Though the morning is dawning clear, showers and thunderstorms are supposed to move into Portland over the course of the day. So I'm glad I got the mowing done yesterday, as well as a big chunk of the weeding, because the forecast looks like it will be unsettled all week. This morning I'll do a bit more weeding, maybe prune, too, and cart some mulch, but if the rains come in earlier than expected I won't be hard on myself.

The gardens really do look lovely, even in their slightly imperfect state. A crescent of golden Stella D'Oro lilies beams along the sidewalk. White, red, and yellow roses overflow. The black-lace elderberry trembles beneath saucers of pink blossom. The grass is dotted with white clover heads. Bees hum in the flowering thyme. Cardinals flit among dogwood and viburnums.

I have decided that Dostoevsky and I are still incompatible. I just cannot get attached to The Brothers Karamazov, and as of this morning I have accepted my weakness and returned the volume to the shelf. I could blame my failure on car-shopping brain damage, but that would be disingenuous. I have never enjoyed Dostoevsky, even in less vehicular times. So now I am once again hovering between reading projects, though I am plugging the gap with a sugar-coated placebo in the form of Richard Ford's The Sportswriter. I wish I were a Karamazov and Ulysses reader, but at least I have the comfort of being a War and Peace and Middlemarch re-reader.

Tonight I may fry up latkes for dinner, serving them with yogurt and dill alongside baked new beets and freshly harvested lettuce. Even better, we still have a little bit of lemon pudding cake left over from last night's dinner party. In other good news Tom sold the Impreza for $600 to a guy who will tow it away tomorrow, and Chuck enjoyed an up-close chipmunk that was yelling at him through the storm door. It's been a fine weekend for everyone so far.

Yesterday's car stuff ended up being delayed because of the holiday, so everything will start up again on Monday, which is completely fine with me. I plan to enjoy this weekend by not looking up anything on Autotrader . . . ugh, those car sites: so much confusing bait-and-switch.

I've got yard work I should do this weekend--mowing and weeding and such--and I'm going to make dessert for dinner this evening with friends (lemon pudding cake, my current favorite sweet). At some point this summer I need to spend a day shopping for wedding jewelry, but I don't know when. My plan is to comb vintage stores for something bright, maybe in glass. The kids want "festive cocktail . . . embrace color," so we are doing our best to oblige. And I will say it's been fun to go all-out with semi-silly party clothes.

I'm still plowing through Dostoevsky, still pecking away at revisions. On Thursday I met with my arts commission handler and we started sussing out some early thoughts for poet laureate projects. On Friday Teresa and Jeannie and I came up with a plan for our next Substack post. The conference creeps ever closer, and my PL term formally begins on July 1. At that point I'll be in the throes of rehearsal: the conference faculty will be up at Bowdoin for most of the week before the conference, working in the dance studio on our Monson, Maine, USA performance. Thank goodness I'll have a car by then (fingers crossed, fingers crossed, please, nothing go wrong).

The past two weeks have been one long tension headache. I've been so distracted by car angst that I've barely been able to focus on the things I actually care about, and I'm always annoyed when I allow myself to get into such states. I dislike the pettiness: there are so many worse troubles in this world, yet there I was, standing in the kitchen crying over a car. It's stupid. It's a trap. It's so American.

All I can say in my favor is that I'm glad I invented a prompt about gas stations a couple of weeks ago, before this whole ordeal began. The prompt arose from an Elizabeth Bishop poem, "Filling Station," and my idea was "write your own poem about a gas station and repeat plain words throughout." Simple but effective, as it turned out.

I might be exasperated with myself over this car despair, but at least I know there are great poems about gas stations milling around in my friends' notebooks.

Today I will go to the dealership and sign papers for a 2022 Mazda CX-30--white exterior, black interior, 59,000 miles on it, full of safety features, all-wheel drive, handles beautifully, a clean accident history, and costing more than I spent for a year of college at a Little Ivy so, please, fates assure me I'm not making a terrible mistake. The credit union is closed for Juneteenth today, so we can't move forward with the financing till Monday. But at some point next week I'll be bringing home a car, and you will have the pleasure of never hearing me talk about car shopping again. (This is probably a lie, as T's elderly pickup is next in line for catastrophic failure.)

