For the first time in years Tom and I are having a New Year's Eve party . . . only five guests, but still that's a sizable number in these little rooms. The plan is dinner first and then a card game and nobody staying up till midnight. This is in stark contrast to my sons' parties--J invited 60 people to his house, and P is hosting canoe friends for an annual New Year's gathering, and I'm sure everyone will stay up till 3. But because the boys and their partners keep texting me about their various plans and inquiring about mine, I am sort of feeling like an actual reveler.

P is cooking a vat of Mexican-style pork and tomatillos. J is constructing many Italian sandwiches. And I am making Julia Child's parmesan-crusted chicken breasts. They do have a lot of steps, but I can get everything done well ahead of time, and they reheat beautifully. The rest of the meal will be simple: roasted potatoes with pesto, sweet and sour peppers, a green salad, and a friend is bringing dessert.

Yesterday I got quite a lot done on my personal projects: wrote a poem draft, pulled together materials for the performance, read a chunk of "Lancelot and Elaine." This morning I'll get onto my mat, then spend a few more hours in the word world before I launch into chicken prep.

It's quite cold outside, and icy as well: yesterday's walk felt dangerous. But the little house is cozy, and Chuck is the happiest cat in town. Bonne chance to you all, on this final day of a stony year. I hope you are warming your hands at a flame.

On this cold and windy morning, young Charles is the happiest cat on earth. Home! Home! Home! As soon as I released him from his travel crate yesterday, he began racing through the house, screeching around corners, hurling himself onto rugs, rolling around in ecstasy, throwing himself into our arms. He kept this up, with only mild breaks, from midafternoon till 9 p.m., when he got into bed with me and finally fell asleep. According to the kennel owner, he was an excellent guest--playing, cuddling, even making friends with one of the other visiting cats. I believe her: Chuck is the kind of guy who makes the best of his circumstances. But he sure is thrilled to be home.

Yesterday I caught up on housework and laundry, changed the sheets, did most of the grocery shopping, fetched Chuck, and otherwise reestablished our nest. Today I'll turn my thoughts to poetry. I've got my Tennyson homework to read, thoughts to sketch out for the conference faculty performance, notebook scratchings to revisit. I'm immersed (again) in Updike's Rabbit Is Rich and have two new novels waiting in the wings: Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake and Andrew Miller's The Land in Winter. Why not take a cue from Chuck and wallow in it all like a pig in clover?

And if I get tired of being cerebral, I can go for a slippery, windy walk; or mess around with my very slow cleaning-the-basement project; or make gnocchi; or finish the grocery shopping; or have a little private dance party in the kitchen. The day is my oyster.

We got home by midafternoon yesterday, a much quicker and easier drive than our snowy Christmas Eve journey was. That gave me plenty of time to wash, hang up, dry, fold, and stow two loads of laundry; make borscht for dinner; water houseplants; carry firewood. Vacation was so lovely, but reigniting the workaday pilot light felt good too.

Now here we are at Monday--a sloppy, messy, icy Monday, and I wish Tom didn't have to drive to work in it. By the time I need to pick up Chuck, it should be straight rain, but the situation doesn't look good now. My plan before fetching the big kitten is to get onto my mat, clean the bathrooms and floors, and then make a grocery-store run, if time and weather allow. But if the sleet persists, I may end up baking my own bread and concocting yet another what's-on-hand meal. Thank goodness for sturdy winter produce, those carrots, turnips, beets, and cabbages waiting cheerfully in the refrigerator drawer; the shallots and potatoes in the cellar; the boxes of stock and bags of mushrooms in the freezer.

With Christmas behind us, the next week looms enticingly . . . home; temporary unemployment; a long chance to read and write and putter. Other than prepping for our little New Year's Eve party, I am untethered.

Here I am, posting at the incredibly late hour of 7:30 a.m., because, praise the gods, I slept like I was under enchantment until well after daylight. Now here I sit by the hotel window, sipping from a mug of weak-witted coffee, staring out into a 7-degree parking lot, and admiring the icicles that hang like catfish whiskers off my Subaru's grille.

Later today we will tearfully bid goodbye to the big party and wend our way back to the little northern city by the sea. It's been a fabulous holiday--my in-laws filled with joy and generosity, the kids outside making snow angels and clambering through drifts, unless they are inside arguing over Monopoly or washing piles of dishes or disappearing to take naps or curling up to read books or suddenly squeezing me into a hug . . . What a crew. I love them so.

