Monday morning of wedding week also happens to be the first day of school in Portland, so I expect to witness scads of shiny new sneakers and backpacks this morning when I'm out on my walk. Stevens Avenue, the main drag in this neighborhood, is home to Longfellow Elementary, Lincoln Middle School, and Deering High, all sited within a quarter mile of one another. So kids throng thick and fast around here on a school day.

Tom and I spent much of yesterday communally packing, and we did eventually manage to fit everything into our luggage, though not always in the places we'd envisioned. Tom's dress shoes are now tucked into my suitcase, and my wedding gift is sandwiched in Tom's garment bag, but they're packed, and that's what matters. Meanwhile, all day long, we were also anxious: my dad had a sudden health crisis, and it seemed possible that my sister and her husband might not be able to leave my parents to come to the wedding. As of last night, things seem to have settled down, but life in Vermont is perpetually dicey.

Today I'll deal with my regular Monday chores: clean bathrooms, wash floors, water the garden, catch up on desk work. If I have time I might freeze a batch of chard or process some basil or parsley, but if I don't get to that stuff, fine. This is why I have a small garden this year: so I don't need to fret over any of it.

I've been working on some poem revisions, and I've also got a writing project reserved for the train--a Poetry Lab idea involving a written musical phrase that Teresa, Jeannie, and I have broken into three sections. Each of us will take one part and use it as a prompt in some way. Because my section resembles train tracks, I thought I would use the sounds and sights of the train trip as part of my material. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens.

Meanwhile, Tom will have the window seat and a gorgeous new-to-him camera to play with, so the two of us will be contentedly preoccupied.

You see that I am trying to stay happy and forward-thinking. But I am worried about my fragile parents, and about my sister who (if she's able to leave) will be traveling with a broken ankle. Optimism can be hard work.

Another cool morning, though if it's like yesterday temperatures will heat up quickly. Still, for the moment I'm enjoying the coziness of a bathrobe and hot coffee. Although my hair loves humidity, the rest of me is not too sorry that autumn is on the way.

Outside a catbird is squawking, a plane is taking off, but otherwise it is blessedly quiet, for a change. We've had a crew of wacko tree guys in the neighborhood for the past couple of days. They did not exude competence for all kinds of reasons--including the fact that they preferred to chainsaw in the dark and didn't really know how to back up their trailers. However, they must be dirt cheap because they kept moving from one yard to another, apparently with homeowner approval, though I don't think they knew a thing about trees other than Cut them down! and they exuded the ambience of bleary-eyed denizens of the VFW. Anyway, here's hoping they are finally gone.

I cleared out some flowerbeds and did some weeding yesterday but, more importantly, I finally got my compost bins emptied and the big pile turned before the leaves begin to fall in earnest. It wasn't a huge job but it was heavy and hot and dirty, and I'm glad to have it out of my hair. Last weekend, firewood; this weekend, compost--all so I can focus on next weekend: wedding. To the dulcet strains of a Red Sox-Yankees doubleheader, I spent much of the rest of the day making a giant, complicated, cross-checked list of everything I need to bring to Chicago, which is way, way too much stuff. Fortunately, several years ago I decided to buy both a purse and a backpack that are slightly too small, and you'd be amazed at how much that's helped me manage what I pack. At least it amazes my kids. When I told Paul I was bringing only four books on this trip, he was shocked. He'd guessed at least six.

Today I'll haul out the trimmer and deal with the grass, such as it is, and I'll do the grocery shopping while I still have my car available. And I'll figure out something or other for dinner. Last night I made a beautiful ratatouille--summer squash, colorful peppers, heirloom tomatoes, eggplant, sweet onion, freshly cured garlic, fistfuls of basil. We ate it alongside steamed mixed grains; local cantalope tossed with agave nectar, rice vinegar, and fresh mint; and, of all things, Salisbury steak. If you think of Salisbury steak as TV dinner fodder, think again. The homemade version--tender meat patties simmered in mushroom gravy--is entirely delicious and, for two people who are juggling leftovers, it's a more manageable version of meatloaf. I happened to make these with ground beef, but they'd be good with ground chicken or turkey as well.

I'm enjoying a slow start today: a treat, given my usual early-morning extremes. It's already full daylight outside. Goldfinches are chirping among the bachelors' buttons, and an angry squirrel is sputtering why you oughta, no doubt a walnut-related tiff with another squirrel. That walnut tree does not promote neighborhood harmony. The local squirrels spend all day every day being furious with each other over who's eating a walnut, who took the other's walnut: gripe, gripe, gripe from dawn till dusk. They'll have a lot of fences to mend once the season is over.

I did manage to get to my haircut appointment yesterday, thanks to my neighbor's car, and I also messed around with poem revision and even, to my surprise, submitted a few pieces to a journal. I don't know what came over me: usually I'll scrub toilets rather than submit poems. But now I need to turn my thoughts to yard work and errand running, and no doubt I'll be juggling phone calls and emails about wedding stuff and wrestling with the impossibilities of packing and trying to remember to do dull things like get the mail held.

Anyway, for the moment, I'm not doing anything other than write to you, which is restful. One large issue about this long trip is the question of how many books do I bring? We've got two 20-hour train rides to fill, which I calculate as requiring at least four books. They need to be paperbacks, for reasons of weight and space, and they must be the sort of books one can enjoy in distracting circumstances: thus, no Henry James or Moby-Dick.

The idea is to pair two paperbacks for each leg of the trip. Plus, I've got a writing project I'll be working on, some shows to watch, probably some baseball games to listen to. Tom and I will play cards and eat snacks. Possibly we'll even sleep a little. But the book choice is central.

