Just a quick note this morning, as I'm swirling through my morning chores so I can get out of here soon after daylight. I'll give you the Vermont lowdown tomorrow.

We got a bit of rain last night, and this morning the neighborhood is damp and blustery and Novemberish. Now the furnace is grumbling, and the kitten is purring, and the coffee is steaming, and T is making his sandwich for work and I am listening to sheets churn in the washing machine, and we are chunking forward through our quotidian hours.

Tomorrow morning I'll be hitting the road for Vermont, so today will be housework, and laundry, and catching up with emails, and getting onto my mat, though I hope I'll also be going out to write tonight. I dug up Baron's dahlias yesterday, so they are now safely stored in the basement for the winter. Really that's my last big autumn chore. I may cut back a few more frost-bitten plants, rake a few more leaves, but for the most part the beds are ready for winter. We've still got a smidgen of chard in the garden and some late lettuce, and the kale is doing well, now that the groundhog has gone into hibernation. I'll likely be harvesting into December, unless we get a sudden snow or the temperatures plummet.

I like November, when the hats appear and the coats get buttoned. I like turning on lamps in the late afternoon and lighting the wood fire. I like hot cups of tea and my warm walking boots. I like the smell of baking and roasting and a bouquet of sage on the counter.

Yesterday Teresa and I finished our Whitman reading project, and now we are going to turn our attention to Zbigniew Herbert's Mr. Cogito.  I am still working my way through The Waves and Little Dorrit and The Descent of Alette. Chuck is excited about a piece of kindling. The chickadees are noisy in the maples. I love my long-poem draft. America feels a touch less gruesome. It's a cheerful morning around here.

What a good election night!

My son was at Ray's bar in Brooklyn when Mamdani's victory was proclaimed, and he said the bartenders immediately blasted "New York, New York," filling everyone with weepy joy. If only Ray himself had been there to run the stereo. Here in Maine we solidly voted down a proposal to prohibit absentee ballots and voted in a red-flag gun law--a very big deal in a state with a strong gun culture. Portland raised the city's minimum wage. Democrats won large and small victories around the country. It's been a long time since we've been able to feel a little political happiness.

After my marathon work streak, I made it home last night and then T and I walked out arm in arm to the neighborhood barbecue joint, a comfortable way to settle back into town life. Today I've got a phone meeting scheduled and house stuff and reading to catch up on, but there will be airiness too. I'll go for a walk. I'll figure out dinner. I'll dig up my dahlia tubers and store them in the basement. Probably I'll be on the horn with my kid, emoting about the NYC election.

I'm very much enjoying this year's high school cohort. They arrived at the first class ready to be serious and engaged, but now they are starting to let loose and be silly together, which adds to the fun. And my car was very well behaved, which is a relief, given my looming Vermont trip. Altogether it's been a good, if hectic, week, and I am full of sap.

And my long-poem draft awaits . . . 

In the homeland the hardwood trees are mostly bare now, and the tamaracks have entered into their golden glory. Soon they, too, will drop their needles, but for a brief span they are suns.

Their brilliance made the drive north beautiful. Altogether it was a good trip. Yesterday was my car's first long trip with her new rack-and-pinion, and the tight steering made me feel like I was handling a sports car on the curves--an unaccustomed sensation, for sure. Clearly the steering had been deteriorating for a while, but slowly enough to keep me unaware, until things got really flabby. I can almost imagine I'm driving a new car (which, considering the number of pieces I've replaced in the past two years, is more or less true).

I arrived in Wellington to celebration: it's hunting season, and Steve had just gotten a deer. The sorrows of death and life, so tangled. I've never been a hunter, but I understand the confusions of gratitude. How Steve thanked the doe. How winter looms.

Transcription of actual text correspondence between Teresa and Dawn, after this weekend's Whitman session

 T: 🔥

D: I cannot wait to spend time with your draft over the next couple of weeks. You are writing so well!

T: OMG I just was thinking about how you and I are going to have so much fun working together on what we’re writing!! I feel we’re figuring out the architecture of the next-poems that have been baffling us. Does that make sense? 

D: Yes!!!

T: It’s so fucking exciting!

D: I feel more energized about my work than I have for a long time 

T: Me, too.

I dearly hope this class is mattering to the actual participants. But it for sure has lit the burner under my own work--almost explosively so--and under Teresa's also. We've now got a two-week gap before the next zoom session takes place, and while the participants are sharing their work and responses among themselves, Teresa and I will be doing the same.

I am so deeply, massively relieved to be in the zone again. Of course I've been writing writing writing for the past month and a half, and of course that essay was real work. But it wasn't creation fire. And now the fire is back.