The snow came on suddenly last night, while we were all out to dinner in Northampton, and the drive back to Amherst was a wintry glare of headlights and swirl. Now, in the morning dark, I sit by the window in our hotel room eying the parking-lot Subarus, lumpy under seven inches or so of fresh white.

I had trouble falling asleep again, but at least this time I stayed asleep once I finally capitulated, so I guess I will take that as a victory. Yesterday was another round of games and puzzles and long walks. Today, if the snow allows, the party might venture out to the bowling alley or maybe mosey around town without any particular purpose . . . 

I hear someone beginning to scrape snow off the inn steps and sidewalks. I am thinking fondly of future coffee, less fondly of the forthcoming giant breakfast. I'm becoming a little tired of eating, but I suppose that is a regular holiday side-effect.

I should go get dressed, but before I leave you here's a link to a tribute to Baron Wormser in the new issue of the Maine Arts Journal.

Yesterday, as my father-in-law told us happily at the end of the evening, was "raucous." It's been a lively cheerful Christmas, jam-packed with family traditions, such as listening to Sounds of North American Frogs (one of the funniest recordings ever made) and continuously rearranging the Christmas displays into ominous tableaux.

But for some reason, despite going to bed very late, I couldn't fall asleep, then couldn't stay asleep. So for the moment I am feeling groggy and fragile, like someone who might accidentally collapse into her dinner plate. Let's hope a nap is in my future.

I write to you from an armchair next to a first-floor window with a view of three Subarus in a parking lot. No snow to speak of down here in the south, though yesterday we had to shovel six inches out of our driveway and white-knuckle our way to the Massachusetts border before the weather agreed to let up. But in the end we arrived safely, the kids arrived safely, and the day closed with a big jambalaya dinner and a noisy card game.

Now it is Christmas morning, and all is quiet in this inn . . . no excited children waking up their parents at ungodly hours; not even one single animatronic holiday rat in the lobby (see my poem "Christmas at the Ramada" in How the Crimes Happened if you want more about that story).  I am wishing for coffee but none seems to be available. In fact, I am unsure that humans run this inn: we have not laid eyes on any staff person since we arrived. However, apparently someone/something will provide breakfast at 7 a.m. I am kind of hoping for C3PO in a holiday apron. I feel he might be a good cook.

In the meantime, coffee-less, I stare out at the Subarus--one from Massachusetts, one from Connecticut, one from Maine. Lights are on in the house next door. Perhaps at this very moment aggravated boys are attempting to drag their fake-reluctant father out of bed by flipping the bedroom light switch on and off and bombarding him with snatches of Metallica songs at top volume. It's been known to happen.

Last night at dinner our own giant boys were putting on "The James and Paul Show," the two of them trying to upstage each other with "remember when we used to" craziness, performing their childhood in the Harmony woods as if it were a Wild West show . . . which maybe it was.

No doubt, there will be much more of that today. I hope you, too, will enjoy a loud and goofy holiday or, conversely, if you prefer, a quiet and thoughtful one.

I send much love.

Well, it's snowing hard out there--a sticky, postcardy sort of snow, glorifying every twig and garden stalk.  Peering into the dark, I'm struggling to guess accumulation: certainly there's enough to shovel. The storm is supposed to die down by mid-morning, so we should be able to hit the road at a reasonable time. But that doesn't prevent me from feeling, in the present tense, a little daunted.

This holiday has opened awkwardly. Yesterday my older son called from Chicago to tell me he was recovering from a bout of something-or-other and wondering if he should travel. My heart sank: my in-laws have set their heart on this big party; we all have, really. But I behaved like a sensible mother and coached him through a Covid test. And fortunately, as soon as he tested negative, he started feeling better. Last night's texts were quite cheerful, so I hope we've dodged that particular bullet. But now Tom and I are immersed in this weather situation, which could affect how easily we can pick up the Chicagoans at the airport in Connecticut . . . 

I will stop fretting and think of good things. I'm sitting here cozily in my couch corner, drinking hot black coffee and admiring the Christmas lights among the cards on the mantle. Chuck has been safely stowed at the kennel. My suitcase is packed. The wrapped packages look beautiful in their bags. Prepped in the refrigerator are boxes of smoked fish, special cheeses, black cake, and three kinds of cookies.  I've chosen Updike's Rabbit Is Rich as my vacation novel. I wrote a sonnet yesterday. Things will be okay, surely.

I have always hated bringing my pets to kennels, and also I have always hated leaving them at home alone, and also I've always hated asking friends or neighbors to come in and do the ugly litterbox or barn chore, etc.--in short, as The Reader's Digest Condensed Version of this endless dumb sentence explains, "I hate going away from my pets."

