First day back at work went pretty well: I finished a big chunk of the novel I'm editing, and also managed to clean the floors and stock the cupboards. I'm definitely feeling pressed and overbooked, but I'm also seeing the daylight at the end of some of these projects. Given that I've still got the rest of the week to myself, here's hoping I can make use of the time. For the adventure boys are now back in Chicago, with a couple of rest days ahead of them. And then on Friday evening, Paul will return to Portland and the house will resume its noisy ways.

As a respite from editing, I've been rereading Anita Brookner's novel Hotel du Lac, and I came across this passage:

[Mr. Neville said,] "You are wrong to think that you cannot live without love, Edith."

"No, I am not wrong," she said slowly. "I cannot live without it. Oh, I do not mean that I go into a decline, develop odd symptoms, become a caricature. I mean something far more serious than that. I mean that I cannot live well without it. I cannot think or act or speak or write or even dream with any kind of energy in the absence of love. I feel excluded from the living world. I become cold, fish-like, immobile. I implode. My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening."

"You are a romantic, Edith," repeated Mr. Neville, with a smile.

"It is you are are wrong," she replied. "I have been listening to that particular accusation for most of my life. I am not a romantic. I am a domestic animal. I do not sigh and yearn for extravagant displays of passion, for the grand affair, the world well lost for love. I know all that, and know that it leaves you lonely. No, what I crave is the simplicity of routine. An evening walk, arm in arm, in fine weather. A game of cards. Time for idle talk. Preparing a meal together."

"Putting the cat out?" suggested Mr. Neville.

Edith gave him a glance of pure dislike.

Lots to think about here, of course . . . not only about the definition of love but also about the author's management of a conversation that is almost but not quite a monologue and the subtle, snaky influence of Mr. Neville's interjections.

Today I'll climb back into the editing saddle: I've got three manuscripts sitting on my desk, a fourth liable to show up at any moment, a fifth due to return for cleanup at the end of the month, plus two poetry manuscripts to read and comment on . . . not to mention that Paul will be back in Portland on Friday. So this short week will be busy, as I try to focus hard and get as much done as I can while the house is still quiet.

I was very glad to have a long lazy weekend bridging the conference and the editing stack. The rain was glorious, and yesterday's sunshine and 60-ish temperatures were a follow-up delight. Tom and I were itching to get outside, so we packed a picnic lunch and took the ferry to Peaks Island, where we spent the day wandering around the roads and beaches, along with a boatload of other day-trippers. Then, late in the afternoon, I mowed the rain-fat grass and Tom loaded tools into his work truck, and we ate grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner and thus mildly slid down the hill into the work week.

It will be hot today, so I'm pleased to have lawn mowing off my mind, though somehow I'll have to cram grocery shopping and vacuuming into the day's schedule. But mostly I'll need to concentrate on reconfiguring my life away from wallowing in poems and back into the routine floor-scrubbing tasks of copyediting--a shift that, while necessary, always feels sad. 

Well, I am fortunate to be at least a part-time wallower.

Adventure boy update: After a visit to Arches National Park, breakfast at a diner in Denver, and a long flat drive through Kansas, they are now waking up in a Quality Inn in Kansas City, ready to spend the morning at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, a place Paul has been dying to go ever since he was a little starstruck baseball-history-besotted Farm Leaguer.

And I think, after this, they'll be en route back to Chicago. The magnificent road trip is winding down, and, like their poet mother, they'll have to figure out how to reinsert themselves into the regular old days.

I lay in bed last night, looking out over the neighborhood roofs, catching an occasional glimpse of the city fireworks display alongside the cove. And I was thinking, drowsily, about Fourth of Julys in the Pennsylvania mountains, when my great-aunt Louise would make my mother mad by blasting Roman candles off the hillside; when my sister and I drank grape soda all day long; when our very best entertainment was six or eight elderly siblings trying to outdo each other with innuendo tales of romance and dog racing; when my granny stood silent and alone against the screen door, wearing her filthy housedress, a Lucky Strike poised in her thin and elegant hand; those days when my parents were the bewildered young folks, harassed and uptight; when my sister and I were the wild raccoon babies wrestling in the grass.

That was fifty years ago, but its vibrancy marked me forever. I was a member of the clan. Unlike my parents, who were struggling hard between their poor roots and their professional aspirations, I whole-heartedly loved the place and my place in it. I was a child then, and of course as I aged my links became more uneasy. But for a long time Scottdale, Pennsylvania, was my Eden . . . a tumbledown, rusted-out, foul-smelling paradise, a place where books meant nothing, where cows and dogs meant everything, where machines had loud and simple lives and the gritty odor of coal colored the cool mornings, where we joyfully pitched garbage into a quarry.

My sister and I will be the last to remember this life. Our children never saw the place or met the dingbat great-aunts and -uncles; sweet and steady Grandpop; crazy, theatrical, sad, terrifying Granny. They never knew their own grandparents as young adults: so strong and struggling, so embarrassed by their own past.