Thus, last week I ordered Colson Whitehead's Crook's Manifesto from the bookstore (though now  I'm starting to worry that it won't come in on time). I felt it would offer the correct level of enjoyment for a train trip: familiar likable characters in a situation I haven't yet read about, in a landscape I enjoy; some snappy prose and a little suspense along the way. But I needed three more books, so I went to the library yesterday morning to see what paperback novels might be available. My library branch is very small so I knew the choices would be limited. On the other hand, my criteria were simple: I haven't read it before; the quality of the prose won't drive me to drink; the book will immerse me in a place and a situation that I find interesting in some way. 

This is what I came home with:

Ruth Moore's Spoonhandle (1946): Moore grew up on Gotts Island, a fishing community off Southwest Harbor, Maine, and became a fine regional novelist. This is her second book, set in the Depression, and dealing with locals versus summer people. I know the landscape well because this is where T and I go twice a year when we stay on Mount Desert Island at our friend's cottage. Downside: slightly too fat for backpack comfort. Plus side: Moore is a good prose stylist, and knows how to dispense irony.

Annie Ernaux's A Man's Place (1983): Ernaux won the Nobel a couple of years ago, but thus far I've only read one of her books, which was about big-box stores in contemporary France. This one is older: a memoir about her father, born into a laboring family who, according to the back cover, made "a slow ascent toward material comfort" while remaining difficult and distant with his wife and children. Plus-and-minus: very thin, so ideal for a backpack but not for enduring entertainment. Also, I didn't adore the book of hers I read before, though I do think about it often, so I am willing to try again. And I like learning about France.

Louise Penny's The Cruelest Month (2007): You already know who Louise Penny is, but I've only read one of her mysteries before. However, I did read it on vacation, so I can attest that it held up very well during a week of cold wet weather in a drafty cottage, a week punctuated by three naps per day and too much red wine with dinner. Like most of her procedurals, this one is set in Quebec, and I recall enjoying the immersion in its landscape and its French-English cultural push-pull. Also, the characters were various and easy to tell apart and I didn't instantly figure out the ending, so that was entertaining. Downsides: Slightly cringy prose style that may force me to exclaim "Why aren't you John Le Carre?" Also this copy is kind of beat up. Can it endure an overstuffed backpack?

Another heavy, sticky morning, but as far as I can tell, no rain fell overnight. Our drought goes on and on. 

And this household is back in vehicle limbo for the foreseeable future. Tom can't get anyone to look at his truck's power steering till after we return from Chicago, so once again I am carless. I know I shouldn't be grouchy about this, but I am a little. I've already spent too much of this summer borrowing other people's cars and begging for rides, and I hate having to start all over again. But Tom needs to take my car to work, so I am stuck.

Thus, today I'll be driving my generous neighbor's car across town so I can get my hair cut. Under normal circumstances I might just cancel the appointment, but that's not really an option on wedding-countdown week.

Otherwise, the day is fairly open. I'm working on a poem draft as well as web copy for next summer's conference. I'm rereading Byatt's Whistling Woman. I may start sussing out my November Poetry Kitchen class or the workshop I'll be leading at the Belfast Poetry Festival in October. I've got a couple of smaller appearances to prep for: a morning at a Jersey City high school in September, a morning in a Bates College class in October. And my Monson Arts high school classes begin in late September.

Yesterday I met with my friend Gibson, who's the executive director of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. He wanted to talk about how the organization can support me--specifically, through grant writing and promotion and helping to set up programming around the state. It was a really helpful conversation. Of course I need all the aid I can get with that sort of administrative work. But it was also good just to talk to a knowledgeable friend about the odd discomforts of the position: its amorphous expectations, its political undertow. I have a fairly clear idea about who I am as a poet in private life. But the public role remains mysterious.

What he made clear was that I need to do what I already know how to do: work with kids and teachers, work with community members . . . but also read books and write poems and continue being a striving, active maker. I already knew this internally, but it was good to hear it from someone else. A lot of people have a lot of ideas about what I should be doing, and I haven't always been able to align them with my actual capacities. Imposter syndrome is incurable. But it is possible to stop paying attention to it.

Last night's dreams have left a blur of sadness. They weren't scary; more, poignant, elegiac. But suddenly what arises most vividly is a bright bowl of freshly harvested, high-bush cranberries sitting on a table in front of me, and my hands in them, cleaning out stalks and stems. The jewel red of the berries, the pallor of my hands. I wasn't the main character of these dreams, more like a Nick Carraway kind of observer. Other family members came and went, ages all mismatched, old ones young, young ones aging, and the place was the Pennsylvania farm, setting of my summer childhood, but I was only a watcher, cleaning cranberries at a kitchen table, though the fruit has no real-life association with that place. Dreams are so very odd.

Yesterday ended up being a mishmash of errands as I spent way too much time driving around mall land trying to track down a few small items for next week's adventure. But wasting hours in South Portland turned out to be the right choice because, as T was pulling out of our parking space after last night's movie outing, the power steering in his truck suddenly died. He did manage to get us home, but not easily, which means that Gloria the shiny Mazda is going to have to take over as construction vehicle for the next few days. The timing isn't terrible as I'm not on the road for work until after we get back from Chicago. But I do have to figure out how I'm going to get across town for my haircut tomorrow. I guess I'll think of something.

Today I have two afternoon meetings scheduled, but the morning will be quiet. Maybe I'll look at notebook blurts or start drafting web copy for next summer's conference. I could start putting together class plans, but I don't think I'll worry about that quite yet. Maybe I'll work in the garden, if the sun's not too hot.

I'm unsure, undecided, unmoored. I don't know what I want for the hours or what will happen. It's not a bad state to be in. Maybe the dreams are still dreaming. Outside, a flock of gulls spirals overhead, screeching, complaining. Inside, Young Chuck paddles a paw in his chow dish. Upstairs, T sighs. The bed creaks as he turns onto his side. The small sounds of home life, layering against dream life, the private, inscrutable country of ghosts.