However, Chuck has not been invited to the hotel, and he is still too young to spend four nights alone, so he and I will be wending our sad way to the cat kennel this afternoon, possibly through snow and sleet. Naturally, just in time for holiday travel, a Yankee clipper is scheduled to whip through Maine today and tonight. I think we should be okay for driving tomorrow, though it's unclear how soon we'll be able to leave. T is supposed to pick up our Chicagoans at the Hartford airport tomorrow afternoon, which complicates matters. But I don't think the snowstorm is supposed to stretch that far south, so I expect things will work out.

This morning I'll bake a final batch of jam-filled cookies, and then my Christmas tasks will be done. I hope I can find an hour or so afterward to think about poems. I'd like to get started on my communal sonnet project; I'd like to work out some thoughts for the summer faculty performance. But who knows if my brain will agree to any of this? It knows the rest of this week will be a maelstrom of driving, card games, chatter, and extravagant culinary undertakings. It may insist on a mystery novel and a nap.

After our busy friendly weekend, my next couple of days will be quiet. Tom goes back to work this morning, and I will have the pleasure of figuring out how to be alone in the house. I've still got one more batch of cookies to bake, and tomorrow (sob) I'll have to drive Chuck to the cat kennel, but mostly I'll be puttering between desk and couch--reading, working on drafts, basking in spaciousness.

Now, upstairs, T chunks his dresser drawers open and closed. The furnace puffs self-confidently through the registers. Chuck races down the steps--bappity, bappity, bappity--and skids around a corner. I am thinking idly of Tennyson, of football scores, of whether to go for a walk this morning or get onto my mat. Last night we shivered beside a bonfire in our friends' backyard, and now the memory of flame glitters in my thoughts and the scent of Tom's toast wafts all over the house.

Yesterday was a busy easygoing day--wrapping presents, making cookies, reading a book, going for a walk, sitting by the fire, then strolling next door for dinner with our neighbor. Today will be somewhat less  Hallmarky, as my main chore is to clean the basement. Replacing the furnace created an uproar down there, and I've been waiting for Tom to do his part (haul dump stuff out to his truck) before I can do my part (reclaim my laundry area, reorganize kindling, vacuum up cobwebs and varied detritus). Yesterday he finally got Part 1 done, meaning that now I am on the spot to do Part 2. But we're also going Christmas shopping for cheese and smoked fish, I'll likely bake another batch of cookies, and we've got another social evening ahead, so the Hallmarkiness is not finished with us yet.

On my walk yesterday I pulled a copy of Rachel Kushner's novel Creation Lake out of a little free library. Both T and I have read her essays and have been meaning to try out her fiction, so I was quite pleased with that find. Also, it was nice to keep something for myself. As usual, books form a large chunk of the gifts I've bought, mostly novels that I've been wanting to read myself but haven't yet. I am sorry to report that I do not at all enjoy giving them away without reading them first. (Oh, beautiful tale that doesn't belong to me. Sob.) When it comes to stories I am selfish and greedy, and I will never be any different.

Yesterday's gale was unnerving. In Portland, gusts close to 60 miles per hour tore at the massive Norway maples as they flailed their boughs over the fragile rooftops. The wind wailed like a train, and Chuck kept staring up at me in wonder and concern. But by evening the storm had died down, and this morning I glimpse only a few small branches littering the yard.

The warm rain washed away nearly all of our snow, and now cold has settled back in. It's the last Saturday before Christmas, and I am tucked into my couch corner as Tom sleeps upstairs, as the furnace chugs in the basement, as Chuck plays chow hockey among the dining room chairs.

It feels very, very good to be unemployed for a few weeks. My writing time will come, but this weekend will mostly feature communal busyness: wrapping presents, acquiring treats for Christmas lunch, confabbing with Tom about plans. There will be eleven of us in Amherst, a crowd of young and old, probably the last big family gathering before the Chicago wedding, and everyone is excited.

Meanwhile, Maine is a hive. This week alone I've had a sleepover with friends in the homeland and holiday hijinks with my high schoolers, been on a movie date with my sweetheart, and gone out for a poetry evening that was also a Christmas party. Ahead are dinners with friends both nights this weekend, and for New Year's Eve T and I are planning a card party.

I love quiet; I crave it; I will soon be begging for it. But in these waning hours of a dark year, the beloveds flicker like candle flame. I'm a moth.