Today I'll drive up to Harmony to go for a walk with a friend, then slip over to Wellington to spend the night with other friends, then head to Monson on Tuesday for a day with my high schoolers, and then the long drive home, and voting, and catching up on home obligations. I'll be tired. But my heart feels so light now that I've got this big pot on the simmer. I don't mind being tired. I've got a poem.

I do love baseball, and I am always a little glum when the last game of the season ends and winter buckles on its galoshes. Though I was rooting hard for the Blue Jays and game 7 didn't end as I'd hoped, this World Series was nonetheless excellent: one thrilling game after another and so many stellar performances. It was a fine end-of-summer party.

Yesterday's class went well, I think, despite a couple of unnerving participant emergencies. The quality of the poets' drafts is really, really high, to my great delight. Whitman is unlocking something for these writers.

Now, if only I can prevent them from scrubbing the dirt off their messy starts and tying up their flapping loose ends and inventing neat logical transitions and shaping tidy conclusions and nailing their metaphors to the wall, etc. That is the big danger: the urge to reduce, fix, polish, when you're in the midst of a sloppy strange mystery. I know there are participants in the class who feel safest when they're in control. But this is primordial mud we're tracking all over the house. I hope, hope, hope they will try hard to keep their mops in the cupboard.

Three groups of trick-or-treaters knocked at our door last night, and Chuck was overcome with the excitement. At the end of the evening he flopped on the couch like he'd been chasing rabbits. Halloween! What a holiday!

This morning he seems to have recovered his equanimity and has resumed his usual purring spot against my left shoulder. The wind, which was whistling all day and all night, has died down to a steady breeze, and a coral sunrise is romantically staining my neighbors' white vinyl siding. It looks like the perfect day to talk about Whitman.

This morning before class I'll get out for a walk or a bike ride. I'll marinate chicken for dinner and deal with laundry and dishes. And then we'll begin the big Walt experiment. Can spending two weeks with "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" really help us carve out a messy, surprising long poem draft? I guess we'll find out.

This class is among the most complex I've ever designed: lots of talk, lots of writing, plus lots of participant interaction, which can be tricky in a virtual setting. And it's long: two weekends on zoom, with a gap week between, when the poets will be working together without my interference. I'm excited. Rereading "Brooklyn Ferry" this summer blew a hole between my ears, and I can't wait to find out how I'm going to respond to our conversation about it as well as to my own prompts. With luck I'll dig a real draft out of this experience. With luck other people will too.

Nonetheless, the class will be a marathon. That's the long poem way, always chasing us up Heartbreak Hill.

It poured rain all night and is still drizzling now. The garden is beautifully sopped, and I'm so glad I did manage to get those hostas transplanted, and even a few leaves raked, before the storm.

Because I'll be teaching all weekend, today is my holiday. Other than answering a few emails and prepping for tomorrow's class, I am not planning to accomplish anything that isn't my own stuff. I finished both editing jobs this week, my high school plans are done, the Baron essay is done, the vacuuming and bathrooms are done. So I'll go for a walk in the dripping woods, I'll throw a load of sheets into the washing machine, and then I'll settle into whatever I feel like messing around with . . . poems, garden, reading, cooking. I do have a haircut appointment this afternoon, and afterward I'll step over to my neighbor's house to watch the baking show with her, but nobody could label either of those activities work. I am very much looking forward to my day.

I'd like to finish The Waves and "Song of Myself." I'd like to make my way through another chunk of Little Dorrit. I'd like to work on poem drafts and maybe start printing out pieces so that I can begin to imagine a collection. I'd like to pick up Alice Notley's "The Descent of Alette" at the library. I'd like to sit by the fire and do a crossword puzzle. I'd like to rake a few leaves and harvest some kale. I'd like to play mousie with Chuck. I'd like to slowly dice up vegetables for minestrone. I won't do nearly all of this, but any of it would satisfy me.

We'll probably get a few tricker-or-treaters tonight, but we rarely see many. For some reason our little street doesn't draw them. But no matter the number, Chuck will be amazed and excited. Everything thrills that guy. Dry leaves! Dixon Ticonderoga pencils! A bread tie! Dawn's nose! 

I woke to a cool and cloudy morning, with rain in the forecast for tonight, I'm pleased to report. 

Yesterday afternoon I snagged half an hour to cut back the rest of my lily and iris stalks. This afternoon maybe I'll get a chance to split and transplant a few hostas before the storm arrives. That depends on how swiftly I can plow through my house and desk chores. I did get next week's high school plans sussed out, and I'm making quick progress on the copyediting, so I'm hopeful.

My brain is slowly beginning to unclot itself. I am feeling lighter, less tangled, which is a surprise to me as tomorrow is the first anniversary of Ray's death, which I have been dreading. Last night we went out to listen to Jonathan Richman, who of course I first heard with Ray . . . those Modern Lovers songs, so plain, so naked with longing, unwinding themselves at midnight in the concrete cocoon of a dorm room.