This morning I'm feeling sad about Dolly Parton's death, yet what a good life . . . a model for how to nurture both the self and generosity of spirit. I was a child in 1970s Appalachia, so I have a fish-eye awareness of the details of the world she sang about, and dramatized, and embodied, and performed. How does one portray trashy with love, not with condescension or self-loathing? I use the term here because my own family wrestled with it directly, veering between comic embrace and shame. I remember, after first meeting my dear friend Ray, he asked me if my relatives were trashy. He himself was from Appalachian Kentucky: for him, the term was a secret handshake. We would know something precious and vulnerable about one another if we faced it.

Dolly figured this all out. And how to laugh and be deeply serious at the same time. How to celebrate but not sugarcoat a heritage. How to change her tune when change was necessary. I am honored to have shared the planet with her.

**

Yesterday's school thing at Merrill Auditorium seemed to go well enough . . . at least, the listeners laughed and sighed in the right places, so I'm hoping the poem got across okay. It was very odd to read to such a massive audience. I couldn't help but recall my own entree into the world of Maine education: as a long-term substitute music teacher for 90 kids in a K-8 school in rural Somerset County--a far cry from 1,500 staff members across multiple sites in the biggest city in the state. Of course, in the grand scheme of city schools, the Portland system is tiny, not a patch on New York City or Chicago. But I daresay my Monson high schoolers would have been flummoxed at the sight of so many faces. The difference between our rural schools and our urban schools is vast. 

After I got home, I did manage to finish and ship that editing project. So today I'll be catching up on some smaller desk tasks, running a few errands, maybe weeding a flowerbed, maybe working on a poem draft. Tonight T and I will go out to watch an old Robert Mitchum noir called Out of the Past. It's nice to have a looser day ahead, a clear-ish desk, an evening to anticipate.

It's a touch cooler and less humid this morning than it has been. A breath of autumn sifts through the screens, and the wren's tea kettle tea kettle tea kettle is a little more subdued. One ripe walnut, then another, clonks down from the neighbors' tree, a sign that as soon as night lifts the local squirrels will hurl themselves back into harvest hysteria.

This morning I've got my big school event to get through, and afterward maybe I'll manage to finish the editing project--if not today, then certainly tomorrow. Given that it's a 500-pager, I'm relieved I've been able to plow through it so steadily. But it needs to be off my desk, and soon.

Suddenly the neighborhood falls silent, the only sound the bare murmur of the highway in the distance. Even the wren is mute, even the crickets. But now a cardinal speaks--cheer, cheer, chip chip chip--a cricket responds, in the half-dark a squirrel scuttles toward the walnut tree, and the day resumes.

I'm thinking about today's big event but I'm not feeling too nervous. Schools don't tend to make me anxious, though government events apparently do. I more or less know where I am with teachers, even when they're crabby. And surely a tale about a hapless middle school basketball team will lift a few spirits. That's my intent, anyway. To tell a good story. To help them forget to be scared by poems.

Night-morning, soft, black, damp. All windows open; air waves dense with cicadas and crickets. Above their thick racket a single whistling cardinal: Cheer, cheer, cheer, cheer. 

But already the black is moderating to gray. The neighbors' pale house looms. Sky flickers among branches. The cardinal falls silent as the insects drone on.

This will be a packed week: the big Portland Public Schools event tomorrow; meetings on Thursday; and all the while cranking away at that editing project; catching up on harvest stuff; undertaking the frivolous chores of wedding prep, like making sure I get my hair cut.

And Monday, as usual, is housework day--wrestling with bathrooms and floors, then buckling down to desk work, though I am going to take a break for a midmorning walk with a friend.

Yesterday I dealt with grass and watering; harvested another bushel of chard; baked a plum cake. I've still got my herb crops to work on this week: I need to freeze basil and parsley, cut sage for air-drying, pack up the already-dry oregano and thyme. Thank goodness I didn't plant a real vegetable garden this year. I would be insane right now, and I'm already a little bit crazed as it is.

We got a spit of rain yesterday afternoon, but nothing that counts as real moisture. We might get a few more drops today but they won't be the deep, days-long rain we need. Drought is settling in, and it's disheartening.

Still, without rain I was able to finish the firewood job yesterday. I trundled the rest of the seasoned logs from shed to basement hatch, tossed them in, then stacked everything, organized kindling, swept the bark mess up from the floor, and now chilly nights can arrive whenever they feel like it. I will have another round of firewood chores: in a couple of weeks we'll get a delivery of green logs that will need to be stacked in the woodshed, where they will dry out for next winter's use. But the basement transfer always feels especially big. I love the sight of a swept floor, tidy stacks, everything neat and utilitarian and ready for winter.

Today I'll deal with grass, such as it is. The only thing green in the lawn is straggly crabgrass, but it sure does like to grow, even without water. Then Tom and I will work on wrapping wedding gifts, which is more complicated than it sounds because we also need to figure out how to carry them in our luggage. And our luggage situation will be extra complicated, not only because of the gifts but also because of wedding outfits and the two overnights we'll be spending on the train.

For the moment, though, I'm just happy to be enjoying Sunday morning--two cups of coffee instead of one, the pleasure of knowing that T is upstairs in bed instead of flying out the door to work, a comfortable idle alone in my couch corner . . . 

Firewood in the cellar, sauce in the freezer, poems in the notebook. Let the winds howl.

Yesterday was dominated by tomatoes. I started cutting up vegetables for the stock pots at 8 a.m., and we sat down for dinner just before 8 p.m. The job still isn't quite over--I need to ladle the finished sauce into freezer boxes--but the cooking/pureeing/cooking-again stages are done.