I have one more zoom meeting this morning, and then, finally, finally, I'll be on vacation. I'm not quite sure what I'll do with myself in these strange new hours, with no responsibilities for the rest of the day other than laundry and dinner. The weather is forecast to be terrible--gale-force winds and weird warm rain--so I may simply light an afternoon fire in the stove and curl up with books and notebooks and Chuck and a cup of tea and a couch blanket, and listen to the wind howl.

We've got a busy weekend ahead: lots of Christmas prep, and we've been invited out for dinner on both Saturday and Sunday . . . what is this social whirl? Both T and I are looking forward to the holiday this year. It will be a crowd: both of our boys and their partners, our nephew and his parents, and my in-laws. The big house will be so full that T's parents made reservations for the two of us to stay in the fancy inn down the road, and we're very much looking forward to that novelty. After an autumn dotted with death, dreadful car repairs, a busted furnace, and overwork, the prospect of spending four nights in an inn above our pay grade seems extremely exciting.

And I would really, really, really like to work on some poems. Teresa and Jeannie and I are planning to dive into a communal experiment with linked sonnets in which we write poems wrapped around one another's lines. I'm excited to get started, now that I finally have a bit of space in which to imagine.

Yesterday, to my great relief, I finished the giant editing project I've been focused on for the past couple of months. My deadline is Friday; and with the onslaught of work and household-emergency distractions during these past few weeks, I've been increasingly fearful of running late. However, I did manage to get the job done in time after all, so today I'll write up my editing notes and ship the files out, and then I will be on holiday hours . . . sort of.  I've still got two zoom meetings this week and a bunch of paperwork chores to slog through, plus my usual housework demands. But I'm beginning to glimpse an airier future.

Another good thing is that my incipient head cold seems to be fading away. I have been tired (I almost fell asleep at the movie last night), but in a cozy, hibernating sort of way rather than an exhausted one. I'm looking ahead--a month off from teaching, a few weeks off from editing: none of this is at all good for our bank account, but I can't regret the gap. It's been a long time since I've had any plain days to myself.

Last night, for dinner, I made a polpettone--a rolled Italian meatloaf--with venison (from my friend Steve's deer) and mutton (from his daughter Amber's sheep farm . . . and don't be distracted by the English-novel connotations of mutton: this is as tender and mild as the best-quality lamb). I stuffed it with garden kale, foraged maitakes, local onions, garden pesto, and parmesan. On the side: buttered yellow and purple potatoes (local) with garden dill as well as roasted garden green beans tossed with store lettuce. It was a beautiful mid-December meal, a happiness of freezer riches and sturdy winter produce; quintessentially north country, with a dream Mediterranean behind it; food as a complex swirl of making-do and making-up.

Yesterday morning my car thermometer read zero as I drove through Harmony. Today Portland is supposed to be in the 40s, the rest of the week even warmer, before we have a flash freeze and drop into the basement again.

This weather seesaw is  unnerving. Also I'm feeling slightly coldy today and crossing my fingers the malaise will wear off instead of getting worse. I do not have time to be sick: this big editing project is due at the end of the week, and then the holidays tumble in. Fortunately, my teaching responsibilities are over for the moment. I won't be back in Monson till mid-January, so I'm hoping that once I ship this manuscript and slither through Christmas I'll snag a few open days for myself before the next onslaught.

Today will be cups and cups and cups of tea, a walk in the brisk air, and hours at my desk. Tonight we're planning to go out to watch The Third Man, one of T's favorite movies. I've started reading Anita Brookner's sad novel Strangers. I'll be getting a dead headlight replaced on my car and I'll be thinking about sonnets. I'll stand at the kitchen window and stare out at the squirrels. Duty, love, melancholy, and a small sniffle. The human condition.

 Eight degrees and windy in the homeland, but the house is cozy. In the night I heard my friends getting up to stoke the stoves, and I felt that sleepy childish delight of being cared for . . .  clank of iron, chunk of wood.

But such moments are brief. Soon I'll get up, get dressed, clump downstairs, become a responsible adult again . . . drink coffee, eat toast, start my car, drive north.

Today the kids and I will work on self-portraits, always an interesting project with teenagers, I think . . . how to see oneself, how to invent oneself. Really, it's an interesting project at any age.

Yesterday was one of those snow-globe days: flakes sifting from the sky all day long, pretending to be flurries, but in the end we got three inches of un-forecast accumulation. I worked on cards, finished my Christmas shopping, watched parts of a weird football game, shoveled snow, made rice and beans for dinner, read some A. S. Byatt stories. And now here we are at Monday again, and I'll be heading north to the homeland this afternoon, then teaching my last class of the season tomorrow.