But somehow, last night, I wasn't freighted with loss. I was just listening to a man in his seventies sing and play guitar, and I was happy to be witnessing how lively and full of curiosity such a man can be. I was happy to be reminded that life is for being alive. Here we are. So let's be here.

I woke up this morning to the excellent news that the Blue Jays knocked superhuman pitcher Shohei Ohtani out of the game in the sixth inning, winning the contest despite an injury to one of their best hitters in the previous day's eighteen-inning grind. Ah, baseball. You are such a romance.

Now Little Chuck has had his breakfast, Tom and I have had our coffee, and I am sitting here in my couch corner contemplating the day ahead. I had a good night's sleep, and I'm feel vastly lightened, now that I've finished that essay. I turned in my first CavanKerry assignment as well, so I'm altogether less overwhelmed than I was. Today I've got to work on high school plans and return to my academic copyediting project, but later I might actually have a chance to work in the garden, or even look at my own poems. And tonight T and I are going out to a Jonathan Richman show, so altogether the day will have a novel flavor.

Yesterday Teresa and Jeannie and I talked about moving forward with the Substack journal we've been planning but have thus far not executed. For all three of us Baron's death has been a blow, not least because he was the person who brought us together in the first place. We've been churning in a sort of group maelstrom over it, none of us able to make much progress with other work. So it was a relief to discover we were able to compile a few sensible plans about moving forward with the journal.

Sunshine today. 

Today is my younger son's 28th birthday, and I wish him the sweetest of days in far-off Brooklyn. He is one of the great joys of my life, so full of feeling and thought, so wholehearted about what matters. He remains my most persistent phone caller, the family member most likely to get a poem read to him, a sports romantic, lover of rivers, whisperer of cats. How I adore him.

Yesterday I got a solid start on my two editing projects and, thank goodness, I finally finished the Baron essay and was able to send it to his wife for her okay. Today I'll run it past the rest of the contributors, and then I'll submit it to the journal editor, and then, I hope, I can take a deep breath and let myself off the hook. Writing that piece has been a massive undertaking. From the start I have felt unqualified, unready, unhappy, and also unable to say no. So I did it, and now there are twelve manuscript pages of shadow.

This morning I'll get onto my mat and return to my editing jobs, and in the afternoon I'll zoom with Jeannie and Teresa. I'd like to think I'll finish the manuscript commentary today, but we'll see. That kind of focus can be slow work. The press sent me one of Baron's author letters to show me how he was thinking and talking about the collections he edited, so in that regard I am still carrying his weight, even without the essay around my neck. But I guess that is my job right now.

Anyway, the sun will shine. Little Chuck will sit at the open front door watching the leaves blow. I'll pour tea and read Virginia Woolf over lunch. The Carolina wren will sing in the bare lilacs. Far to my south a hurricane will shred lives. The abyss is difficult to fathom.

It's 34 degrees this morning, just shy of a frost. I got a lot done in the garden yesterday, though not everything I'd hoped to accomplish. But the furniture is stowed, I cut up sticks and bagged them, and  I pruned the massive elderberry and bagged the trimmings. I also made good progress on cutting back perennials. I hope I can get more of that finished this week, as well as do some transplanting, but these jobs always take longer than I think they will.

The next few weeks are going to be hectic. I'll be teaching or traveling for three weekends in a row, plus embarking on my usual Monson jaunts. But at least I'll be sleeping in my own bed for the next seven days. This morning I'll go for my walk, and then I'll turn my thoughts to finishing the Baron essay. This week I've got a poetry manuscript to comment on and a small academic project to copyedit. I need to prep for my high schoolers and go over my long-poem syllabus and show up for some meetings. I've got to keep up with house chores and cook meals and, with luck, get back into the garden. Life feels kind of dizzying, but the great news is that I am not sick and my car isn't terrifying and my cupboards are full of ingredients.  Also, my kitten is no longer sad.

I still don't know when I'll be able to think seriously about my own poems. I keep writing them, tucking my drafts around the edges of obligation. I keep reading and reading. But there has been no space to plan a collection. Maybe once I finish the essay, I can hoard that space for myself. Life seems so eager to crowd me out.

I spent yesterday morning in the garden: cleaning out the last of the delicate crops--peppers, eggplant, okra. We haven't had a frost yet, but they'd clearly stopped growing, so goodbye. I pulled carrots and dismantled the insect nets, and did a thorough weeding of the vegetable beds. I planted, then mulched the garlic. I collected the outside chairs, drained the hoses, stowed the table, the fire grate, and the cold frame. Today T and I will finagle the chairs and hoses through the cellar hatch for storage, carry the snow shovels out to the shed, and then that stage of fall cleanup will be done.