Storms raced through yesterday, but today is dawning calm and bright. I'm not sure what's on my schedule, other than signing away our life's blood for a car at some point in the day and talking about poems with Teresa and Jeannie this afternoon. The beaten-up peonies are in dire need of rescue, so once the garden dries out a bit, maybe I'll find a chance to prune away the smashed blossoms. I'm plodding through The Brothers Karamazov, wishing that I was enjoying it more and hoping that once I get through this slow beginning I'll suddenly latch onto it. Part of my problem is that the print in this edition is really small. But also the characters aren't attractive in any way, at least not so far, so I'm having a hard time caring about what's about to happen to them. I've always loved Tolstoy much more than Dostoevsky, but I was hoping that finally, in my maturity, I might have learned to broaden my scope. Apparently not.

After packing another day with stupid car stuff, I was able to track down another option that we are close to buying . . . if all goes well with the loan. This time I was able to put a 24-hour hold on the vehicle so at least it won't sell out from under us. It's not as good a deal as the one we lost, but it's adequate, and it's more or less the same car. On my travels I did test-drive a new Corolla AWD hybrid, which I expected to love but I did not. The hybrid part was fine, but the car itself felt kind of tinny, like I was driving a toy. I guess it's some comfort to know I'm not pining over a car I can't afford anyway.

Well, everything could go south again, but I am hoping that maybe, please, finally, at last I can stop shriveling my soul with Carfax reports. Ay yi yi. 

One great thing that happened yesterday was getting a beautiful long friendly letter from someone I'm eager to get to know better. A hand extended is always a surprise and a delight, but it was especially comforting at a moment when my spirits are being crushed in the vehicular mills. So I'm feeling brighter this morning, a little more like myself, a little less like a cog in the vortex, and I'm actually remembering that I like to do things such as gardening and reading and writing and cooking and going for walks and hanging out with friends and hanging out by myself and playing cards with Tom and texting funny stories to my sons and entertaining the cat by poking him with a dust mop.

Not that I'm out of the doldrums. Ever more glop awaits--wincingly taking the plunge, haggling with a salesman, signing piles of paperwork, buying insurance, dealing with registration, getting the dead Subaru out of the driveway. But after that, in the hazy future, maybe I can relax and let myself enjoy owning a car that doesn't terrify me every day.

Today rain is forecast, so no sheets on the outside lines. I've got desk work to do, an afternoon zoom meeting, and I may end up hosting my writing group here tonight as our usual host has a conflict. I hope to tear my thoughts away from cars, at least for part of the day. And surely there's a writing prompt I could invent from a Carfax report. . . .

Someone else bought the car before I could get there, so we are back to the beginning of this ordeal. I'd spent all morning trying to pull together the various threads--trying to reach T who was on a construction site with bad cell service, trying to reach the loan officer, who was incommunicado at various times. The end result was crushing and I cried. I so hate this process. Every decision is wrong: be too careful and you lose the vehicle; be too rash and you end up with a lemon; do anything at all and you're saddled with a financial boulder.

My over-emotions were also linked to the fact that I'd been awake all night fretting. It's hard to be serene when I've had almost no sleep. Fortunately, I did manage to drop off last night, though I had to do some work to get myself there. And I do feel less tragic this morning.

Oy. This is not how I want to live out my days--combing through Blue Book and JD Power printouts, comparing the details of CarFax reports, researching complaints about reliability, watching T plot out the horrors of loan repayment for each possibility I track down. The fact is: I don't even like to drive. I would be delighted to never drive again. But my job--which I love--requires me to travel long distances in bad weather over bad roads. And thus I must have a car, and the car must have all wheel drive, and be in decent shape, and not have ridiculously high mileage, and cannot break down all the time. This doesn't seem like a lot to ask for, does it? However, such basic parameters mean that the car will cost more than $20,000. We're in a brutal situation, no matter how we look at it.

At least we like each other, so there's that.

