couldn't afford and drove it around the mall roads while blasting My Bloody Valentine songs on the stereo. Once Ray went to a My Bloody Valentine show and reported that it was "too loud"--a real accomplishment by the band, I'd say, given Ray's lifetime devotion to raucous rock shows.

I got up too early this morning, thanks to pesty Chuck. But that's nothing new. Though I may dream of sleeping late, I hardly ever do. Now he's folded himself into the gap between the back of the couch and my shoulder, wedged in, purring like a pressure cooker, pressing his cheek against mine or patting me with a tiny soft paw. Little Chuck is such a romantic.

On the coffee table: Ruden's Plath study, Lahiri's Whereabouts, Whitman's collected works. An almost-finished book of very hard crossword puzzles. A history of indigenous America, a New Yorker. An empty white cup and saucer. On the mantle, a pewter cup overflowing with sweet peas, a stoneware vase of dahlias and cosmos. Outside: pink-tinged daylight and the clonk of black walnuts dropping from the tree onto my neighbor's junk car.

This is a long note. I seem to have contracted logorrhea overnight. I will release you from my sentences. I hope you get a chance today to enjoy your own.

Little Chuck's debut with the poets went swimmingly. He enjoyed a novelty pen and a notebook with ribbon markers. He climbed into book bags. He submitted happily to doting and cuddling. He claimed his own chair in the circle, then fell asleep in it.

Often I've wondered if, morally, I should have adopted a more difficult-to-place animal: an older cat, a shyer or more anxious one. But it is so gratifying to have a pet who easily dispenses charm and cheer amid a clutter of guests. Like Ruckus before him (though in different ways), Chuck is good at a party. Really, I don't know why I should feel guilty for choosing to adopt a well-adjusted kitten. It's not like this one had an easy start, given his hoarder background. I've also read that shelters sometimes have a hard time placing black cats. So maybe I did him a good turn by taking him in, and now he is doing us a good turn by being such a sweet and sociable pal. Whatever the morals of the case, he lives here now, and we're glad to have him.

So now it's Friday--recycling-truck day, washing-the-sheets day, finishing-the-firewood-chore day. I wrote a couple of drafts last night that I want to inspect this morning. I have friends' poems to read and the book about Plath to pore over. I'll go for a walk. We'll eat bluefish for dinner, and freshly picked green beans, and homemade ice cream, and we'll play cards and listen to the Sox versus the Pirates, and we'll be happy about the long weekend ahead. With luck the sound of rain will lull us to sleep.

I am feeling so grateful this morning for the small and not-so-small gifts. A houseful of friends! A funny kitten! A partner who is so pleased that I have friends, who enjoys the sound of our chatter, who says, "Tell them to come any time." Firewood stacked, fat tomatoes in a bowl, books on the table, a warm arm around me at night and a kitten tucked under my chin. Oh, the world, the world. So terrifying, so beloved.

Fifty degrees on this dark morning, and for the first time in months all of the downstairs windows are shut for reasons of cold rather than heat.

Today is housework day, and another-round-of-firewood day, and, most excitingly, Little Chuck Party day: I've invited my writing group here this evening so that Chuck can enjoy his debut into the social whirl. I'm sure he'll be overjoyed, though to be honest it doesn't take much to overjoy this kitten. He is an enthusiast. Presently he is sitting on my shoulder, purring hard and now and again pressing his cheek lovingly against mine. This cheek-to-cheek stuff is irresistible. It's also impossible to sleep through when he's got breakfast on his mind. Ruckus used to bite me to get me out of bed. Chuck's velvet glove is less decisive but equally effective. First he wedges himself under my chin. Then he pats my face with a soft little paw. Then he rubs his cheek against mine and gets hair in my mouth. The charm-school approach to world domination. So sweet. So annoying.

I've started reading Sarah Ruden's I Am the Arrow: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath in Six Poems. I want to spend time with a friend's new chapbook, and Teresa sent me one of her poem drafts to look at, and I need to come up with a writing prompt for tonight. It will be a busy day for words and wheelbarrow and soap. In the kitchen the toaster pops. Outside, a distant ambulance whoops. Tragedy as background music.  Little Chuck chirps and bats a shoelace.

