Today begins my first non-working/non-traveling weekend since October, and I am enormously pleased to be sitting by the fire with a cup of steaming coffee and not one damn thing on my schedule. I've got vague plans to do a final post-frost garden cleanup--pull out the drooping annual herbs and the dingy lettuce and such--and I need to brush brandy on the loaves of Emily Dickinson's black cake that I baked last week. I might walk to the library and the bookstore. I might buy a baguette. I might do some Thanksgiving-dinner planning. I might work on poem drafts or read Zbigniew Herbert's Mr. Cogito or convince Tom to play Wingspan. Or I might not do any of that. 

This year's November has felt particularly beautiful. I like the sudden starkness of sky and branch, the wild clouds, the way daylight tightens into a brief dizzying knot before twilight drops its curtain. And I love November meals. Last night's dinner was one of the best I've made in a long time: Venison round steak marinated with lime, salt, garden garlic, and garden thyme, seared briefly, than rolled in a white-wine reduction. Local spinach melted into butter and nutmeg. Julienned garden carrots with local red onion and garden dill. Mixed grains (quinoa, millet, buckwheat) steamed with olive oil. It was a magnificent feast--the venison a gift from Steve in Wellington, plus my own garden gleanings and those gorgeous local vegetables from our CSA. The only bit of grocery-store produce in this meal was the lime I used in the marinade.

Poems have been another happiness this week. My intense engagement with the long-poem class seems to have exploded me into the zone. In addition to messing around with that big draft, I have written two new shorter poems that have real potential, and I've got another in my notebook that I hope to fidget with this weekend. One of those new drafts appeared during my high school class on Wednesday--always a sign that something big is brewing for me because I can't often let myself drop into the zone when I'm trying to stay attentive to the kids.

I won't say that our household troubles have exactly helped me out. The money terror is real, and so are frets about pipes freezing and no oven for Thanksgiving. But there is something tonic about figuring out how to deal with adversity, and I happen to have a partner who will jump onto the roof of the train and do what needs to be done before the dynamite reaches the bridge as I lean out through an open window and toss the bag of priceless heirlooms into the culvert. Which is to say: right now we are in especially good moods about each other. And so even though my brain is on the alarm, it is also basking, and that is when the poems want to come alive.