I think I may have found my car yesterday, though we haven't yet had the final discussion about how I should move ahead. It's a 2022 Mazda CX-30 with 32,000 miles on the odometer, still under warranty for the big things (engine, transmission, and such) and with a fairly modest trim package, which is keeping the price sort of reasonable (not that reasonable is actually a word one can associate with car pricing). So I'll likely be spending my day in sales/credit union/insurance purgatory, and of course I got almost no sleep last night because of worrying about car stuff, meaning that I'm in prime shape for such a thrilling day.

But better to just get it done. I'll be relieved to have this over: to park the replacement car in the driveway, get the junker car towed to its final destination, and return the borrowed car with gratitude and a full tank of gas.

Otherwise, what's new? It's hard to recall, given that my brain and my hours have mostly been sucked up into the horrible car vortex. I met with Teresa yesterday afternoon to talk about Aurora Leigh and her lovely poetry manuscript, so that was a respite. I did some editing, and I did some housework. I dealt with an invasion of ants into Chuck's chow dish. (He was disappointed I got rid of them; he enjoyed the ants.) I've been working on poem drafts, though I don't much like where they're going. Still, better to be writing than not writing, even if the results are disappointing.

It's a dark morning, raining steadily. I've been sleeping hard lately, for some reason, and it was sweet to swim up from depths to a slow awareness of tap and clatter against the panes.

Monday has arrived: I'll be back to editing; I need to do my weekly housework; I've got a meeting this afternoon--but the rain is a silvery gate into the day.

I'm still finishing The Red Queen, but I decided yesterday that my next novel will be Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamozov, which I haven't reread for years. I also ordered Randall Jarrell's novel Pictures at an Institution from the library, on the advice of a friend. I've been thinking about Jarrell's poems since I shared that review of Bishop with you the other day. Maybe the one poem contemporary readers might know is "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." But there are many other World War II-linked poems, many set beyond the war as well. His poems are lonely. His characters mostly don't know what to do in this world, other than what they have to do.

Jarrell's poems are emotional, compressed, accomplished. I don't want to forget them.

We did venture out to a dealership yesterday, where I drove a used Mazda CX-30 that is probably too expensive for us, but I did like the car and how it handled, so at least I learned something. It's not going to be easy to find a car with 50,000 miles or less that has all-wheel drive and a reputation for reliability. I've had to give up my hopes of a used hybrid AWD: they're completely out of our price range. But a Mazda seems like a possibility, if we can find one that's a little cheaper than the one I drove . . . or, I suppose, if we can dicker the price down, though that is not a talent that either one of us possesses. Here's where my older son would come in handy: he is the family fast-talker; the rest of us just stand back and marvel. But unfortunately he is too far away to muscle in as our agent.

Once we gritted our way through the dealership ordeal, the day returned to being a regular summer Saturday. I weeded the front gardens, mowed the front and back yards, listened to the Sox win, made pizza, texted with my boys, sat in the shade and read my Drabble novel. In the evening I watched some of the Knicks game while Tom checked out a garage-band show at the VFW.

Now the house is draped in Sunday-morning peace. Cool air floats through the open windows. Chuck, full of breakfast, crouches at the screen door listening to robin song. Upstairs, T clanks his coffee cup against his saucer. Sunlight streaks the walls. A passing crow complains.

I might spread mulch this morning. I might wash windows. I might go for a bike ride. It feels nice to not care too much, one way or the other. Anything could change my mind.

The novel I'm rereading, The Red Queen, is set in the Korean royal court in the late 1700s. It overflows with repression and protocol and madness and disaster. The book is a sorrowful companion, yet the voice of the Crown Princess, the central character, is so very sane in the midst of insanity. I won't say that her voice is helpful to me, here in our own insane historical moment. But it is clarifying.

I always enjoy plundering the local free library boxes during my morning walks, and yesterday I was pleased to find two nearly mint-condition copies of Life from 1969: one a special issue about the moon landing, the other titled "The Incredible Year '68." Both contain many cigarette and cheap liquor ads. One encourages me to buy a Toyota because it comes with "backup lights." Both, oddly, include long poems by James Dickey. But in my view, the piece-de-resistance is a poetry review by someone named Charles Elliott, which opens like this:

When Judgment Day arrives in the seminars of Elysium, Elizabeth Bishop stands a pretty fair chance of being put down as a minor poet.