Today I'll work on pruning perennials, bagging sticks, and, I hope, splitting my hostas so I can fill some blank spaces in the backyard beds. I might start raking leaves into the gardens, though there are many more leaves to fall.

Baron's pink dahlias still bloom bravely. The orange nasturtiums and white zinnias are hanging on. The blueberry bushes and the Japanese maple are brilliant crimson. Despite the drought the yard glows red and gold and green. Kale, chard, and lettuce flutter in the vegetable garden. The sturdy herbs are thriving; even the basil, though wan, is hanging onto life.

In the cellar, the firewood is stacked. Boxes and buckets are filled with kindling. The furnace is clean. The tank is full. There is a basket of potatoes and onions. Drying shirts and pants tremble on the clotheslines. Upstairs in the freezer are bags of wild mushrooms, green beans, kale, corn, peppers; boxes of tomato sauce, peaches, chicken stock. In the refrigerator: peppers, carrots, cabbage, celery, beets--some of it mine, all of it local.

I feel rich. It's not like I've forgotten that obscene car-repair bill and the rest of our endless suck of expenses. But the homestead snugness of late autumn is so reassuring. We have food. We have heat. Let the storms arise.

Saturday, dark and cool. A fire in the stove. Hot coffee in my cup. I dreamed that Chuck was dreaming, and that I had access to the rolling receipt for the expense of what he was dreaming: $4,000 and counting. What might a little cat dream that would cost so much? Perhaps pushing crystal off counters or eating an expensive parakeet. The dream-within-a-dream did not divulge.

 

Hey, how about those Canadians and their pinch-hit grand slam? I suppose I ought to be rooting against the Blue Jays, given that they're divisional foes of the Red Sox. But I've seen so many of these players in their youth: the Jays' AA squad is the New Hampshire Fisher Cats, which regularly plays our Portland Sea Dogs. So I have been watching Vlad Guerrero and Bo Bichette since they were baby big leaguers and am feeling motherly pride in them.

This weekend will be my last restful one for a while. Next weekend I'll be teaching, the following one I'll probably be in Vermont, then I'll be teaching again, and then Thanksgiving will be upon us. So today and tomorrow I'm going to plant garlic, stow away hoses and outside furniture, continue cutting back my perennials, and otherwise try to catch up before the cold decides to arrive. The days won't just be chores: this afternoon T and I might go to a movie; tomorrow we're having dinner with friends.

I am looking forward to being outside, to the crunch of leaves under my old sneakers, to the satisfactions of mulching a garlic bed for winter. I like the sleepiness of autumn; I like saying, "Goodnight till spring."

Yesterday I finished a small editing assignment in the morning, then spent much of the rest of the day fine-tuning the Baron essay, reading The Waves, reading "Song of Myself." I baked an apple cake so that my neighbor and I could have a snack while we watched the new British baking show episode . . . the exact same cake I'd baked the day before for my poetry group, assuming I'd have leftovers for our tea party. That was not the case: apparently poets really like apple cake. The recipe is my tweaked version of a Joy of Cooking standard, and one of these days I'll type it up and share it with you because this cake is a winner: beautiful, delicious, and quick, especially if you possess one of those fine old-fashioned apple peeler-corer-slicers.

Once I finish this essay, I'm hoping I can transfer some of that momentum to poetry. I need to start thinking seriously about organizing a new collection; I need to start trudging through my own rough and rocky fields. I'll be on the road so much during the next few months. I've got so many work and family obligations. But surely the poems will come to me. Because I want them so much.

I spent much of yesterday with young Chuck, my sticky shadow, who preferred to keep me in sight at all times. Every time I sat down, there he was, coiling himself against shoulder or hip, climbing into my lap to lick my face. At night he immediately got into bed with me (which has not generally been his pattern) and curled against my cheek for the next eight hours. That was annoying, but I more or less put up with it because the poor kid is clearly in need of reassurance. Here's hoping he has a more relaxed Friday.

Today I'll get onto my mat and then turn my thoughts to a small editing project before going back to revising the Baron essay. My work life, it seems, is about to undergo yet another shift. I was contacted a few days ago by the editor-in-chief of the press where Baron had worked for years as the primary developmental editor: that is, the person who reads accepted manuscripts and shares advice about organization, infelicities, poem choice, and so on--not copyediting (which focuses on line issues such as spelling and punctuation) but holistic commentary on the overall presentation of the collection. The editor-in-chief wondered if I might want to take on this job. I thought about it and decided yes. The work won't accrue into a lot of hours, but it is paid and will allow me to step away, at least occasionally, from the copyediting grind. So I'm pleased . . . to be honest, I'm really kind of chuffed to have been invited to take over for the man. Somehow his generosity continues, even after death.

