Down at the end of the street, a freight train squeals and rumbles north. It is strange, living so close to an active track. I wake in the night and hear trains. I sit in my car waiting for trains to pass. What's in those cars? Anything could be in those cars.

Autumn melancholy sifts down through the weary trees. Windows are shut, sweaters buttoned. Cicadas scree in the drying branches.

I wish I had something to say, but what?

Autumn 

Amy Lowell 

All day I have watched the purple vine leaves
Fall into the water.
And now in the moonlight they still fall,
But each leaf is fringed with silver. 

1919

Dorian is roiling up through the Gulf of Maine toward the Atlantic provinces, and here in the seaport it's spitting rain. No wind yet, though a breeze is supposed to kick up later today. Down East counties (Hancock, Washington) are on a tropical storm watch, but our Casco Bay is tucked away from any real weather. So on this dim morning, as I nestle under a couch blanket and think about sweaters and socks, I'm also drinking black coffee and listening to raindrops tick on the vent hood and not worrying about trees falling on the house. What destroyed the Bahamas is nothing more than a passing thought here. The disjuncture is terrible.

I have no particular plans for today, except to run an errand downtown and maybe freeze some chard. Yesterday I got a shingles vaccine, so my left shoulder is as stiff as a signpost, but better that than shingles. I spent some time in the afternoon working on Frost Place stuff, pulling my thoughts together about my upcoming Monson gigs, and forgetting to buy airline tickets to Chicago. So I'd better get that done today too.

Autumn really has arrived: I wore long pants all day yesterday, and a long-sleeved shirt, and soon I'll be putting on socks and a sweater and closing all of the windows and thinking about lighting an evening fire in the woodstove. Yesterday I tore out my sad cucumber plant and made a jar of gherkin pickles using the tiny fruits I stripped off the vine. I stuffed peppers with eggplant, sausage, and rice, and I cooked tomato sauce, and I spread compost around lily plants. I read poems and I read a novel and I talked on the phone with my mother and my son. I played cribbage with Tom, and I went for a walk to the meat market, and I discussed sheep-raising with the guy across the counter. I listened to a small amount of baseball and I watched Foxy Brown.  I washed sheets and hung them on the line to dry. I made the bed. I washed dishes. I considered a manuscript.

It's been good to have a few days filled with this sort of desultory busyness: reacquainting my thoughts with my hands, my daydreams with the season.

I'll be turning 55 in a month. I'm coming to a version of terms with my carapace. What else can I do? I'm happy to be alive.

On September 20, I'll be reading at the Harlow Gallery in Hallowell, Maine, with Adrian Blevins, 7 p.m.

At the end of the month I'll be starting my year-long high school poetry class at Monson Arts.

In mid-October I'm going to Chicago to visit my kid.

On November 1-3 I'll be leading a weekend poetry class at 26 Split Rock Cove, a retreat center in Thomaston, Maine. It will center around the work of Hayden Carruth and Jane Kenyon, and we'll use those conversations to trigger both new work and revision.

In late November I'll be in Bennington for my other kid's senior directing project.

But today I'll be at home reading a poem packet, and maybe moving some compost, running the trimmer, washing sheets, stuffing peppers. It's been a while since I've been able to relax into writing and home stuff, and the garden is certainly in need of harvest attention. I've got chard to freeze, probably tomatoes and eggplant to deal with, and a sad cucumber plant to tear out. I've got my own poems to revise, and other people's poems to mentor.

I'm still reading Barth's The Tidewater Tales. Someday I'll tell you the story of the reading/re-reading of this book. It's very specific, and to me feels very odd. But that's a tale for another morning.

I did get a lot of editing done yesterday, and I tried to can tomatoes, too, but apparently the rubber gasket on the lids had gone bad so none of the jars would seal. It was very irritating. Still, I did mow grass and roast a chicken and make mashed potatoes, and cool air sifted through the evening windows, and the Red Sox came back from a large run deficit to almost win even though their pitching was horrible, and I finally beat Tom in a cribbage game, and it was a sweet early autumn night when a homesteader's thoughts turn to "guess it's time to move some firewood into the house this weekend."

I spent yesterday going nowhere in the car. It was a fine break from the past couple of days. In the morning I shucked, boiled, cut, bagged, and froze a bushel basket of fresh corn; then harvested a dish pan full of various peppers--poblano, sweet Italian, bell, Serrano--and cut, bagged, and froze them. I'll have tomatoes to deal with this afternoon--a small canner load, but I'm short on freezer space here at the Alcott House.

And I'm back to editing today, and I have a poetry manuscript to review, and grocery shopping to fit in somewhere on the schedule . . . but the boy is happily back in his milieu, anxious to get started on his work, and Tom and I enjoyed a pleasant day in which we hardly saw each other because we were too busy humming around our own hives.

Home, finally, after two days spent mostly driving. The boy is installed in his room, we played lots of cards with my father, and I now have 30 ears of his corn to steam and shuck and freeze. But I came home tired, and it was lovely to find Tom making a good dinner, which was still good even though the power went off in the middle of the cooking, and we ended up spending the evening standing around candles in the kitchen shucking and eating raw mahogany clams with lemon and horseradish instead of the cooked ones he'd planned . . . not at all a disappointment as the clams turned out to be superb on the half-shell. In Harmony we could still cook without power but had no water. Here we have water but no stove. Adjustments must be made.

Anyway I'm glad to be here. The boy is glad to be back at school. Rain is moving in today. I'm fretting about the Bahamas and the hurricane path, of course, but so are you. I have a headache and a stuffy allergy-ridden nose, but I also have a hot cup of coffee and a quiet sofa. It feels as if autumn is underway, and I'm glad.