It then touches on the superiorities of Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Marianne Moore before spending two columns grudgingly admitting that EB has something going for her, though it can't possibly be lasting.

It's the oddest review--one essentially saying "Here's a book I like but I refuse to believe that people in the future will care about such things," as if legacy should be the prime mover in any discussion of art, as if simple present-tense pleasure is a lesser experience.

Of course the comedy, nearly 60 years later, lies in the Judgment Day that's already arrived: in our own fashionable pantheon, Bishop's star floats higher than any of the other names that Elliott chose to taunt her with. Lowell has been reduced to "crazy guy," Moore to "technician," Jarrell to nothing at all . . . who remembers Jarrell? This is just as unfair as Elliott's original review was, but so go "the seminars of Elysium."

**

Sea fog rolled into the little northern city last night, and it lingers this morning. The neighborhood is green and misty and freighted with wet, and the air smells of brine. But the air, though humid, is pleasantly cool, and I am wrapped in my red bathrobe by the open window, happy to be drinking hot black coffee, happy to be listening to a robin who seems to be pretending to be a thrush--those long liquid sad remarks, the music of a forest evening suddenly reenacted on a city morning.

I worked on a couple of poem drafts yesterday, finished the Erdrich novel, started rereading Margaret Drabble's The Red Queen, made garlicky pappardelle with shrimp, scallions, and chard, listened to some of the Sox game, stared out into the fog. Next week I'll start the move back into work life . . . it's time, and I'm ready, but my little early summer hiatus has been sweet, and I'll miss it.

Meanwhile today I suppose we'll do something or other about car shopping. The credit union still hasn't decided how much money to lend us, and T has been working out various scenarios which he has yet to share with me, but Saturday is our only window to visit a dealership, so I expect we will gird on our swords and stride into the fray at some point today. (Though why aren't dealerships open on Sundays? That seems like a stupid decision for a capitalist to make.)

T doesn't like air conditioning, so I only turn it on when conditions have reached the brutal stage, which wasn't quite the case last night. Still, even with a fan running, the bedroom air was sticky and hot, and I did not expect to immediately tumble into the sleep of a satisfied boulder. But somehow I did, and this morning I'm blinky and groggy and squinty, as if I've just rolled out of a winter's hibernation. . . .

I break off this dozy commentary to report that my tiny street is suddenly full of firetrucks. Something seems to be happening on Saunders Street, the next block over, something that involves five trucks and ten or so men walking around casually in their gear and blocking all traffic, if there were any traffic. But now two of the trucks have driven away, leaving the rest of the guys to deal with whatever non-emergency this is, and now the remaining trucks are leaving as well, all of them choosing to drive the wrong way down our narrow one-way street . . . a brief and exciting (and apparently benign) interlude, suspenseful chiefly because firetrucks are the vehicle version of our giant maples, which is to say they are way too big for the situation and seem likely to roll over houses and cars without noticing, but magically never do.

Okay, well, that's over now. Back to whatever I was talking about before . . . I think I was maundering on about being dozy, but there's nothing like five firetrucks strobing their lights across the front yard to wake a person up.

It's Friday, and I'm expecting an editing project to reappear on my desk at some point today, and maybe we'll get news about the car loan, and I have to drive to the post office and I have to haul recycling to the curb and maybe mow grass in the backyard, and I think I'll make something with shrimp in it for dinner, and I'm worried that something bad is about to happen to one of the characters in the Erdrich novel I'm reading. As you can see from this sentence, my day could unfold in any number of ways, but at least I'm pretty sure that none of my neighbors is on fire.

I had a fun visit with the printer yesterday, who turns out to have one of T's photos hanging in his house, which certainly increases my happiness about hiring him to do this job. He showed me some other poetry broadsides he's done--one for Richard Blanco was especially beautiful--and now I'm very much looking forward to seeing what he'll do with my poem. T and I are getting excited about this wedding--both of us working on our gifts, both of us having fun planning our outfits. T acquired his suit and shirt this week; I've got a dress and shoes but need to figure out earrings and a necklace. "Dress up in favorite bright colors" is what the kids asked for, so that is what we will do.