I should get off this couch and start dragging the recycling and compost outside for pickup, but a fire is crackling in the stove and I would much rather stay here and watch it. Though I dearly love the cottage, I'm glad to be back in my tidy shabby familiar nest. I'll roast mackerel for dinner; the World Series begins tonight. Go, Canadians! Have a sweet day, friends.

I taught all day yesterday--a really good and lively class, I'm glad to report. Then Tom picked me up and drove us home through pouring rain, and after we unloaded the truck, I went out again into the pouring rain to fetch home young Chuck.

So now our little pack has been reunited. Chuck appears to have grown several inches while in custody, and he came home bewildered . . . happy to see us, but very confused by why and what and where. Fortunately, the comfort of bed seems to have reassured him, and I woke up this morning with his cheek pressed against mine, just like old times. In his short life he's had so much uproar: born into chaos, then the coils of foster care, then a calm stint with us, and then suddenly the cat kennel, which I'm sure felt like a return to the dark, no matter how nice they were to him, and I do know they were nice.

Well, today I will devote myself to him. I've got various catch-up things to accomplish--laundry, housework--but I can certainly make the kitten the center of attention if he needs that. I'd like to work on my Baron essay, and I'd like to go out to write tonight. I want to take a walk. I want to wander in my garden. I have a small editing assignment awaiting me, but I won't look at it until tomorrow. Today is about remembering home.

On this dark morning Monson is cocooned in fog. Truck headlights slice through, heading toward work in Dover-Foxcroft or Greenville. A few windows shimmer.

Yesterday morning I sat in the cottage and finished the first draft of my Baron essay. It's got a few holes, but essentially it is there, beginning to end. The writing has been a huge task, one I wasn't very sure I could accomplish. I am still not sure I have accomplished it. However, something exists.

Then, in the afternoon, we left the island and wound our way into the interior. The sea feels very far from this solid land of lake and ledge and tree. And now here I sit, wishing for coffee, which I can't get until the store opens at 6:30, and trying to cast my memory over the teaching plans I prepped a week ago and haven't thought much about since.

I do know we'll be working with Sappho fragments, writing drafts that play with ideas of swelling and shrinkage. But my mind is distracted, a little sleepy, enwrapped in essay, fogged over.

After last night's gale, the cove is a slow band of ripples. A breeze trembles the sodden hedgerows, and the spruce trees shiver in their granite beds. The sky is streaked with cloud and a few raindrops swirl.

It is our last morning here till April. Yesterday, before the storm, T chainsawed up some fallen cedar and we carted the logs to our friend's woodpile. Cedar doesn't put out much heat, but it is sweet-scented and crackly, lovely in an open fireplace. Then we drove out to Long Pond and did a five-mile hike over Western Mountain, nearly deserted on an autumn Monday. Now and again rain spat into the lake. The forest was mossy--dark spruce and fir glowering under the impending storm, the hardwoods bright glimpses of gold and red.

Now I sit in front of the big glowing wood stove, coffee pot hissing, wind wailing in the chimney. Maybe we'll go out for a last clamber over rocks. Maybe we'll stay snug. After lunch we'll head west, back to the mainland, skirting Bangor, following Route 15 into the homeland, our old familiar landscape of forest and shack, rough fields, weary towns, slow hills, long low sky.

 I had a visitation from Baron last night in my dreams. He looked and acted like himself, though he was driving a Mustang. I looked and acted like myself, though I was also immersed in my familiar dream distress about forgetting to feed my goats. In this dream it was my job to empty out the barn, scrub it clean, right down to the concrete floor. Then, and only then, would Baron show me how to repair the cracks. And I did get that barn clean, the cleanest barn floor you ever saw, webbed with almost invisible cracks. But of course the dream faded away before I learned how to fix them.

Yesterday morning we drove over to Ship Harbor to watch the waves crash on the rocks, then spent the afternoon on a somewhat too cold deck overlooking the marina at Southwest Harbor watching an 80-year-old gravel-voiced powerhouse named Roberta sing and strut and play the piano. It was pretty great.

Today we'll probably get out for a more serious hike, and we'll need to do some firewood chores for our friend before the rain comes in. But for the moment I am recovering from my visitation. My dead friend Jilline still visits me regularly. But Ray has never visited me. I did not expect Baron, and here he was.

This was Goose Cove yesterday afternoon.

We arrived just before 4, stopping first for crab sandwiches and the No Kings rally in Ellsworth, then for a walk through Nature Conservancy land on Indian Point. The temperature has been mild, in the 50s day and night, and now sea air filters into the cottage as I start a wood fire crackling in the big stove. An open window and a warm wood stove: it's one of the great luxuries.

Usually we're here a couple of weeks later in the season, when the leaves have fallen and the weather has stiffened. But this year we've arrived during the sweet height of autumn. Though the drought has dimmed the tree colors, they're still laden. Asters bloom in the hedgerows, and wandering clusters of nuthatches peep like little kazoo orchestras. 