So that's one big late-summer chore completed. Now if I can finish moving firewood into the basement this weekend, I'll feel even better. I've do have one more week at home before we leave for Chicago, but it's speckled with meetings and events. In the meantime, T is shopping for a new front door. That has become his big pressing project. The casing is rotting away, and the sag and gaps have gotten extreme, but as usual with home repairs, side issues are complicating matters--in this case the rickety wooden front stoop that some previous terrible handyman built over an existing busted-up brick one. The whole thing is going to have to be removed before T can get the old door casing out and the new one in. Blah.

Anyway, that's the Alcott House update for Saturday, August 22, 2026. Tuesday marked our 9-year anniversary of owning this place, and it remains shabby and mostly unrenovated, but such is life with a carpenter who has to work full time for somebody else. Still, we are heading into winter with a brand-new furnace and a reliable car and a free foraged dishwasher, and plenty of firewood and tomato sauce and blueberries and wild mushrooms, and it looks like we might get a new front door as well. Plus, I cannot forget the fantastic daughter-in-law we're about to acquire. So do not think I am complaining.

No dreams and a solid sleep last night, thank goodness. And now it's Friday, and my thoughts are turning toward the kitchen. Yesterday I brought home twenty pounds of canning tomatoes, so today is sauce day: chopping up and cooking down piles of tomatoes, peppers, onions, and herbs; grinding the softened vegetables through the hand mill; then simmering the puree with a knob of butter and a pinch of sugar until it starts to thicken. It will be an all-day affair, though with plenty of space for me to work at my desk, toss firewood, even wander down to the bookstore and choose a couple of treats for my long train trip.

In Harmony I usually had to buy tomatoes in bulk if I wanted to preserve anything for the winter. My garden just didn't get enough late-summer sun, and the growing season was so short. Here, I could grow enough on my own, but I was still mostly ripening them in the house: sauce was always a late-September task.

Now that I've reduced my vegetable plots, I'm back to relying on bulk field crops, and that is just fine. These tomatoes are cheap, gorgeous, and organic; the peppers and herbs are from my own overflowing plants; and I'll have to break down and buy grocery-store onions, but oh well. For a non-Italian I'm a pretty good Italian cook. This evening I'll be packing the freezer with divine homemade sauce, and what could be better? Drop by for some ziti, why don't you?

I am just now attempting to recover from a horrendous night of insomnia bracketed by terrible dreams, which began when I woke in a panic about the hole under our front door (we really do have a hole but the panic was manufactured by my brain) and ended with dream-me helplessly watching a car careen around the downtown roads and then crash full speed into a tree in the park, at which moment the alarm went off.

Not surprisingly, I'm still stunned. The transition between dream and waking was so abrupt, the dreams themselves so vicious, that I can't quite believe I've returned to the world of the living.

But here's the Carolina wren singing. Here's the cup of hot black coffee. Here's Chuckie, clanking his breakfast dish. I must be home again. I hope so, I really do.

It's Thursday, as far as I can recall. The miasma must be beginning to lift  . . . Ahead, the usual tasks wave their small flags at me. Stripping the bed. Washing the sheets. Walking. Firewood. Editing.

It's always difficult to transfer dreams onto the page. Nightmares in particular look so thin, sometimes even comic. But these dreams had nothing comic about them. My panic about the hole under the door was panic only . . . it had no accompanying narrative, no beast tunneling into the house, no embodied force of evil. In contrast, the car crash dream was all too vivid. I sat helplessly on the curb, among many other people, watching the moment unfold. The car was a white 60s-era muscle car, red-trimmed, broad and low-slung. The unseen driver seemed to have no control of the steering wheel. The car clipped one sidewalk, bounced into another, spinning, airborne; then hit the ground, and purposefully sped straight into a giant oak.

There are things as a poet I don't want to write about but feel obliged to write about. Bad dreams are not in that category. I don't want to write about them. I just want them to go away. Nonetheless, they do creep into my poems, even as I try to keep them out. My long poem, "Mr. Kowalski," arose from a bad dream.

I hope this car-crash dream doesn't become a poem, but I don't have control over that, apparently. Already I've said too much about it.

Another humid half-dark dawn--crickets pumping out their repetitions, a wren's song ornamenting them. I like the way night begins to set its claim at this time of year, clinging to morning, encroaching on evening: a preview of sweaters and lamplight and wood fires, even when the air is still fully summer's.

So far the week has been a desk-and-firewood grind, as it's needed to be. I must get this editing project done and this firewood stacked before I leave for Chicago. But this afternoon I'll take a bit of a break and spend a couple of hours talking to Teresa and Jeannie about our Sappho prompts. I think I may have gone overboard with my responses, but what else is new.

In the meantime, an interesting thing has happened: I got an email from an administrator in the superintendent's office at the Portland Public Schools. Turns out she's a Haverford alum who read the article about me in the magazine, and she invited me to speak and read at a gathering of all 1,500 district employees at the big downtown auditorium next Tuesday. Naturally I said yes: the idea of reading my comic middle school basketball poem to a big crowd of school folks fills me with delight. I may squirm at photo ops, but hanging around with teachers is my bread and butter, and I am always ready to try to make them happy. What's more, I now have a contact in the superintendent's office who wants to meet with me about district professional development, etc., and I am already simmering thoughts about ways to use this as an opportunity to bring together not just city teachers but those in districts beyond Portland. I'm feeling hopeful and excited, which is a good change from feeling nervous and overwhelmed.

A little rain fell yesterday--not nearly as much as the garden needs, but enough to prevent me from hauling firewood after I'd finished up my desk chores for the day. There is nothing good about handling wet logs. But I did get the house cleaned, and I did work my way through a hundred pages of editing, so stuff was accomplished.

Today: another giant editing push, another round of firewood hauling. That's the kind of week this will be.

A wind-breath, thick and damp, fumbles at the open windows. In the semi-darkness a Carolina wren solos above a cricket-drone continuo. Chuckie crunches up some chow in the kitchen.

