Today is my 48th birthday; and though I keep thinking that someday I'm sure to succumb to the melancholy of growing old, for now I still wake up on my birthday morning feeling just as happy as I did when I was turning 6. I opened my eyes on this Sunday morning to the warm body of my husband curled against me and the comfort of knowing that, for the first time since August, both of my boys were asleep downstairs in their beds. From my pillow I watched the red and gold leaves sift slowly down from the maple tree outside my window. And I thought, Well, here I am again. This sturdy body has trundled through another year; my heart relentlessly taps out its teletype messages; my brain keeps pondering and my patient ears keep hearing; and later today I will laugh and cry and watch a black dog careen over the green and unkempt grass.

Here are a few lines from Gregory Corso's "Writ on the Eve of My 32nd Birthday," a fine and foolish poem that brings tears to my eyes every time I read it, even though he drives me crazy by randomly leaving out the articles before his nouns and I have no idea what "it might not make day" means:

The clue, perhaps, is in my unabashed declaration:
“I’m good example there’s such a thing as called soul.”
I love poetry because it makes me love and presents me life.
And of all the fires that die in me,
there’s one burns like the sun;
it might not make day my personal life, my association with people,
or my behavior toward society,
but it does tell me my soul has a shadow.

from The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1815-1830 by Paul Johnson

[Painter George] Richmond was only 16 when he first met Blake at a party given by Tatham the architect in Saint John's Wood. He offered to escort Blake back to his house at Three Fountains Court, off the Strand. While Blake talked, Richmond said, "I felt as if I were walking on air and talking to the Prophet Isaiah. One remark of Blake's struck him with great force: "I can look at the knot in a piece of wood until it frightens me." Richmond, [fellow artist John] Linnell, and their circle used to call Blake's rooms "the House of the Interpreter." One of them, John Giles, described Blake as "a man who had seen God, and talked to angels." That certainly is what Blake believed. . . . Richmond said that when he entered Fountains Court, he used to plant a reverent kiss on the bell handle. But he admitted that Blake's room was squalid and untidy: "Once, Mrs Blake, in excuse for the general lack of soap and water, remarked to me: 'You see, Mr Blake's skin don't dirt.'"

For the past several years I've been having a recurring dream. It's always set on a cute, Vermont-ish, diversified animal farm: foals in one patch, goat kids in another, sheep in the meadow, cows in the corn; that kind of place. I'm supposed to be doing morning chores--feeding, watering, milking, mucking out--but all of a sudden I realize that for weeks I've entirely forgotten to take care of all the lambs or all the calves or whatever the livestock variety du noir might be. Panicked, I rush into that particular animal shed or out into that particular field and find, not dead or even dying animals, but confused, reproachful ones, usually lined up along the fence line or perhaps huddled into small groups, waiting for me to do the job I keep forgetting to do. Last night's dream had an additional feature: I was sharing a farmhouse apartment with a hip new roommate who turned out to have left lice all over the bathroom towels, although the bathroom itself was more like a beauty salon and not at all like the kind of bathroom one would really find in a farmhouse.

What-would-a-psychoanalyst-say-? does not especially interest me, nor would her remarks be too difficult to guess. It's the details of these dreams that cling: the whiteness of the lice-infested bathroom towels, the shape of the hills behind the sad knock-kneed calves, the sight of my mud-booted, hurrying feet as I rush to feed everything that needs to be fed. And all the while my glittering omniscient eye stares at exactly what I always forget to tend.

Probably you're sick of these quotations from my reading, but I think this book is interesting. Anyway, I've already had one of those days--beginning with staying up past midnight as I drove 80 miles back and forth to school to pick up boys coming home from a soccer game in Bar Harbor, a trip accompanied, first, by the Red Sox losing the final game of the season in spectacular yet predictable fashion and, second, by endless and tedious presidential-debate detritus; followed by "Didn't I tell you to put that iPad away and go straight to bed?"; followed by tossing and turning all night; followed by a non-ringing alarm clock that my husband mistakenly un-set after I'd set it; followed by rushing around without enough coffee; followed by driving 80 miles back and forth to school because the kid had, in response to the non-ringing alarm clock, missed the bus. In other words, unless you want to listen to me sulk, you'd better just settle for a history lesson.

from The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1918-1930 by Paul Johnson

The intuitive physics of Kant and Coleridge foreshadowed electromagnetic theory, but they did not explain the nature of matter, on which the forces played. Kant, indeed, by positing immaterialism, actually pointed in the wrong direction. Coleridge at least was moving in the right one, taking Davy with him. He rejected the prevailing notion of an imponderable fluid, often called phlogistron: It was a "vulgar idea like that of the peasant, everything done by a spring; so everything must be done by a fluid." A more likely explanation, in Coleridge's view, was that "all power & vital attributes" depended on "modes of arrangement." [Pioneer scientist Humphry] Davy, thus prompted, put it in more "scientific" terms: "forms of natural bodies may depend upon different arrangements of the same particles of matter." This foreshadowing of atomic theory is a striking demonstration of the importance of imagination in forming scientific hypothesis: Coleridge and Shelley could see possibilities in nature with the intuition of poets and so open the eyes of the experimental scientists. The early 19th century was a great age of science precisely because it was also a great age of poetry.

