For now the snow has paused . . . maybe we'll get a few more inches today, but certainly we have plenty to work with for now. My phone claims that 20 inches have fallen in Portland, but the total doesn't seem that high in my neighborhood, at least from my indoor vantage point. Still, whatever the details, the world looks exactly like Maine.

Tom will be home today, but I have to work, and I have a meeting in the afternoon, and I'll need to make bread at some point, and of course the two of us will be shoveling. I suspect the Good Samaritan neighborhood snowblower owners will be on duty, which will be a big help, but we've nonetheless got a lot of labor ahead of us.

I hustled through my grocery shopping and weekly housework chores yesterday morning so I wouldn't have to cram them in around shoveling and work today. I meant to spend the afternoon reading The Pillow Book and Tabucchi's Dream of Dreams and maybe wrestling with poem drafts, but all I did was lounge with a Le Carre novel, idly check football scores on my phone, and watch the snow fall. A fire crackled in the stove. Young Chuck flopped belly-up on the hearthrug. My beloved wandered upstairs and down.

But I didn't sleep well last night--maybe because of snow excitement, maybe because of American terror; who knows? Now I sit here alone in the shadowy living room, nursing my second tiny cup of coffee, listening to the far-off scrape of a city snowplow. The sound is soothing. I have always loved snowplow guys . . . All night long they rumble up and down the roads and lanes and highways, clearing, clearing, clearing. Snow swirls into their headlights, eddies against their windshield, yet on and on they go. Muscling forward into the void. Cloaked in the loneliness of 3 a.m.