Yesterday evening I got notice that the Academy of American Poets has posted three of my poems on its website. All are from previously published books; if you're one of this blog's eight regular readers, you've probably seen them before. But the fact is: this is the first time that a major national poetry clearinghouse has ever taken notice of my work.

I know the state laureateship was the trigger for the invitation, a blip on the po-biz radar that suddenly made me visible. I'm pleased, of course, and also gratified--even this small bit of national recognition feels like candy. But at age 61, I'm also bemused. I've been writing intensely for 30 years, and over the decades the audience for my work has increased from nonexistent to small. It's easy, and obvious, to carp about invisibility, to yearn for fame. But invisibility is also extremely cozy. And I'm not, in retrospect, at all sorry to have spent so many years under a blanket, flashlight in hand, writing and writing and writing.

It was a good weekend for getting home stuff done. Yesterday I sowed arugula and spinach for the fall, lugged about a third of the firewood from the shed into the basement and stacked it there, caught up with groceries, and then T and I walked over to the University of New England's art gallery to look at a puzzling show of avant-garde musical notation--compelling in its way, but difficult to imagine into sound, though I am considering the potential of using one of the examples as a structural writing prompt. Still, the show was interesting if confounding, and we had a good walk together.

Today: housework, and then I'll start a new editing project, which I expect will consume much of my desk time this week. I need to finish dealing with firewood; I should turn my compost pile before the leaves start to fall. I'm expecting a delivery of twenty pounds of canning tomatoes later in the week, so Friday is already scheduled as sauce and freezer day. However, I also yanked my back yesterday afternoon (while sitting in a chair shucking corn: so stupid), and while it's feeling better this morning, I ought to remember not to be an idiot, and that is often hard for me.

Thanks, everyone, for the kind words about the crown of sonnets. I still can't quite believe I wrote it, but poems can be like that sometimes. A subject demands its form.

Yesterday I harvested a bushel of chard, a half-bushel of parsley, a half-bushel of basil--amazing production from this tiny plot of mine--which tied me down to a morning spent cleaning and processing for the freezer. Then I figured I might as well keep going with the kitchen fun, so I simmered a batch of sauce (tomatoes, sweet peppers, hot peppers, baby leeks), baked a peach-blueberry crisp, and eventually dropped a batch of meatballs into the sauce and served it over penne.

If you like tender, velvety meatballs, you ought to try mine. They are outstanding in fresh summer sauce, and I brag with confidence, even with zero Italian blood in my veins.

Yesterday, between kitchen jobs, I messed around with my Sappho drafts, updated blog pages, answered emails, read the Byatt novel, went for a walk. There will probably be more such this-and-thats today, amid firewood hauling and lettuce sowing and grocery shopping, and a drive down to the fish market to buy salmon for dinner. Among other things, T and I are starting to match up our calendars so that we can figure out how our schedules will overlap this fall. He's decided to come with me on a few of my work jaunts, which I love, though we won't always be able travel together. Still, just knowing he's around, or on his way; that we can meet up somewhere on an evening: the thought does assuage my homebody yearnings.

***

You might remember, earlier this summer, my excitement about accidentally writing a crown of sonnets. Well, the sequence is out now, in the current issue of Hole in the Head Review, if you're interested in seeing how the project unfolded.

Last night's baseball game was just about perfect: balmy temperatures, a fun crowd, three homers for the Sea Dogs (after each of which a cheesy lighthouse rose portentously from behind the centerfield wall and shot off a few delightfully lame sparklers), a fantastic throw-on-a-dime-from-left-field out at second, and even a pitching position player! This game had everything: plus, a long sweet stroll to and fro, a beer and a steak sandwich, and a fireworks show afterward. It was likely the only time we'll get to the park this summer, and what a good night we chose.

To Chuck's chagrin, I wallowed in bed a little too long this morning, no doubt thanks to the fine sleeping weather (56 degrees this morning, the coolest it's been for weeks). But now Big Kitten breakfast has been served, coffee brewed and carried up to the dozy guy still in bed, and I am curled into my couch corner, happy to be wrapped in ye olde warm red bathrobe, looking forward to enjoying my Saturday morning second cup of coffee--pleasantly aimless, a weekend at home ahead.

I've got a few chores I could do--plant a fall crop of salad greens; start moving firewood into the basement. But I'm also completely willing to be sidetracked. Right at this moment I'm a cat with the dregs of a bowl of cream, a spider with a neatly packaged fly--which is another way of saying, I drafted six poems I like yesterday.

Six! All day I wrote and wrote, and wandered, and wrote, and read and reread, and fidgeted, and wandered and wrote, and lay on my back, and wandered again, and wrote, and tinkered, and wrote. Six poems, all of which contain the same eleven words--sometimes fractured, sometimes exact. The words are Sappho's Fragment 53 in Anne Carson's English translation. I can't write them out for you here because the translation is under copyright, so look it up yourself if you care to. All I can say is that the words gave me characters, and a family situation, and a setting; a completely unrelated photograph entered the fray; and then my imagination could not stop fizzing.

Yesterday's six poems are only half the story. Over the past week I'd already written six others. Together they are becoming a tale-in-verse, set in the 1940s, in an American city . . . and yet the Sappho source material remains alive.

A day like yesterday is heaven.

Unlikely as rain seemed in yesterday's forecast, chance came through like a champ: we not only enjoyed a decent steady rain for a couple of hours in the morning but had a late-afternoon thunderstorm that transformed the street into a riverbed. Other neighborhoods dealt with wind and hail and uprooted trees, but all I saw here was downpour and plenty of it. There's always a lot of runoff with that kind of storm, but some of it soaked into the gardens, and some rain is way, way better than the nothing we had before.

It was a good day all around. I saw a bluebird during my a walk in the cemetery. I baked a lemon-brown butter loaf cake that came out really well. I wrote three new poem drafts linked to my self-imposed Sappho prompt. I read a chunk of the Byatt novel, washed bed linens, talked to my kid on the phone, went out to write in the evening with my friends.