Given Chuck's ongoing gut issues, I can't lock him out of the basement and away from his litterbox for hours at a time. Nonetheless, I managed to get a sizable amount of firewood into the basement yesterday morning, and then released the lion and let him cavort over the mountain of logs as I stacked. At this speed, I'll need another few days to finish the job, but that's fine. Chuck's delight over the woodpile is worth the extension.

This morning I'll go for a walk with a friend, then return to firewood and my poem draft and my reading. Tonight T and I are going out to the movies--Robert Altman's 1973 noir The Long Goodbye, one of our favorites. Meanwhile, my tomatoes have suddenly started ripening, so I'll make sauce today, maybe freeze a few beans. Clearly it's homestead season--harvest work, firewood work--and I'm lucky to have a block of time to concentrate on the bounty.

Now T is coming down the stairs, and Little Chuck is bouncing after him. The sky whitens; chill air swirls through an open window. No fires needed yet, but the vision of neatly stacked wood in the cellar is satisfying. I look forward to the fragrance of simmering tomatoes. I look forward to a little black cat curled on the hearthrug.

Today I'll finish the Le Carre novel and turn my thoughts to Sarah Ruden's book on Plath. I'll mess around with my draft . . . it's close to done, but a few phrases remain rough or conditional. Is it a good poem? I don't know yet, but for the moment it is alive--shifting, expanding, murmuring.

I know all of northern New England has suffered from drought this summer, but the Maine coast has been particularly stricken. Any rain in the interior never seems to make it to the edge. For instance, though the rest of you had rain yesterday, we did not get a single drop. It's sorrowful to watch the shrubs and trees shrivel into oblivion. Even a passing shower would have been respite. But the rain never comes.

Yesterday I finished Wajsbrot's Nevermore, read a friend's poetry collection, started Le Carre's Agent Running in the Field, and worked hard on a poem draft--exactly the day I was hoping to have. Today I'll do more reading and writing, and I'll also get started on my multistage firewood chore. Part 1 is wheelbarrowing the seasoned logs out of the woodshed and tossing them down the basement hatch. Part 2 is stacking the pile in the basement. Part 3 begins in September, when the delivery truck dumps a new pile of green wood in the driveway, and I wheelbarrow it into the shed where it will season for a year. Tom will help around the edges, after work and on the weekend, but mostly this is my job.

As firewood chores go, it's pretty minor, nothing like the endless forest-to-fire cycle of our life in Harmony. No cutting trees, no hauling them out of the woods, no chainsawing them into stove-length pieces, no splitting by hand or machine, no always being behind schedule, no snow-soaked work gloves and cranky trudging children. Still, even city firewood is a project. There's nothing easy about keeping a wood stove going.

What a lovely weekend! My in-laws are 100 percent fun and sweet and doughty . . . we walked all over an island, walked all over downtown, ate great food, chattered and laughed, became melodramatic over a card game, cosseted Little Chuck, and generally amused ourselves greatly. I so appreciate their good humor, their curiosity, their easygoing restful attitude. It is an honor to be a daughter-in-law in this fine family.

And now it is Monday, and I feel like a person who has actually experienced a restorative weekend. This week I have little on my calendar, other than moving firewood into the basement (which, granted, is a significant project), going for a walk with a friend, and hosting my writing group for Little Chuck Night. So wish me luck with the writing and the reading because they are my primary goals.

I won't start the firewood chore today because we're supposed to maybe possibly who knows receive a dab of rainfall. Last night, from our restaurant window by the docks, we watched the shifting mackerel sky, the wind fluttering the water, and I hope they presaged a true turn in the weather. This drought is terrible.

For now, I am starting the day in my couch corner, with Little Chuck tucked against my shoulder and breathing confidingly into my ear. He, too, enjoyed the weekend company, and now he is full of contentment and breakfast. I've got Cecile Wajbrot's Nevermore to finish today, Sarah Ruden's small book on Plath to begin, Brigit Pegeen Kelly's The Orchard to reread, and a stack of books from yesterday's used-bookstore haunt a-waiting on the shelf (LeCarre, Lahiri, Toibin, Komunyakaa). And today I've got the warming memory of last week's essay acceptance,  I've got a clean and tidy study to work in. And maybe I'll have rain and maybe I'll have good fortune and maybe a few as-yet unknown words will fly up from silence and start humming and bumbling against one another, start murmuring back to me, start telling me a story.

