It's cold this morning, which is too bad because today is the big No Kings protest so in a few hours we'll have to go downtown and stand around and freeze. Sigh. But when civic duty calls, you put on long underwear and two coats and trudge up the hill and speak your mind.

Fortunately my yanked back muscle or whatever this is seems to be healing, though I'm still very stiff and sore when I get out of bed. Yesterday I swallowed only one dose of Tylenol and managed to do my house chores and even walk my usual two-plus miles, so that was an improvement over the day before, when I was running entirely on acetaminophen and having a hard time putting on my socks. But I'm not sleeping well--body discomfort plus busy thoughts, always a winning combination--which accounts for why I'm writing to you so early on a Saturday morning. 

Still, it's nice to be quiet and untethered, even if I have to be awake. I like knowing that T is asleep, that Chuck is roaming the floors, that the lamps glow and the furnace groans and coffee steams in the pot. The weekend already feels so brief: on Monday I'm heading to Vermont to visit my parents for a couple of days, and then as soon as I return I'll drop into extreme busyness again: end-of-year teaching lunacy, conference prep, stacks of editing, gardening. But now is a little window of peace.

Speaking of the conference, we are completely full! Wait list only! And with a number of new participants signed up alongside some regulars! I'm so pleased, and relieved. Every year I doom-talk myself into imagining it won't run, no one will show up, the program's a bust, that's it, give up, etc. You know that conversation: who else can you trust to be your own worst enemy?

Now that I've quelled the doom-talker, what I ought to do is design another Poetry Kitchen class for later this summer. I've had so much else to do lately that I haven't had the wherewithal to keep inventing classes. But I'm considering a generative poetry session based around the influence of the novel--maybe selections from Woolf, James, Bowen, Henry Green; maybe some Victorians as well . . . I haven't even begun to suss out how this might work, but it feels like it could be rich.