Today will be another home day, and then in the evening T and I will stroll over to Hadlock Stadium to watch our first (and only) Sea Dogs game of the season. Sometimes we get to the stadium a few times during the season, but this one has been so crowded. I feel lucky we managed to snag an evening . . . and now a balmy forecast, fireworks afterward. Baseball is a fine way to play-act the sweetness of summer.

Will it rain today? The forecast is for slight chance followed by chance, neither of which sounds promising. I did water the garden yesterday morning, so I guess I can postpone till the afternoon and see what's what then. For now we have another dim and humid birdsong morning, rumble of plane and train, the little city rubbing its eyes, reaching for its coffee.

Yesterday's radio date went well enough, I think. It was fun to chatter into a mike, and I enjoyed the station's bustle of music and people. The show is called Passionate People and it's archived somewhere on the WMPG site, so you can listen if you feel like it.

As far as I can recall, I don't have any obligations written on the calendar for today, other than tonight's writing group. That means I can keep working on my Sappho poems, keep working on chapbook ideas, keep rereading A. S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden, which I pulled off the shelf yesterday after finishing the baseball book. I'll wash sheets, maybe get to dealing with the basil crop or freezing chard. Or maybe I'll just mess around with words all day. That would be an unexpected luxury.

Whatever else transpires, I will go for a walk this morning. Walking rhythms are always a big help to me when I feel as if I'm on the edge of a burst of writing. Inhabiting that cadence both settles my fidgets and urges my wordlessness into the air. I won't call those fragments thoughts, because I'm not really a thinking poet, at least not at the earliest stages of a poem. But, for whatever reason, walking is sometimes a way to start saying.

This morning I'm being interviewed on WMPG, the radio station of the University of Southern Maine, 10 a.m., if you're interested in listening in. It's been years since I've done a radio interview, so I forget how the whole rigmarole works, but I bet it will come back to me quickly--as long I don't start getting hyperaware of my small speech imperfections: how I pop p and blur s . . . things I never notice in daily speech but that sometimes leap into my awareness during readings and recordings and such.

The interview will be just a half-hour blip out of the morning, and then I'll walk home and get back to work on a Poetry Lab prompt that's turning out to be quite productive. Teresa, Jeannie, and I decided to play with Sappho fragments, and I've been reusing the same one over and over in different ways to create a series of linked character-sketch poems. In the afternoon Teresa and I will talk about Aurora Leigh, and at some point in the day I'll water the garden and harvest basil for pesto. Plus, I've got eggplant and peppers and tomatoes and fresh onions--a bounty waiting for me to invent something wonderful for dinner.

Yesterday I caught up on mowing, weeding, and a few other garden chores, meaning that for the moment my homestead demands are minimal--just the usual daily laundry and cooking. So I'm glad the Sappho prompt is making me excitable, just when I have a little time and space to play.

And both boys phoned yesterday, and I went for a lunchtime walk with another of my favorite young people, someone I've known since she was two years old . . . and nothing matches the lift in my heart when I hear any of those dear voices on the other end of the line. The wedding, of course, is a primary topic, but despite the annoyance of the expense and the fret over plans, what we talk about is our excitement about being together at this big and wonderful party, dressed up in our silly loud outfits, playing our roles, being giddy and joyous together. 

We might have gotten a few drops of rain overnight, but nothing useful. The garden is hot and tired, the grass is spindly and brown, yet the humidity is so high that I can't convince any laundry to dry on the outside lines. It's difficult to dredge up enthusiasm for yard work.

Still, this morning I'll water, and maybe do some trimming and pruning. I'm meeting a friend for a noon walk, and Chuck has his annual vet checkup midafternoon, but the early hours are mine. So once I muscle through the outdoor chores and today's emails and paperwork, I might be able sit down for an hour or so and think about new poems, or even the chapbook. I hope so.

Yesterday I caught up on my Aurora Leigh reading, and I'm still slowly making my way through Grimm as well as the Dan Barry book about that 33-inning Pawtucket Red Sox game. It's difficult to feel brisk during these dog days. But one bright spot is tomato season, and yesterday I used up some of our beauties in gazpacho. My favorite recipe is an old M.F.K. Fisher version from the 1940s that calls for crushing the herbs and vegetables with pestle and then adding "half a glass of olive oil" and "a few glasses of water." A juice glass? A water tumbler? I love having no idea.

***

If you're interested, that article about me is out in the current issue of Haverford. I'm not sure my path to being a poet was exactly "unlikely," but I guess the word made a good headline.

It was another brutally hot day driving yesterday, but the town cooled down a little over night, so this morning I turned off the A/C and opened the house windows, and now Chuck is happily ensconced beside the screen door. He survived his two bachelor days without problem: our neighbor dropped by to give him his breakfast and remind him that he was adored, and there are no signs that he reverted to his youthful gut problems while we were gone. But since our return, he has spent all of his time in our laps or in our bed or whirling around our ankles, so clearly he is relieved that the band is back together again.

And here comes Monday . . . housework, garden work, desk work, and an enthusiastic, still-a-little-bit-worried cat. Though we were only gone for two nights, I feel like I've slipped out of gear somehow. What is it that I'm supposed to be doing around here?

Now the big Chicago trip looms, and these remaining August days are scattered on the path like breadcrumbs.

The heat just keeps simmering, but yesterday after dinner T and I finally got out for a walk. This part of Vermont was settled as dairy country, orchard country--open rolling fields, orderly trees: a domesticated prettiness that is nothing at all like the scrabbled forests, compressed skies, and stony dooryards of central Maine. The residents of these places are equally different from one another. Still, both regions are labeled rural New England, as if merely not being city or suburb drops them into the same bucket.