* * *

There's still room in my upcoming Poetry Kitchen class. If you're out there not signing up because you (1) don't understand why anyone might try to experiment with long forms or (2) are struggling with self-confidence about whether or not you should take such a leap or (3) worry that everyone else in the class will already know what they're doing, please reach out and talk to me. As I think I've made clear in a few recent posts, taking the risk of working with long drafts changed me as a poet and as a human being.  I don't say this lightly.

We had a good day out on Great Diamond Island with my in-laws. It is a strange place: one half is a delightful ramshackle ode to 1910s-era shingle-style cottages; the other half (known as Diamond Cove) is a 19th-century red-brick military installation that's been transformed into a prissy condo community. The difference is startling. But I do love the ramshackle half. On the last Saturday of summer, it had a quiet beach, a few kids on bikes, shady gravel roads, and lovely water views, all easily accessible from the ferry landing. Peaks and Long Islands are packed with day trippers, but this side of Great Diamond remains peaceful. Meanwhile, the Diamond Cove side sports restaurants, a wedding venue, day trippers galore . . . It's like the island has schizophrenia.

Back in Portland we stopped at the fish market and bought oysters and toro for dinner; we played cards, made a salad, drank a little wine, and entertained Chuck. It was a delightful Maine-coast day, and I am eager to go back to the charming side of the island with a picnic, a cribbage board, and a book.

It is fun, every once in a while, to treat Vacationland like vacationland. We live here, so it's easy to forget to play here. But Maine is a pretty fabulous place to loaf around in.

I'm not writing well or fluidly these days, though I keep hammering out scraps of new work because that's my only way through these dead zones. This happens often during the summer and usually works itself out as the year wanes. I've always tended to do my best and most intense writing in the fall and winter. Once that made sense because the boys were back in school and I could find more time for myself. But I have no such explanation now; it's just become a seasonal pattern.

I could start focusing on putting together another poetry collection. I could even start thinking about an essay collection. However, I haven't shown any signs of propelling myself into either task. Instead I'm reading reading reading reading, and scribbling out a few unsatisfactory drafts, and drifting in and out of my quotidian chores and obligations. Call it a flotsam-and-jetsam period. I guess it's okay to be finishing nothing. I guess it has to be okay.

Still, these dry patches are hard. I feel more invisible than usual. I panic about whether or not anyone will--or even should--sign up for the classes I invent. I start comparing myself to my brilliant friends. Everyone else seems so vibrant, so full of words and ideas. I, meanwhile, am panting under the weight of Woolf and Whitman and the other lights who have made the work I long to make myself . . . and yet somehow, despite decades of striving, I have not managed to do what I crave to do.

But I had a huge and unexpected lift yesterday. Last fall, after Ray died, I wrote an essay about him, about our youth together, about the way in which our volatile friend group aged into a family constellation. I sent the piece out to a few places, and everyone rejected it. Then I stopped sending it out. And then, a few days ago, I tossed it back into the aether. Suddenly, yesterday, a response appeared in my inbox: yes, the editor would love to publish it. And then, at the end of his note, these words: "Dawn, do you know how great you are?"

I wanted to put my head down and cry . . . for Ray, for my own limping self-confidence, for the balm of these too-kind words. I am, of course, not great. Whitman is great. Woolf is great. I circle them, like a small and bedraggled crow. I wanted to put my head down and cry. The work is so hard. The sugar comes so rarely. The sweetness is so sweet.

Discovering the Long Poem

 Early in my poetry apprenticeship, my teacher, Baron Wormser, pointed out a few of my habits to me. I retreated to glibness and fancy forms to avoid exploring content. I equated revision with radical cutting. I wrote by ear. This last habit, he said, was one he would never question . . . and he never did. From the beginning he trusted my ear, and that was what taught me to trust it. But the other two habits? He was merciless with them. He pushed me into physical language and away from received forms, telling me I shouldn't, for instance, write sonnets until I had a better notion of them as a container rather than a mask. He told me to stop reading and imitating writers such as William Carlos Williams until I had a stronger sense of my own voice and what I needed to say. Exquisite brevity wasn't necessarily concision. Sometimes it was murder. For the first time, I began to recognize that brevity might be forcing me away from exploration.