The coffee table is loaded with new-to-us books. That's because Saturday was the Portland Public Library's annual book sale, a favorite event because we get to drive out to the library warehouse on the edge of town and wander among disorganized tables overflowing with surprises. We always come home with piles, of course. This year I snared the aforementioned Byatt story collection, plus The Major Works of John Clare, The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas (in a beautiful old edition), Seamus Heaney's Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996, Anita Brookner's Strangers, another copy of Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel's Dayswork because somebody I know will surely need this book, and a fine little volume of annals titled Marvels of 1924.

Of course in order to make room for the new, I had to weed out the old, so another of yesterday's chores was to lug a bag of castoffs to the local little free library. I used to feel sadder about that than I do these days. I've gotten better at releasing myself from the tyranny of print. Not a lot better, but a little bit.

All mass shootings are horrific, but for me the Brown University situation has been particularly upsetting. I grew up outside of Providence and spent my childhood and youth among the university music buildings and bookstores, among the East Side shops and streets. Then in my twenties Tom and I lived for several years on Governor Street, a block or so from this shooting, while he was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. Our son Paul later lived in the neighborhood, too, when he was enrolled in a Brown summer drama program. Providence was my first city, Brown was the center of my music life, that neighborhood was the spring of my love affair with Tom, and so this shooting is geographic distress, memory distress, in addition to all of its other distresses.

I sit here now, in a couch corner, in a living room, in a little house, in another small New England city neighborhood, one not so different from the East Side--watery, tree-lined, domesticated; shops and sidewalks and students.

We cling to our innocence because what else can we do?

Yesterday was a sociable day--haircut at 11, lunch with a friendly author at noon; then out again at 6 with Tom to the Bakery Photo Collective's annual auction, which is a giant hoo-hah, packed with people, a band, an open bar (he always donates work and we like to see what others are up to), then driving back across town to my friend Marita's birthday party, and then at 8 T suddenly says, "Let's go out to dinner," so the evening turns into a date: we drive home, park, and stroll around the corner to our local, where I eat mussels and T eats a croque monsieur, and we hold hands on the icy walk home. "When's the last time we went three places in one evening?" he asks, and I say, "Maybe never?"

Portland is such a nice city to be social in, partly because it only takes 10 minutes to drive from one end  to another and yet there's a variety of neighborhoods and things to do: lots of arty stuff, excellent food, the ever-present bay, and then back to our old-fashioned little enclave, with its walks and gardens and friends so close by. The best thing, really, is that T has taken a shine to my poets; it makes me so happy to watch them get to know one another better. He is pleased to hang out with them, to go on outings with them, and I am so glad to have my varied sweethearts take joy in one another.

And now here we are, Saturday morning, still dark outside, no doubt still cold and breezy, the sidewalks still slick. I've got various this-and-that plans for the weekend: cleaning the basement, working on Christmas cards, cogitating over summer conference stuff, going to the fish market, finishing up my Christmas shopping. I've had a busy week, and I'll have a busy weekend, and next week will be busy too.  But that is the tale of December.

It's cold and windy outside, the kind of weather that rumples up house sparrows in the hedges and makes oak trees creak like old men. Yes, I will go for my walk this morning, but I'll feel as if I'm atoning for sin.

Friday: recycling day, wash-the-bedding day, run-errands day, then back-to-my-desk day. The furnace huffs and puffs against the cold. Cavorting among the legs of the dining-room chairs, Little Chuck plays chow hockey with his breakfast.

I've been editing madly, reading Tennyson madly, trying to catch up and keep up, solve and speculate, juggle Christmas planning with class planning, project planning, poem writing, and I don't have a clear idea about where most of this is headed, though I'm hoping something will surprise me, and not in a bad way. I could use a week alone to stare out the window, but alas.

Still, I'm lively, so there's that.

This has been such a buckle-down-and-get-stuff-done week, mostly involving my piles of desk work. Yesterday I turned in one editing project to the press, finished a large section of another, and figured out next week's high school plans. I also made a lot of progress on Tennyson's "Idylls" and read some Fussell--which, coincidentally, happens to mention Tennyson's "Idylls" as a culprit in the era's urge to romanticize war language.

Today will be more of the same, plus housework, and then probably I'll go out to write tonight. But I also need to fetch a library book; I need to do some editing of the Poetry Lab Substack drafts; I need to read a few more crowns of sonnets so that I can talk about them with Jeannie and Teresa; I need to think about the faculty performance that Gretchen, Gwynnie, Teresa, and I are beginning to create for the summer conference in Monson . . . 