Today I hope the credit union will finally have collected enough paperwork to make a decision about the car loan. Otherwise, I'm not too sure what the day will hold. Thunderstorms rolled through last night, and the weather will continue to be unsettled today. The air is foggy and humid, my hair has suddenly become curly, and the sodden peonies are a sloppy beautiful mess. I'm looking forward to a morning walk in this lush, wet world, but I doubt it will be a day for yardwork. So I'll focus on inside tasks: read Louise Erdrich's disturbing but extremely well written novel The Round House; continue to gather together conference materials; tinker with a poem draft; think about my manuscript; polish the dining room table; do some dusting; bake for my poetry group . . . Tomorrow I'm expecting an editing project to come back to me, and next week will be filled with meetings and obligations. The summer bubble is about to burst. But not quite yet.

It was a warm night, and today we've got thunderstorms forecast for the late afternoon, though daytime temperatures will be a bit cooler than they were yesterday. I might get out to mow the front yard, if the sun isn't glaring. I've never had much stamina for working in a full blaze, though I've frequently forced myself to do so. But I'm over that idiot habit now.

This morning I need to drive into town to meet with a letterpress printer who may be working on a project for me--a wedding present for my son and his fiancee. And I need to continue dealing with auto-loan application stuff. Being a freelancer means that applying for anything financial always involves a stupid amount of paperwork: there's no such thing as a simple weekly paystub in my life.

Otherwise the day will be quiet. Now that I've finished my Poetry Kitchen syllabus, I'm going through my conference plans: tweaking materials, discussions, prompts; creating packets for photocopying; double-checking the daily schedule. Today I'll start pulling together the materials I'll be traveling with: books for the display table, poems for share-a-poem night. I travel heavy, so let's hope I'll have a car to carry this stuff.

Yesterday was primary day in Maine, so that will be another distraction for the day. There are no clear winners in the governor's race, meaning that Democrats will need to be sorted out via ranked-choice voting. I will likely have to write an occasional poem for whichever candidate eventually gets inaugurated (likely to be a Democrat, but who knows), so I've got an odd sort of stake in the matter. What will I write, for whom, and how?

It will cost $6,000 to replace the transmission, so Tina the Subaru is now officially dead. Time to cancel the insurance and try to sell her for parts. Sigh. She was a pain in the ass, repair-wise, but she drove our kid back and forth to high school and then college, and she drove me back and forth to all of my various jobs and obligations, and she never left me stuck in the mud or the snow. I lift my cap to her.

Today I need to mess around with getting us preapproved for a car loan, and then T is going to plot out various financial trajectories as he decides what sort of car we should be trying to find. And then, I guess, we will start actively looking.

I'm trying not to worry too much about this car situation, though in addition to the money anxieties I also fear I'm not going to have a vehicle by the time I need to start traveling again. But I'm striving to keep my thoughts away from fret and focused on the present: I need to vote today. I need to work on Monson plans. I might pick at some poem drafts. I've started reading Louise Erdrich's The Round House. I'd like to finish Notley's Mysteries of Small Houses. I'm waiting for an author to return an editing project. I could mess around more with my manuscript.

And the conference is getting ever closer. As usual, we've had some last-minute participant upheaval, but this year I've been able to fill all of the open spots quickly, which is a very, very good thing. Last year my beloved cat died suddenly while I was in Monson, and my beloved kid got really sick at the same time. This year I'm merely in automobile panic, and let's hope that's the worst of the emergencies I'll be dealing with.

Yesterday it rained, so I transplanted--moved a serviceberry into a sunnier bed beside the patio, cut handfuls of sweet woodruff from the thriving backyard beds and moved them into empty patches along the driveway. And then I walked around and took pictures of the front and side beds.

 

But of course I woke in the middle of the night fretting about what I need to do today: call the garage about the dead Subaru; call the bank about getting a car loan; begin to make decisions. Fortunately I do have a borrowed car I'm able to use for a couple of weeks, which does make daily life easier. I used it yesterday to drive to the fish market and buy a pair of softshell crabs for dinner. We love softshells, and they've had a long season in the market this year.