Now, at sunrise, this is the cove. The lobster boats are at work, engines grumbling, lights ablaze, as the lavender clouds unroll. One crow shouts, then another. I stand in the yard, amazed to be bare-legged outside at 7 a.m. in mid-October Maine, a little too cold, yes, but persevering a moment longer before returning to coffee and wood fire.

This afternoon we're going out with our friend to listen to a jazz show in Southwest Harbor. That's the only plan on the schedule, other than chicken on the grill for dinner. Maybe we'll climb a mountain or clamber over rocks on the shore. Maybe we'll stack firewood. Maybe we'll wrap ourselves in coats and sit in the yard and read. Maybe it will be a good day to be wordless.

Saturday morning. I still have all of my packing to do, but the groceries are in the house, the laundry is done, the editing project is shipped, and Little Chuck is at the cat motel. I think we're going to try to time our arrival so we can take part in the No Kings rally in Southwest Harbor, if I can get myself pulled together.

We'll be traveling heavy, with a chainsaw and its accessories and possibly our bikes, as well as the usual coolers and baskets and boots and books and games and water supply. I've decided to bring along The Waves and Trollope's Barchester Towers, plus Anne Carson's Sappho translations and the ms of Baron's new collection.

I wonder what I'll actually find myself reading.

I am feeling lighter, with the big editing project temporarily off my shoulders. I'll have a couple of smaller projects waiting for me when I get home, but this breathing space is a boon. I might actually spend the weekend not thinking about either teaching or editing . . . though the essay still looms large.

We love the cottage for many reasons--the sea outside the window, the cozy sweet shabbiness, our old friend across the yard. It does not belong to us, but also it does. I'll dig in the garden. T will cut up tree limbs. A lobster boat will idle in the cove. Bluejays will quarrel in the spruce trees. Chimney smoke will tremble in a cloud of drizzle.

Friday, cool and dark. All week I've been able to sleep in a bit, thanks to Tom's uneven work schedule, and  this small respite has been really helpful. My health is better, my general weariness is lifting, and I've been able to buckle down and get things done during the day. Yesterday I did indeed finish the editing assignment, and this morning I'll pull together the bits and pieces and send the files to the author, then turn my attention to travel prep: laundry, meal plotting, groceries, packing, plant watering, waving tearful adieu to Little Chuck.

Always the burning question: what books do I bring? And how much work will I actually accomplish there? The cottage is a famous place for doing nothing in particular, no matter how I plan otherwise. There we are, two energetic people on vacation in the middle of a national park, and are we climbing Cadillac? Are we making art? No, we are lolling on a beat-up wing chair, drinking coffee from a mug named Ernie, eying a Louise Penny mystery, and considering a 10 a.m. nap.

It's possible that won't happen again on this visit, but I have my doubts.

On the other hand, maybe in the quiet mornings I'll write a few more pages of my Baron essay. I'll mull over hazy thoughts of my next collection. I'll read Virginia Woolf with care and attention. Who knows?

Last week's bad-news birthday was a sucker punch, and I've had no chance, or desire, to undergo my annual take-stock-of-who-I-am reflections. I am now 61 years old . . . that's a lot of old, and I ought to take a look at it and ponder what's going on. Maybe that's what I'll end up doing at the cottage: I'll think about being.

Or I'll venture into the drizzle, perch myself on a pile of broken granite, and stare at seabirds rocking wildly in the surf,

Another cool morning, though we haven't had a frost yet. Still, by late afternoon it feels good to set match to paper and feel the first flames of warmth lick up from the kindling.

The next couple of days will be busy. I hope to finish my editing project this morning. And Thursday is my usual housework day--bathrooms and floors and general tidying. Today and tomorrow I've got to start pulling myself together for our trip to the island on Saturday. Poor Little Chuck has to go to the cat kennel tomorrow, and I'm sorrowful about dropping him off in a strange place. But he is too young to stay alone in the house and has too many gut issues for a long car ride.

Tonight I'll go out to write; tomorrow I'll do the grocery shopping for the cottage and attempt some sort of reasonable packing strategy. We will be on the island for a few days, then in Monson overnight so that I can teach the next day, then home that afternoon. So I'll have to pack camp clothes and school clothes, books for the cottage and books for work. Clearly I won't be traveling light.

But for the moment I am allowing myself to be quiet. The clock ticks. The refrigerator hums. The books on the table whisper among themselves. The walls of this house are a fragile shell. Above the roof, the universe lofts its uneasy weight.

T goes back to work today, but with a later start than usual so we've had yet another small respite from the alarm clock.