Too much, too much, and then Christmas on our heels . . . My work life seems to require one invention after another. All I do is either make stuff up myself or help other people figure out what to do with the stuff they're making up. Yesterday, as I was standing in line at Walgreens, I was a little jealous of the cashier. It seemed like a restful job, just being cheerful and telling customers they've stuck their debit cards into the slot upside down. But no doubt Walgreens is really a bubbling cauldron of evil, and the cashier goes home every afternoon wanting to slit his throat.

Well, Chuck, for one, is fully satisfied with his lot. After a nice breakfast, he's in the kitchen chattering to Tom--chirp, yeek, chirp. He sings like a chubby little round-eyed bird. No one is happier than he is. 

On this dark morning, under a new skim of snow, the street-lit houses and cars look like toys forgotten outside, a dollhouse town frozen into a wintry Pompeii . . . until the first car door slams and the scene jolts back to plain old Wednesday.

The days unroll. Last night's reading morphs into today's doctor's appointment into tomorrow's housework. Yards crisscross with squirrel tracks. Fat juncos flutter like leaves. A wrecked car yawns in a ditch. In the windy parking lot at the post office, I clutch a box of Christmas presents as a woman begs me for bus fare to the warming shelter.

It is winter, it is winter, and the sky is streaked with cloud, and the city dogs wear their jackets when they go out to pee, and the country dogs dig up chipmunk burrows and bark at the plow guy, and the man who collects cans has to shove his grocery cart through ridges of salt and slush.

I open a book and a serious person tells me, "Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected," and I believe him, I believe I should read more, should absorb this suffering, I should take it into my deepest self, but the print in this book is very small and my eyes wander off to the high corners of the room, where the spiders refuse to be squelched; every day they tack up new webs, little laundry lines, little hammocks, little traps. "In the Great War eight million people were destroyed because two persons, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his Consort, had been shot." Why is it Consort and not consort? My mind sinks into trivia, I am the least of god's creatures, I wander into the kitchen and fill the kettle for tea.

Seven degrees this morning in the little northern city by the sea, and the doughty furnace is hard at work.

My busy week continues. I've got scads of editing awaiting, tonight's poetry reading to prep for, a Christmas box to pack and ship. I need to get onto my mat, deal with Monson planning, catch up on my Tennyson homework, and by 4:30 I'll hit the road with the poets, heading north for our event in Gardiner.

Despite this to-do list, I did somehow manage to oversleep, which for me is always a coup even if it also throws our weekday routine into an uproar. But the bustle is over. T's truck has vanished around the corner, and I am finally sitting down for a minute, listening to the kettle heat, listening to Chuck chirp to himself.

That guy, as usual, is full of thrill and wonder. Yesterday he hurled himself into the hysterical joys of gift wrapping. Now he is wedged against my shoulder, purring lustily. He's the happiest kid in town, this guy: not a speck of grievance or side-eye. My neighbor thinks he'll probably grow up to be an asshole like the rest of the cats. But I'm not sure. He seems entirely clueless about such responsibilities.

This week I've been reading an odd combination of books: Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, a serious and complicated tome; David Trinidad's semi-crown of sonnets "A Poet's Death," which I am puzzling over form-wise; Lord Byron's "Idylls of the King," which, to my surprise, is a fast and absorbing read; and Kate Douglas Wiggin's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, a beautiful first edition from 1903 that is a pleasure to hold but that also clarifies why Louisa May Alcott was a far superior writer in the American-girl-grows-up-to-be-a-moral-and-imaginative-being genre.

Now, at first light, I am trying to inspire myself to leap into action. Outside the cold seems visible--an aura of blue stillness, snow as stiff as porcelain clay. Laundry awaits, and the litterbox and firewood and all the rest of my trivial round.

Though Fussell writes: 

Two nights before participating in the attack on the Somme--perhaps the most egregious ironic action of the whole war--[the poet Siegfried] Sassoon found himself "huddled up in a little dog-kennel of a dug-out, reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles." Clearly there are some intersections of literature with life that we have taken too little notice of.

Usually I am the primary Christmas shopper, mostly because my schedule is more flexible than Tom's. This is a default situation, not a preferred one: I am not a shopping enthusiast. But by some magic, the two of us managed to get much of our shopping done this weekend--together, in person, in town, from local stores and artists we like. Plus, Tom made a fantastic shopping coup for himself: in a vintage clothing shop he found a pair of pale blue suede Italian dress shoes, with red laces and soles, that fit him perfectly. Blue suede shoes for our son's wedding! What a magnificent find.