This is how I served them yesterday. First, soak them in buttermilk for a few hours. Then dredge with seasoned flour and fry in butter and olive oil, 4 minutes each side. Serve with garlic bread (a local baguette, broiled with butter, green garlic from the garden, parmesan, and za'atar); roasted peppers and red onion; yogurt with pickled dandelion buds, garden dill, red onion. Follow with homemade coffee ice cream.

One thing about an accidental weekend at home is that I have unexpectedly gotten a lot of yardwork done. Friday morning, before we left on our abortive mission, I'd frantically weeded and trimmed everything in the front yard. Then Saturday turned out to be cool and occasionally misty, so it was perfect for weeding (and thus for not perseverating about cars). I cultivated and tidied all of the backyard beds, refreshed the hummingbird feeder and the bird bath, watered seedlings and young transplants, and ran the trimmer. I even hacked weeds out of the gravel patio.

Today will be another cloudy, vaguely showery day,  Now that the front and back yards are (temporarily) lovely, all I have on my mind garden-wise is the long semi-naturalized strip between our driveway and the neighbors'. In gardener-speak, naturalized means a bed that's designed to mimic the natural spread of plant life. The plants don't necessarily occur in the wild, but they fill in as understory and spread in a casual-seeming manner. It's a useful strategy for difficult-to-cultivate areas such as this one, much of which is a tangle of tree roots.

But enough of this boring garden talk. Let's be overwhelmed by car decisions. Yikes.

I am not in Vermont. Yesterday evening, on route 93, just north of the Hooksett rest area in New Hampshire, my car suddenly lost power. I coasted to the shoulder, all of the engine's emergency lights flashing. The car would not move forward or backward. Traffic was flying past. It was scary, and there was nothing to do but call AAA and have the car towed back to Portland. So T and I spent the rest of our Friday evening in the cab of a tow truck. We got home a little after 8, and now Tina the Subaru is dead in my driveway, and I fear that this may really be the end for the old girl. I'll have her towed to the transmission shop on Monday, but I doubt we'll be able to face the cost of replacing it at her advanced age (and this is not her first transmission). Which leads me to the fearful situation of having to acquire another car. Which makes me want to put my head down and cry.

Obviously, things could have been much, much worse. Tina could have died in the middle of a lane. Our vehicle could have been clipped by a semi. As it happened, we failed just at the edge of the ramp from the rest area, so we were slightly protected from the onslaught of traffic. Still, it was an awful moment, and I never want to experience it again.

This morning will be all bustle-around-and-batten-the-hatches as T and I are heading to Vermont as soon as he gets home from work. Garden and yard stuff first; then packing and house stuff; then lug the Big Kitten to the cat kennel. Not a poem-filled day, but I've had a pack of them lately so that's probably just as well.

I've started rereading Austen's Persuasion, and it will be a good travel book: familiar but demanding--my favorite sort of comfort reading. I have little patience with milquetoast prose, even when I'm in need of rest. It's no relaxation to spend time with sloppily conceived characters, mechanized plots, and tone-deaf sentence style. When I read these kinds of books--and I do sometimes, for exploratory reasons--I'm at work: I'm paying attention to what I don't want to replicate in my writing or encourage in my teaching. I'm not resting.

For me, reading is often a joy, often a comfort, often a mystery, often a challenge. But it is never an escape.

Yesterday I lay in the hammock for a few minutes, in the late afternoon, staring up into the massive canopy of Norway maples whose roots and branches tangle the neighborhood's separate little backyards into a leviathans' grove. Their hugeness is startling, impressive, unnerving: the maples are a family of wooly mammoths peering down at a doll's picnic. But their intense green shade, watery sun-flicker as a breeze ripples among the broad leaves, their sky-reach . . . I know they are trouble, those trees. But they are also extraordinary.

I'm making good progress on my Poetry Kitchen plans. And by the way, there's still one open spot, so if you're at all interested in experimenting with prose-to-poem influence, do join us. It's been fun to choose passages and poems, to grapple with conversation possibilities and prompts for new drafts. I like creating these classes; I like the way the passages and poems fizz together in my thoughts, how the writing prompts become inevitable, like a chemical reaction.

