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.