So despite my dislike of shopping, we had a pretty good weekend. And now I must gird myself for an intense week, starting tomorrow night, at 6 p.m., when I'll be reading at the Table Bar in Gardiner, Maine, with some of my favorite people: Gretchen Berg, Marita O'Neill, Betsy Sholl, and Meghan Sterling. In the interstices, I'll be dealing with stacks of editing and class planning, plus various appointments and obligations, plus cold and ice and holiday chores. Ugh, December is a ridiculous month.

Seagulls swirl up from the bay, circle over the sugared roofs.

A man trudges past, pushing a grocery cart filled with cans.

A clock ticks.

A person wakes suddenly, overwhelmed by dread.

Yet after two days of bitter cold, the temperature has risen to a balmy 20 degrees. I put out a few Christmas ornaments yesterday--scattered, out of Chuck's enthusiastic reach, on window ledge and mantle and doorjamb: a cheerful hodgepodge of nostalgia . . . the paper houses Tom made with the little boys one year; the ancient styrofoam gingerbread men that hung from my parents first Christmas tree, in 1962; the battered felt chicken, a gift from our neighbor, which Ruckus would steal off the tree every single day during the season; the rubber King Kong that T bought me at the top of the Empire State Building when we were very young . . . 

Yet the furnace remains magnificent, and that smart guy who lives here has solved our lingering soot problem.

Yet I worked on a poem. I made braised lemon chicken with olives and pesto over fresh polenta, with a side of buttered spinach and slices of pumpkin bread for dessert.

Snow fell gently as I walked to the library.

We drove to Brunswick last night with a passel of poets to watch the student dance concert at Bowdoin. This is the second year we've gone, and it was again an excellent time. Our friend Gwynnie is a stellar teacher (as anyone who attended the conference last year can attest), and her students are a joy to behold. Then afterward we hung out for a while at the hotel bar across the street, a pack of cheerful chatterers out on a frigid Friday night.

It was sweet to glance across the room and see T in busy conversation--my friends morphing into our friends, his shyness slipping away. Underneath his reserve he is funny and sociable and observant, and very interested in other people. But shyness is a suffocating blanket, and all those years in Harmony were no help to him in that regard.

The older I get, the more grateful I feel for this widening circle of engagement. It doesn't make up for loss--nothing will fill the hole that Ray left in us--but it somehow deepens my sense of the necessary patience of love. I think of my dear ones in Wellington and Harmony and Bangor, in New York and Vermont, in Amherst and Chicago and West Tremont and Sarasota, and upstairs asleep in my bed . . . close by, or far-flung  . . . the web of history that binds, the small everyday comforts, the sudden epiphanies, the nothing-special that is everything.

This morning the temperature in Portland is 5 degrees above zero, but the Alcott House is a balmy 66. Praise to the furnace guys, who rescued us in the nick of time. We're still dealing with a bit of soot from the kitchen duct, but otherwise it's all mod cons around here.

Young Charles is somewhat disappointed with this high life, as he loves the wood stove. Yesterday he kept suggesting that I should light it so he could toast himself on the hearthrug. But Chuck has always preferred the old fashioned ways: pencils and pinecones and sitting on books instead of computers.

Shortly I need to venture out into the Arctic to get the trash to the curb, but for the moment I am basking in this pleasant heat that I have done nothing to produce. It will be another busy day--a morning zoom meeting, then editing and class plans and assorted paperwork and, I hope, a walk once the temperature rises. We may be going out tonight to watch the student dance extravaganza at Bowdoin. I need to start reading my Tennyson homework. Probably I should go to the grocery store. There's always a pile of laundry waiting.

But at least I went out to write last night. I think the drafts I made aren't worth much, but maybe I'm wrong. And I did come across a copy of Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory in a little free library--a golden acquisition, that one. I've been meaning to read it for years. 

Funny how books find us.

What a day we had yesterday . . . First, T and I rushed through before-dawn snow shoveling. Then, promptly at 8, the furnace guys showed up and started demo-ing the busted furnace. T left for work and at 9 I began zoom-teaching upstairs, behind a barrier that T had constructed to keep the cat away from the furnace hoo-hah, which the cat figured out how to circumvent almost immediately. So I was teaching while leaping up from my chair to pluck the cat out of mischief; guys were banging and crashing in the cellar . . . Eventually, while the kids were writing, I reconfigured cat jail and shut Chuck up in our bedroom. By this point a full-sized semi was idling in front of my driveway, and the guys were unloading the new furnace from the trailer and starting to try to get it into the house. From upstairs I could hear their loud panting despair about tight corners and narrow stairs. The cat wailed in the bedroom and scratched at the door. My zoom children sweetly shared the drafts they'd been writing . . .  Ah, bedlam.

