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.