I wonder if I would become a poet if I'd spent a quarter-century in the Champlain Valley instead of Somerset County, Maine. There's something so visually unchallenging about this landscape, whereas Harmony confounded me at every turn.

Of course there is struggle everywhere. I would have wrestled, no matter where I was. Something would have happened.

But what happened to me was the woods.

Dog in Winter

Dawn Potter 

 

Up the boggy headland, frozen now, where a stone fence

Submerged in snow and earth-sink hints at pasture

So long vanished that the woods are convinced

Grassland never existed, two bodies climb—one fast,

Black, doe-agile; one slogging and foot-bound

Like a superannuated tortoise.  Guess which is me.

Easy to badmouth my grace but oddly hard to expound

On the postcard beauties of our workaday scenery—

Giant pines draped with frosting, wisp of chimney cloud

Threading skyward, and behind the frosted window

A glorious wall of books, lamp-lit; a dear bowed head.

In tales, common enchantment always merits less than woe,

            And perhaps I should collapse on the stoop like a starved Jane Eyre,

            Pleading heat and mercy. But I earn my joy. I mean, I live here.

 

[from Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)] 

We arrived at my sister's place in Vermont just as night and a rainstorm were settling in. Gloria did beautifully on her longest adventure to date, and her fancy features--those blind-spot alerts, for instance--really do take some of the stress out of highway driving. I felt almost relaxed behind the wheel.

Things are unusually loosey-goosey here as my sister, who is her household's action-packed organizer, broke her ankle a couple of weeks ago and is more or less tied to the couch. So she won't be charging off into fast walks or rounding up everyone for Fun. And my parents certainly won't be. It will be a weekend of sitting, which is just as well because the weather is terrible--hot and drippingly humid. Yesterday, when we stopped at the rest area in New Hampshire around 6:30 p.m., temperatures were still in the 90s. I like all kinds of weather, but this stuff is a challenge.

I brought two books to read: Aurora Leigh and Dan Barry's history of the longest game in baseball history--the 33-inning game between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings that took place in Rhode Island on Easter weekend in 1981. I was a junior in high school at the time, only a few miles away from McCoy Stadium, so for me the book is an evocation of time and place as well as the tale of a game. The book is a bit sentimental, as sportswriting can be, but the whiff of early 1980s Rhode Island is hard for me to resist.

The humidity around here has become ridiculous, and the A/C, reluctantly turned on last night, has thus far barely made a dent.

We're both groggy this morning because we had our second bat incident of the summer, which was unfortunate as T has to work all day and then we'll be driving to Vermont--that is, I will be driving, as he has yet to sit behind Gloria's wheel and will be exhausted to boot.

At least I'm not too scheduled today, so I can grab a nap if needed. I'd planned to get the grass mowed this morning, but the humidity is so heavy that I can't stand even the thought of dragging that heavy trimmer around the yard. Things will have to stay as they are: it's not like we're the only house in town with wispy shaggy patchy August grass.

Despite the miserable air, I will go for my walk this morning. I was so rushed yesterday morning--meeting stacked upon meeting--that I didn't manage to get outside, and that's never a good thing. I have a few errands to run today, I need to pack and deal with cat stuff, but otherwise I can be stupid and under-slept without damaging much.

Though the word meeting connotes tedium and wasted time, yesterday's were really useful. We made big progress in shaping next year's version of the conference, and that is a load off my mind. Actually much of what I got done this week is a load off my mind, including my beginning work on the chapbook. Going through my earlier collections, I began to see a particular thread I might follow, and I was unexpectedly pleased by some of those young poems. It's encouraging to note that I wasn't always a wordy self-involved yoinck (though sometimes I definitely was).

Anyway: today. Hot. Humid. A little blurred. But bat-free.

It sure is humid out there. My hair is curling like crazy, and so are the paperback covers. Through the open screens, late-summer cicadas scrape their thick sandy endless hum across the hours. Beyond the continuo, a gull screeches, a screen door slaps.

I'd like to hang sheets on the line, but will laundry dry today? It seems unlikely.

Despite the stickiness, the house has not felt ridiculously hot, and I spent most of the day beside the window in my little study, wandering between chair and standing desk: reading for the chapbook project, reading my kid's screenplay, reading Aurora Leigh, searching for a poem to read at the wedding; editing the Substack piece, drafting a fundraising letter, working on conference paperwork, recording poems for a class . . . so much to juggle, but I am making progress.

Tomorrow afternoon we leave for Vermont, and I'd like to imagine that my desk will be cleared off--not probable, but at least the lingering to-do list will be shorter. The manuscript I was editing has gone back to the author. The draft letter has gone out to its readers. The new Poetry Lab Notes post is now available on Substack. I'm glimpsing a couple of possible routes for the chapbook collection.

Today will start with a faculty meeting, but then I'm thinking I might work on some new poems. I'm feeling the swirl of the unsaid rising and shifting behind my eyes--an actual physical sensation, and one I should pay attention to, because it often presages writing. Something, I have no idea what, wants to become words.

I got a lot accomplished yesterday--finally finishing the week's endless housework, then diving straight into Poetry Lab Notes stuff. Teresa, Jeannie, and I have been preparing a post about our readings and responses to Sei Shonagon, a tenth-century lady-in-waiting in the Japanese imperial court, who wrote a sheaf of gossipy, opinionated observations of court life that have been collected into what is known as The Pillow Book. The post will include short essays by each of us as well poems we wrote using The Pillow Book as a prompt. But as always, it takes some work to pull together the thoughts of three people in a way that makes those reactions coherent on the page. Plus, I'm still learning the Substack platform, so that slows me down.

Anyway, it's a big job that's almost done, and I also made a first stab at drafting a fundraising letter for a new conference scholarship. Today I'll turn my thoughts to prepping for a conference faculty meeting tomorrow. I've got a stack of reading to do, and a couple of poems I need to record for a class I'll be visiting at Bates College this fall. The chapbook project is beginning to weigh on me, and a new editing assignment will be arriving at some point this week.