Despite my small wake-up holiday, I've been editing hard all week and have nearly caught up to where I should be, schedule-wise. And I've prepped for my Monson class, finished the Ondaatje novel, and spent time with The Waves and Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette. Work is getting done.

Today will be more scattershot. I'll need to drive my car back to the garage for an inspection sticker. I'm walking with a friend early; then another friend is dropping by in the afternoon because he needs to mourn Baron in company. Maybe, after he leaves, I'll work in the garden--cut down a few more dying perennials, spread a few more bags of soil. I don't know what my state of mind will be, but I am beginning to feel less tired . . . less wrung out, anyway.

In a few minutes I'll get showered, get dressed, get moving. I'll deal with laundry, dishes, firewood, litter box. I'll drop off the car, make breakfast, kiss Tom goodbye. I'll prepare to be sociable.

But always, behind the busyness, the rattle of loneliness. A pebble in a cavern. It echoes.

Somehow, though the wind whipped and the skies glowered, we never got a drop of rain yesterday. Such a disappointment. I long for days of wet, but the drought goes on and on.

Tuesday. T is home again, so I am allowing myself another slowish start before I trudge up to my desk. I'll finish editing a chapter, then turn my thoughts to high school plans. I'll get onto my mat; I'll return a library book; I'll figure out something for dinner.

In the meantime the big kitten curls against my shoulder and purrs into my ear. Dear little Charles. He glows with such cheerful light.

Today Vox Populi has published "Don't Tell Me You Don't Know What Love Is," my elegy to Ray. I didn't choose the timing but it is poignant. Ray died last October, while we were staying at the cottage in West Tremont. And now it is another October, and we'll drive out again to the cottage on Saturday.

I wrote a note to myself while cooking dinner the other night: "In a way it is romantic to grow old." All of the loves gathering round.

Monday morning, and Tom is still asleep. Because he's being shifted from one house assignment to another, he's ended up with a couple of empty days, so he's taking them off, and I'm glad for him. We're heading to West Tremont next weekend for our autumn visit to the cottage, which means he'll have time off next week too, and that's a very good thing. He works so hard; too hard. Being an aging laborer is not an easy life.

But I'll be at work today. I'm already behind schedule on the editing project, thanks to being sick for three weeks. And I need to prep for next week's high school class and return to my Poetry Kitchen plans and keep grinding away at the Baron essay.

Still, I was able to sleep a bit late, and I can sit here quietly for a little longer than usual. I'll get out for my walk before the rains begin. Even though I have to work, I feel less rushed than I usually do on a Monday morning.

I did get another few pages done on the Baron essay yesterday, and I did attend to my poem draft. I weeded and deadheaded dahlias and spread new soil in the garden boxes. I fell asleep, hard, for two hours. I made baked penne with fresh sauce and leftover lamb. I made quick pickles. I listened to an hour of baseball and was delighted to learn that the Blue Jays' radio broadcast is sponsored by "Armstrong Bird Food." For some reason that struck me as hilarious.

And today the rains will come. And I might start a fire in the wood stove early, to celebrate. And I'l make fish chowder for dinner because chowder is a rainy-day comfort.

We are snug here. And I am still feeling kind of lost.

I slept badly for most of the night, then fell asleep hard at around 4 and didn't wake until after 6. I do appreciate these unclocked weekend mornings. So many years and years of 5 a.m. alarms . . . it's been wearing. I'm naturally an early riser, but there's something exhausting about being constantly told what to do.

The house is quiet. Tom and Chuck are still a-bed. I hear a distant growl of traffic. I hear a crow.

Yesterday I tore out the cucumber, bean, and cherry tomato plants. I took down the groundhog fencing, pulled up stakes and trellises, emptied flowerpots, lugged everything into the shed for storage or to the leaf pile for composting. I cleaned and trimmed the garlic that had been curing in the shed. I chopped hot peppers for the freezer. I simmered a batch of sauce.

And I worked on a poem, the first I've attempted for many weeks.

The garden isn't bare. There's still kale and chard and lettuce. I left the okra and pepper plants. Marigolds and nasturtiums and zinnias and dahlias are blooming wildly.

I wish I could say that my poem draft is also blooming wildly. But I'm not sure what it's doing. At least it exists, and at least I am attending to it.

My plan today is to do some weeding and then start spreading bagged compost over the garden beds and boxes. And to read Woolf's The Waves and Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion. And to attend to that poem draft.

What I am is tired.

Saturday morning dark. Coffee steams in a white cup. A big kitten full of breakfast leans against my shoulder and purrs lustily into my left ear. Outdoors the air is chilly, but in the house dregs of warmth still rise from last night's wood fire.

I have nothing on the calendar, nowhere I have to go. My plan for the weekend is to work in the garden, work in the kitchen, work on Baron's essay, work on my own poems. I'll probably treat Monday like a regular weekday as I'm unsure if Tom has the day off. (His schedule is temporarily weird.)