It was Baron who pushed me into writing my first long poems. I was, in those years, very aware of myself as a failed novelist. My assumption was that I had failed because I didn't have the stamina to crank out the requisite number of words, that I had some fatal misunderstanding of plot construction. It took me years to understand that my inability to write prose fiction had nothing to do with stamina or plot weaving. It had to do with how I was hearing and reacting to language.

Still, I was frightened at the idea of writing a long poem, and the fact that I was a worshipper of the past wasn't helping me. Milton and Keats and Homer lurked in the weeds. What did I have to say that they hadn't said already? In short, I was yellow-bellied: I paced back and forth on the edge of the cliff, winced at the depth of the chasm, invented a hundred reasons not to jump. You know what I mean. I expect you've spent some hard times on that cliff edge too.

But I was so lonely in the woods, with T away all day and two little boys to care for. I was desperate to become myself, whatever that self might be. I was desperate to make something. Working with Baron had opened a door into that unknown country. You could be a poet, he told me, and I clung to that hope. I could become a poet, but I was not a poet yet. And so I had to leap.

I know this all sounds like inflated melodramatic elegy, but I have always lived in a private world of emotional overexcitement. And oddly enough, writing my first long drafts showed me that this emotional overload could, in itself, be an essential driver of a poem. A long draft gave me, for the first time, room enough to feel. I was not cutting myself short. I had no goal, other than to keep opening, opening, opening.

I also began to see that these long drafts were giving me the chance to bring multiple parts of my private life together . . . my daily labor in woods, barn, house; the uproars of children and love; my deeply personal reading patterns; my landscape; my family past; my national shames and worries; my unwieldy terrors and longings.

Of course great short poems can also incorporate these matters. Yet for me, the spaciousness of long drafts became a web that not only linked disparate elements but also caught flies--unexpected strangers swarming up from my imagination.

What if Whitman had ended "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" after part 1? He would have possessed a brief and attractive poem-portrait. As a short poem, it's sweet and evocative and pleasant to read. But he didn't choose to stop. He kept pushing himself forward. "And yet," he murmured to himself. "And yet."

The long poem is an opportunity to say, "And yet," not just once, not just twice, but a dozen times, or more. "I am large, I contain multitudes," he declared in "Song of Myself." So am I. So are you. Writing a long poem is a way to explore our selves.

***

My latest Poetry Kitchen offering is a two-weekend class on writing the long poem, with help from Whitman. If you've never written a long poem, if you're terrified of long forms, if you're an eager writer of long pieces, prose or poetry: this class is for you.

Forty-nine degrees this morning! Autumn has arrived with a bang, and I am sporting my red bathrobe for the first time in months. Ruckus admired the red bathrobe very much, and I expect the new guy will like it too, one he gets his claws into it. Cats think polar fleece is extremely fashionable.

This chilly weather is reminding me that I've got to start moving firewood into the basement soon. I've got to pick up my winter coat from the dry cleaner. I've got to find a new heating-oil company pronto. And school is creeping closer and closer. Technically I've still got a month before classes start, but yesterday the Monson Arts staff met to discuss plans for our high school programs, and I'm starting to feel my schedule tighten.

But for the moment I'm still on summer time. We've got company coming this weekend, so today and tomorrow I'll be focusing on housework and food and Little Chuck hijinks. I'll get onto my mat, and I'll read, and I'll ponder my notebook of draft blurts, and I'll water my sad dry garden, and I'll go out to write tonight with my friends.

I'm happy to say that the Poetry Kitchen class is slowly starting to fill. I've been worried, and I'm grateful a few of you are taking the plunge with me. If nothing else, we'll have Whitman to keep us starry-eyed! Oh, that poem. I am in love.

Apparently we're supposed to get a drop of rain this morning, though only enough to make me sad we're not getting more. Ah, well. Not all is lost. Somehow my half-assed groundhog measures did the trick; and despite the drought, I am now bringing in more green beans and cucumbers than we can quickly consume, the lettuce and parsley are regenerating, and the cilantro only looks semi-terrible.

I did some weeding yesterday--selectively, because stirring up the soil just dries it out even more. I cut down dead flower stalks, deadheaded blooms, and ran the trimmer over the splayed edges of the brown lawn. Things out there look as good as they can look, which is not good at all but is at least no longer dotted with crabgrass.