I'd like to write. Sometimes that possibility seems very far away, but maybe a door will open today . . . a small door I can duck through, a small courtyard with sunlight blinking through the leaves.

Such a long slow rain we had yesterday, a relief for all growing things, but the humidity was thick. Though I decided that trying to mop floors would be stupid, I did get the bathrooms cleaned, and then I was able to turn my attention to desk work: finishing that manuscript job, piecing together a draft of the next Poetry Lab Substack post. In the afternoon I heard from our kid, the one who's been incommunicado in the Canadian forest. He's arrived in Attawapiskat, a Swampy Cree community on the edge of James Bay, and today he and his campers and their canoes will fly south to Timmins and then bus their way back to Temagami. An incredible trip, and I look forward to basking in the glow of his excited voice.

This morning I'll go for a walk and catch up on my floor-cleaning chores, and then I'll return to the desk: more Substack prep, sketching out a fundraising letter for a new conference scholarship. Maybe I'll start sorting through possibilities for that limited-edition chapbook. I need to catch up on my Aurora Leigh reading and keep ferreting a path through my big collected Grimm. I should start thinking about high school teaching plans, and I need to prep for a meeting about the 2027 conference.

So many bits and pieces to juggle, but thus far I'm not feeling too hair-on-fire about work. It helps that I managed to keep August mostly travel-free. Though T and I are driving to Vermont this weekend, I'll otherwise be home until we leave for Chicago in early September.

Now I'm listening to the remains of yesterday's rain slowly drip from the trees; listening to the floorboards creak upstairs as T gets dressed; thinking about patience and impatience, the lonely spaciousness of a quiet room; wondering what will unfold in this unfledged day.

                                             [S]ometimes

’Tis well to be bereft of promis’d good,

That we may lift the soul, and contemplate

With lively joy the joys we cannot share.

--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison"

I didn't do much of what I imagined I might do yesterday, other than process blueberries and go to the fish market. Instead, after I stuffed the freezer with berries, T and I drove to the Eastern Prom and then strolled along the water, into town and back. Our ostensible goal was the fish market, but mostly we were in it for the tern-watching: such mesmerizing birds, with their sharp triangular flight, sudden needle-drop to the water's surface, then rapid sweep back to sky, a silver fish wriggling.

At the market we bought a handful of scallops for ceviche, a sliver of bluefin for crudo. I baked a small custard cornbread as accompaniment and warmed blueberry cobbler for dessert. A summer feast. 

And now suddenly it is Monday again. Outside the neighborhood is cloaked in fog. Rain is forecast, but so far only a vague drizzle has seeped from the cloud weight.

Yet now, suddenly, a patter of drops, small burst of down-drop, the whisper settling in. Clack of drip on vent hood and air conditioner, steady shiver of water coursing through the broad dry maple leaves.

I've got my weekly housework to deal with today, manuscript job to finish up, stack of emails to answer, Substack post to draft, fundraising letter to write, poems to record, wedding stuff to do . . . so many other this-and-thats. The list for the week is long, but at least I'm not traveling till Friday.

And this rain is a song. I hope it hums all day long and deep into the night.

Every year's harvest is different, depending on the vagaries of what I grow, what I forage, what opportunities fall into my clutches. So far this season I've scored mushrooms--a big chicken-of-the-woods cluster that filled many freezer bags--and blueberries. Of course I picked too many yesterday. But I didn't pick as many as I was tempted to pick, so there's that.

Now the refrigerator is bloated with many pounds of fruit, which I'll need to wash and box up and freeze this morning. The cobbler I baked last night hardly made a dent in the supply. What two people are going to do with so many blueberries is a good question. I daresay I'll be bringing a lot of blueberry desserts to my poetry-group dinners.

Still, as always, I feel self-satisfied, as if I've achieved something marvelous. There's nothing like an August day in a field, air fragrant with hot grass, cicadas a-rattle, marsh hawk wailing. I spent so much of my summer childhood in hayfields, gardens, berry patches; so much of my adult life there too. Sweaty, scratchy, bug-ridden; hands purpled with berry juice; tender skin hay-scratched, thorn-scratched. But then parading home with the loot . . . a loaded hay truck, pans overflowing with fruit. A victory. Flags should fly.

***

Yesterday was all sun and shimmer, but clouds have moved in, with rain forecast to begin tonight and settle in for tomorrow. I'll believe it when I see it: we got almost nothing from the last forecast storm. On the bright side, there's no need to mow grass. Even the weeds are depressed.

Maybe I'll drive out to the fish market today and choose something interesting for dinner. Maybe I'll go for a bike ride. There's an exhibition of modernist musical scores at the University of New England's art museum that I wouldn't mind walking down the street to look at. Yes, I just waxed nostalgic about country life, but here I am in town now, and happy to partake in local delights. Maybe I'm just easy to please.

This morning I am being taken blueberry picking. The car will arrive at 9 and will whisk me off to some field somewhere in Maine, and then I will fill a few containers with berries until lunchtime and then I will fill a few more containers, and then my friends will whisk me home. The expedition is delightfully out of my control, except for the actual picking of berries.

I haven't been on a serious berry-picking run since I left Harmony. It was something I always did with my boys, the three of us wildly filling dishpans and baby bathtubs with blueberries and strawberries. Those two are berry-picking kings: even as little guys they knew how to fill a pail fast, and in our prime our trio could strip a row in minutes. 

I hope to be more desultory today. Without either a chest freezer or ravenous boys, there's no point in gloriously overdoing it. And I'm tired. It's been a long week of PLANS PLANS IDEAS HURRY on about ten different fronts, so I am going to conscientiously try not to relapse into my traditional furious berry-picking persona. It will be hard to behave like a hobby picker, but that's my goal.