Today I'll keep messing around with class plans. I'll try to fit in some gardening as I didn't end up accomplishing much outside yesterday. I'll keep reading Philip Roth's novel Indignation and finish Alice Notley's collection Mysteries of Small Houses. Maybe I'll take another look at my manuscript.  I'll listen to birdsong. I'll go out to write tonight.

Meanwhile. Trees.

T and I went out last night for an early movie and a late dinner, which is a date we should maybe have more often. As we were pleased to discover, it's easy to find a table in the Old Port at 8 p.m. on a weeknight, even in June. Mostly I tend to avoid the Old Port in the summer months, when it's the bastion of tourists and bar crawlers. But there are good restaurants in that neighborhood, and they are a pleasant stroll from the movie theater, through the briny night air, and a short drive home, along the lights of the cove. And it is nice to hold hands in public on a Tuesday.

Yesterday I got a chunk of work done on my Poetry Kitchen packet: all of the prose samples and most of the poems. I'll make a few more decisions today, and then I can start working on writing prompts. I also ordered a new printer. You may recall that a couple of years ago the roof leaked into our old one, and the machine has never recovered from the shock. For a while the left margins were still readable on the printouts (meaning that most poems were mostly legible), but last weekend, as I was printing out my manuscript draft, it gave up the ghost. Thus, I am spending yet more money on mechanized insentience. Blah.

Still, despite my luddite grumpiness, I am looking forward to a pretty day--sunny, mid-70s: an excellent day to hang sheets outside, listen to warblers in the woods, eat lunch in the garden; to cut fresh bouquets for the mantle and pull weeds in the shade; to sit by an open window in my blue chair, a book of poems in my lap, and watch robins splash in the birdbath. The Alcott House has its dreamy moments, and they are in bloom.

My dreams made me sad, though I can't remember details other than a room with two beds and the certainty that a task was looming.

Now, as I look out into the cool and cloudy morning, I can't shake the feeling that I am forgetting an obligation, letting someone down.

A cardinal whistles, pauses, whistles. Traffic growls in the distance. The air is very still.

In this darkened room, flowers shimmer . . . a jar of golden irises, a flagon of bridal veil and pale peonies.

Sunlight slashes through the heavy maples, streaking the neighbors' vinyl siding. A gray squirrel scuttles across their driveway, vanishes under the abandoned SUV whose tires are slowly sinking into the backyard earth.

Dream-sadness is nothing but loose ends. 

Except for eventually replacing my spring pansies with hot-weather flowers, I think I've finished my plant shopping for the year. I'll do some transplanting, and I'll keep sowing succession crops of salad greens, but I'm not buying any big-ticket shrubs or trees. I picked up a few last things as my neighbor and I wandered through nurseries and plant sales this weekend, and earlier last week I bought a raspberry plant . . . at the grocery store, of all places: a variety I've been looking for for years--compact, thornless, and non-spreading, perfect for a tiny homestead. Tom and I had a fantastic raspberry patch in Harmony, but there is no way to manage such a sprawling situation in this little garden. So finding the Glencoe berry bush was a score.

A thunderstorm came through yesterday evening, and rain must have kept falling through the night because everything is sopped again this morning. I've got my weekly housework to deal with today, and I'll go for a walk with a friend, and of course there's my manuscript to prod. For the moment I'm still mostly on employment hiatus, though I'm expecting an onslaught of new editing to show up soon, and the conference is rolling ever closer. Paperwork-wise, I'm prepped for Monson, but this week I'll start plotting out the syllabus details for my July Poetry Kitchen class.

Looking ahead at my calendar, I am already feeling a twinge of nerves about the amount of traveling I'll be doing in the fall. I know, as an introvert with a performance career, that I need to let myself keep soaking up this temporary peace. If I don't, I'll be a mess in the long run. But I've always found it hard to tamp down my guilt about my earning gaps.

So I scrub toilets and tell myself that I am contributing. Ah, the things we put ourselves through. No one else is griping at me. I can do all of the griping myself.