As I worked, I pulled together some thoughts for a new class on the long poem, so check out what I've posted on the Poetry Kitchen page. I am not 100 percent sure the class will run, though I certainly hope so.   Are people interested in pushing themselves into length? I don't really know.

As I wrote yesterday, for me, the long poem has been transformative. I believe that my best work is likely embedded in those poems. I have learned so much about myself, about the expansiveness of poetry, about dramatic movement and tension, about narrative, about the unknown. Oddly, I've also had external success with those poems: several have appeared in major journals; several have received attention from well-known writers. Many people have the notion that long poems are unpublishable, but that is not the case.

Anyway, I'd love to spend time with you and Walt Whitman and your ventures into the long form. The class will take place over two weekends: one in October, the other in November. Between times, you'll be writing and sharing with other participants. Thus, I hope it will be a social opportunity as well as a writing one. I've capped the numbers at eight instead of my usual twelve so that we have ample time to share work.

The cost is $300, which a friend tells me is way too little to charge for so much time and planning. She worries that I am undervaluing myself, and I take her point. Probably I am undervaluing myself. But I also want to make these classes affordable. I know what it's like to have no money but to long for a community of writers.

Fifty-three degrees this morning, and we're forecast to get a high temperature of only sixty-five. I am glad to see the last of that ridiculous heat, though the continuing lack of rain is painful. Still, it will be pleasant to work outside on a cool day, and that is my plan: weeding, deadheading, running the trimmer, and such.

Yesterday I performed my annual drawer and closet clean-out: sorting through ragged underwear and unforgivable socks, admitting defeat with the supposedly decent items I never seem to wear. This is one of the advantages/disadvantages of living in a tiny house with hardly any closets: the stuff must go. Last week I did a book cull, this week a clothes cull. Fall is on the way, and I'm clearing the decks.

Last weekend's class went well, I think. It's interesting to watch people wrestle with their imaginations--to note where they are willing to venture, where they are not. Some people get distracted by other people's imaginations: say, the metaphors and allusions embedded in literature. Some people get distracted by the intensity of their own real-life emotions or situations. So where does private invention start to create a wormhole through these distractions? What pattern or word or sound is the first opening?

I'm thinking of constructing a future generative class around the building of a long poem--maybe using Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" as the source of prompts and conversation. About once a year or so I find myself writing a very long poem . . . but why? Where does this need come from? And where does the stamina come from? These poems often turn out to be very important to me, both personally and developmentally. They are big, in more ways than one. They are also exhausting. But I've noticed that few people in my classes seem to push themselves into length. What would happen if I created a structure for that experiment?

Today is my parents' sixty-third wedding anniversary. It is also the eighth anniversary of the day T and I closed on this house. That means we've now lived in Portland for nearly nine years (including our first year in the apartment on Munjoy Hill). We're not newcomers anymore.

Eight years in this seventy-seven-year-old house, with its rattletrap repair history and wildlife invasions; with its beautiful new kitchen and charming neighbors; with its sociable front garden and its past-glorious neighborhood cats; with its little wood stove and its clothesline; with its two tiny studies housing two tiny private lives; with its bed, built of Harmony ash, and its bedroom window, with its view of the bay-mirror sky and the wheeling gulls.

Well, I can admit, finally, that I'm glad to be here. This little neighborhood, this little house; the gift of being a poet among other poets; the ability to walk out my door to a meal, a market, the bay, even a small wood; the ease of traveling to visit my children. Eight years in, these amenities still feel extravagant. It is hard to explain how far away Harmony was, and is, from such easy congress.

When we moved to Harmony, we were twenty-eight years old and our blood ran hot and we were overflowing with energy and self-will. We would do everything ourselves! We would do everything in the hardest way possible! But now I am almost sixty-one, and I am ready to welcome a little ease. We still work all the time, so our version of ease is not really all that easy. But we've got a furnace and a dishwasher and trash pickup. We're five minutes away from the grocery store and ten minutes away from the bus to New York City. We can walk to a restaurant on a whim. Poets stop by for coffee. Neighbors leave sympathy cards for our dead cat. I came here kicking and wailing. But it's a good place to have landed.