This went on till 1, when class ended and I could finally go into the bedroom and settle Chuck down into sleepiness. Midafternoon I heard a rumble, and heat began to seep through the registers. Then the Dump Guys showed up, parking their giant trailer the wrong way down my narrow street (yes, that is actually the name of the business). They'd been hired by the furnace guys to take away the old furnace . . . which they accomplished by Sawzalling it apart in the basement and shoving the pieces through the old coal hatch at the back of the house. My neighbor texted me: "Your house is vomiting."

And by 4:30 p.m., the drama was over.

Well, not actually entirely over because now I am dealing with the unpleasant aftereffects of furnace swapping: nasty greasy particulates from the old appliance, previously caught in the ductwork, are now blowing into the house. The furnace guy assures me that the problem is temporary, and I can see that it's manageable and definitely on the wane. But ick.

Anyway, despite this annoyance, we now have central heating, and just in time, because temperatures are supposed to drop precipitously tonight--into single digits or lower--and our little wood stove would not have been able to fight that battle.

Today will be much quieter without a pack of guys in the building . . . just me alone for most of the day, fidgeting through housework and desk work, getting onto my mat, fetching our CSA order, going out to write tonight. Phew.

Just a quick note this morning as I am toppling under a mountain of obligation: snow shoveling, furnace guys, zoom teaching, cat wrangling, and probably a lot of other things I am forgetting along the way. Wish me luck--

I'm supposed to be driving to Monson this afternoon, but likely I won't be because we've got a winter storm warning and up to eight inches of snow forecast. So that means I'll be zooming with the kids tomorrow while also kitten wrangling and dealing with noise and disruption because . . . [drum roll] . . . THE GUY IS COMING TO INSTALL A NEW FURNACE.

We've been without central heating for three weeks, and we've done okay. When the kitchen oven died, I do admit to feeling disheartened, but on the whole we've stayed cheerful, fed, and mostly warm. However, temperatures are supposed to drop into single digits by the end of this week, so thank goodness we're getting our heating troubles solved before life turns dire.

Because I'm probably not traveling north today, I'll have a few more hours to get other stuff done: planning for January's Monson Arts reunion class; a chance to catch up on editing, and maybe also to mess around with materials for Poetry Lab's incipient Substack journal. Yesterday I made a big pot of turkey stock and used some of it for butternut-squash risotto, so velvety and full of flavor. Today I'll reserve another couple of quarts for that classic post-Thanksgiving comfort, turkey noodle soup, and stow the rest in the freezer. I'd like to go for a walk before the snow settles in. I need to get cracking on Tennyson's Idyls of the King.

In the midst of all this I'm also working on scholarship stuff for the Conference on Poetry and Learning. If you are able, I would be so grateful for any donation you can make to our fund. Every dime will go to supporting participants who would otherwise not be able to attend.

And if you are considering applying to the conference and have questions about whether or not you'll be a good fit (short answer: you will), please reach out. I would love to see you in beautiful Monson this summer.

And now we are back to our regular days.

The kids left yesterday afternoon, and Chuck immediately collapsed into exhaustion. Nonstop kitten fun is so tiring, but he sure did enjoy himself. He dozed much of the afternoon, slept hard all night, and now he is groggily eating his breakfast and wondering where his friends went.

It was an excellent visit for all of us, though like Chuck I am a little groggy from it. Unfortunately, I need to snap out of my grog because I've got a lot of things to do: prep for Monson, prep for January's online class, work on my editing project, deal with groceries and housework.

This week will be screwy. The furnace is supposed to be installed, but we don't know on which days yet. There's a big snowstorm coming in tomorrow, meaning that I most likely won't be driving north but will instead have to zoom with the kids on Wednesday. If I'm teaching at home or up north and those are furnace installation days, T will have to take a day off from work to manage the cat situation. . . . In short, the week ahead is a busy unformed mess.

However, we do have an oven, and it has been a big help in keeping the house warmer. Last night for dinner I roasted a squash and mashed it with garlic and olive oil; I baked bluefish en papillote (with shaved red onion and a bit of leftover stuffing) and made a kale salad--classic winter fare, and so delightfully oveny. Today, amid my myriad other obligations, I'll simmer turkey stock and probably bake bread. I've got so much reading to do and, ugh, so much Christmas shopping. 

No tree for us this year, and probably very few ornaments, as young Charles is a Menace. Christmas with a kitten is always an adventure in disaster.