So, Fourth of July. Independence Day. I lift the memory of a can of Miller High Life, slowly sipped by an old man wearing a white t-shirt and green work pants. My grandpop is a handsome man, not tall, balding now, but still with the arched nose and deep-set eyes of a movie idol. He is sitting on the grassy hillside behind his farmhouse, and we are watching the lightning bugs. The hill is dotted with old men, his brothers and brothers-in-law. They all dress like him; they all sit in the grass, even big Uncle Melvin the butcher. There are no mosquitoes; why were there never any mosquitoes? The old ladies have bad feet and girdles: they fill up the chairs . . . these old ladies the men married, or didn't marry; their sisters, their long-ago teenage hookups, all somehow blended into this odd and elastic clan. My granny stays in the house, watching. My father lies in the grass too, pretending to be an old man. My mother hovers between house and hill, uneasy about everything, but especially those Roman candles. And my sister and I, the only children, the future . . . running barefoot until dark.

A steady, soaking rain has fallen all night long, and now, at first light, the house still echoes with the sound of slow water, clinking and tapping at panes and shingles. Our two days of rain, after last week's onslaught of heat, is such a relief . . . though I'm not delighted to see that one of my staked tomatoes has tipped over under the water-weight. Looks like, in an hour or so, I'll be out there in the downpour wrestling with a sodden monster plant. Oh, well. Small price to pay for the end of a drought.

I was so incredibly lazy yesterday. I actually took three naps, without even being sick. I think I was simply very, very comfortable and relaxed; for whatever reason my Duty button had turned itself for the day. Today I'll probably convince myself to do some housework, but lolling certainly was pleasant, and I just might do a little more of that too.

We had the pleasure of finally receiving an actual phone call from the adventure boys, a lovely chatter-fest. They sound so delighted, full of comic stories and tales of wonder. What a magnificent road trip they're having.

And so we have arrived at the Fourth of July. The little northern city by the sea is swaddled in rain and mist. A glimpse of gray daylight. Hot French roast in a French press. Huge dark maple limbs sagging with wet. White cat hunched on a yellow chair. Bubbles of drops coursing from the roof edge. Refrigerator sighs. Clock ticks.

It's not raining currently, but that's only a temporary condition: showers will move back in this afternoon, and tonight and tomorrow will be wet. Given that I have absolutely no holiday-weekend plans, I couldn't be happier. Already the cucumber and tomatoes have exploded with growth; I'll cut the first broccoli and peppers this weekend, and I have hopes for baby beets as well. Sunflowers and zinnias are finally budding and blooming; and though the groundhog has ravaged my bean plants, even they are showing signs of hope.

So rain and more rain--yes, please.

I slept in till after 6 this morning . . .  a rare treat. Now I'm sitting quietly in my couch corner as the cat coils into his chair and Tom dozes in our bed. The milky sky is low, portentous. On the mantle a vase of coneflowers casts twining shadows against the painted wall. It feels like a good morning for poems, even if I don't write any, even if I don't read any.

Last night Tom and I watched Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye as we ate roast beef and garlic mashed potatoes and lemony mushrooms and freshly picked lettuce and homemade apricot ice cream and local strawberries. It was so peaceful, so comfortable to be together.

Sometimes I forget how lucky my life has been. Sometimes know that I am beyond fortunate.

As we sat together on the couch, our boys were texting us from the West--about their day spent whitewater rafting on the Salmon River in Idaho; about their next stop, at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado. The Birtwistle brothers on the road . . . young, strong, energetic, and joyful. 

And so my Frost Place idyll is over for yet another season. Except for the Zoom tedium--and except for a sudden tragedy in the life of one of our participants, which has surely shadowed memories of the experience for the rest of us--the conference could hardly have gone better. And Teresa's generative writing workshop was a revelation, and now my notebook is stuffed full of drafts: six or seven rich possibilities sketched out in just a day and a half. What a gift.

I'll be crashing today, for sure. Not only do I have teaching fatigue but the damn cat outdid himself in mayhem last night. I didn't get much sleep after 1 a.m., thanks to his cavorting.

But we have rain--a long, slow, quenching rain; and though I need to grocery-shop and I ought to go to my exercise class and and and and, I'm going to start my day by curling up in the crook of the couch, by mulling over what I wrote yesterday, and maybe I'll dream my way forward into the poem's next room.

Today is my final day at the (virtual) Frost Place. A day to be spent writing, under Teresa's guidance. A cooler day, with rain. A refreshment. Those wobbles I mentioned yesterday have vanished. Now I am just a poet excited about making poems.

Yesterday morning I shared a small talk I'd written about some of the ways we kneecap ourselves as writers: how we talk ourselves away from confidence, silence our deepest inner voices, reduce our joys to ashes. The open conversation afterward was heart-rending, and this morning my sadness about that communal self-flagellation lingers. Words were hard to say, hard to hear. We teach ourselves so many, many ways to not write. It's a wonder poems exist at all.

These two paragraphs seem to be contradicting one another. And I guess that's another place where my sadness is filtering in . . . that gap between those of us who wallow and splash in the art-making and those of us who have to climb back out of the mud hole early because our mothers are calling us, or are afraid that the hole might be too deep in the middle, or love the feeling of mud between our toes but hate getting it in our hair, or worry that we look stupid with mud all over us . . .