I'm starting the day with a book rejection and a band collapse, but neither of these events is entirely bad. The Vagabond rejection was kind, personal, and just what I expected to hear. As Phillip Lopate says, the essay has long been "an underutilized, low-status genre, neglected by both the academy and commercial publishers. . . .  Those gifted essayists who are trying to get their first collections published still face daunting odds." And though I am not co-opting the adjective gifted as a way of making myself feel better, I also know that I'm not an apprentice essay writer and that the quality of my prose has nothing to do with why no one will publish this book. Contemporary publishers prefer nonfiction that streams, novel-like, from beginning to end. Would any of them now publish an unknown Virginia Woolf or E. B. White, whose Common Reader and One Man's Meat were collections of previously published, stand-alone pieces bound together with a loose thematic ribbon? I think that's a reasonable question to ask; and if I were a publisher, I would stand back and ask it of myself. But then again, I'd rather eat rats than be a publisher.

And now for the band collapse. One of our members has a mortally ill child, and the rest of us knew that it was just a matter of time until he admitted that he would have to bow out. We've been limping through gigs, never being sure he'd show up, never knowing what songs we'd be able to play. So now we're officially a trio--Sid Stutzman on vocals, guitar, mandolin, and banjo; me on vocals and fiddle; and Brian Smith on guitar, bass, and occasional vocals--and though I'll miss Craig's presence terribly, at least the rest of us can start figuring out what we really need to practice. I think we'll probably be temporarily working under the monicker of Doughty Hill, which has been a fall-back name for the various groups of musicians who've worked with Sid over the years. I'll keep you posted on what transpires.

Yesterday the mailman brought me the current issue of The Fourth River, which features several of my western Pennsylvania poems. It also features an essay by Phillip Lopate, whose beautiful anthology The Art of the Personal Essay has been a model and a support during my own venture into the world of anthologizing. I have not yet finished the essay he contributed to The Fourth River, but already I can see that what he writes will matter to me.

from The Future of the Essay by Phillip Lopate

The true essayist is not only antiquated but an antiquarian, who gladly draws on and plays with the form's historical traditions. It has been that way ever since Montaigne quoted and jousted with the ancients, Seneca, Plutarch, and Cicero, or Lamb invoked in his mannered prose the shades of Thomas More, Robert Burton and the Duchess of Newcastle. Hazlitt wrote about Montaigne; Virginia Woolf wrote about Hazlitt and Emerson. Essayists are in a conversation with their ancestors, trying to explore from a new angle the same preoccupations about how to live; about friendship, conversation, manners, and solitude.

On French novelist George Sand, pen name of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (1804-1876):

To Baudelaire she was "a latrine." (This kind of abuse continued; later in the century Nietzsche called her "a writing cow"; in our own time, V. S. Pritchett used the expression "a thinking bosom.") In fact, Sand was neither doctrinaire nor promiscuous in sexual matters, though she was often inconsistent. Her views on women strike one today as sensible and moderate; she might be called a skeptical feminist. . . . She wrote, in her diary: "[Women] are mistreated, reproached for their stupidity imposed on them, scorned as ignorant, their wisdom mocked. In love they are treated like courtesans, in conjugal friendship like servants. They are not loved, they are used, they are exploited." [Yet] Sand inherited from her mother, who was immensely gifted with her hands--she could tune a piano perfectly, for instance--a passion for needlework, and defended it with equal ardor. Indeed she approved of all kinds of housework: "Housework dulls the mind only for those who spurn such tasks and do not know how to look for what can be found in everything--skillful work, well-performed" (from Johnson, The Birth of the Modern).

And as an echo of Sand's defense of housework, and because I am bad at needlework and have never tried to tune a piano: this is what I made for dinner last night--

Tuna steaks cut into quarters; rolled in a mixture of brown mustard seeds, crushed green peppercorns, and salt; and hastily seared. Arranged alongside baked mashed delicata squash, steamed beet greens, and sliced red and yellow beets; topped with a balsamic vinegar reduction and minced cilantro.

This made a beautiful plate of food, and I should have taken a photo for you, but I was too hungry to remember.