The living room is shadowy. On the mantle Baron's dahlias are rosy and subdued in the gray light. The kitchen clock ticks. The refrigerator growls. The books on the table are mysterious.

Yesterday afternoon Teresa, Jeannie, and I met on zoom to talk about Baron. For all of us his death has been a blow, not least because he was the one who brought us together. I met Jeannie at his house in Hallowell. I met Teresa at the Frost Place when I was his assistant at the teaching conference. That was the kind of thing he did: he saw who needed each other, and he opened a door.

It's hard to overstate how lonely I was as a writer in Harmony. I had made two friends at poetry retreats; yet though they were real friends (and remain so), neither clung to poetry with my obsessive seriousness. But Baron not only taught me; he led me into a world of real ambition: not for place or prize, but for poetry itself. As a Romantic, I was starry-eyed. This was what being a poet could mean. This was the life I dreamed of.

And in many ways it is the life I have lived, the life that Baron showed me was possible. To make poetry the center of my days. To bring words into conversation with the work of my hands. To become more generous to other people. To take the risk of saying something that is almost impossible to say.

Last October, Ray died, and with him a certain wildness in me died. But Baron's death has left me in a different state of mind. In all the years I knew him, he was constantly working to give me to myself. He strove to keep me from depending on his opinion. He pushed me into teaching situations that I didn't think I was ready for. He gave me friends and then detached himself, let us swim away into our own futures. His goal as a teacher was to teach himself out of a job, and that's a motto I have since shared many times in my own classes and conferences.

Yes, I do feel like an orphan. But also I feel like a poet.

Outside the temperature is 34 degrees and inside the furnace is running for the first time this season. Maybe we didn't quite get a frost, but it was close.

Yesterday afternoon I picked all of the Serranos, the only one of my pepper plants that came to anything in the drought--though it was supposed to be a hot pepper and the fruits are not, so what's the explanation for that? I picked a few tiny eggplants and the last of the cherry tomatoes and a bouquet of basil. But I let the beans and cucumbers ride: they have more than done their duty for every other vegetable this summer.

The day was busy. I cleaned house, finished most of an editing chapter, and walked down the street to pick up our first CSA delivery, a beautiful bundle of carrots, potatoes, peppers, spinach, and scallions, with a fat spaghetti squash on the side. When Tom got home, we drove to Yarmouth to fetch my car from the mechanic. I made a batch of biscuits and took them with me when I went out to write.

And now it's Friday. In a few minutes I'll deal with recycling and trash and compost. I'll get sheets started in the washing machine. I'll do my exercises and answer emails and get back to my editing. I'll go to the grocery store and have a zoom meeting.

Behind all of this busyness, the memory of Baron shifts in my mind like small ripples in a cove. He was a gardener, with a special love for flowers. He cared about the work of the hands: digging soil, splitting wood. Our chores were a bond, as much as our passion for words.

I am doing my chores.

I spent so much time talking yesterday--blessedly, over coffee with Gretchen, then over the phone with Teresa, then another phone call with my sister, then via countless notes that I still haven't fully waded through. I did manage to do some editing around the edges, but the sorrow words were heavy. "That's not bad, though," said Tom, after he got home later in the afternoon. I was standing wanly in the kitchen, surely looking overwhelmed. But he was right. It's been more than not bad. It's been necessary. When a beloved writer dies, words are the mourning.

Last October, after Ray died, Tom and I and our boys knew that we were not officially family, but we were nonetheless treated by the real family as part of them, given our long and complex closeness. This time around there's a starker difference. I'm in no way family. But I know I do stand in a unique place: I was Baron's student who became his colleague and then the chosen heir of his program. He brought me up, and then he trusted me to carry on a sliver of his work. There was certainly a kind of parentalism involved, but also, in later years, there was a detachment. He didn't oversee me. He left me alone to find my own way of managing the conference. I wonder if that was difficult or easy.

Today I need to continue working my way through the emails. I need to clean the house. I need to get more editing done. My car is still in the shop, but supposedly it will be ready sometime today. I dearly hope I'll go out to write tonight. I've missed two weeks in a row and I'm lonely for my poets.

Ah, sorrow.

My dear mentor, Baron Wormser, died yesterday, only weeks after being diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. He died at home, quietly, with his wife and children and sister present. It was, his wife tells me, a good death.

I told her that I don't know whether the fact he died on my birthday is a weight or a lightness.

I told her that Baron made me, as a poet. He gave me myself.

Tom took me out for dinner last night and we had a celebration/wake.

My car got towed away to the shop. My phone is pulsing with love notes and sorrow notes. Apparently something shitty happened in the public realm yesterday, but I haven't been able to look at the news yet.

A small rain is falling. The scent rises through the open window.

 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?