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.