I spent much of yesterday reading contest manuscripts and (sob) tearing out my six tomato plants--a sad but necessary job, as they were clearly exhausted. I picked off a good deal of unripened fruit, enough to fill a half-bushel basket. Only some of the greenies have any ripening potential, so today I'll start cooking down the runts for northcountry tomatillo sauce. I've got more stuff to do outside too: transplanting kale and winter broccoli, ripping out some dried-up flowers and possibly the peppers . . . The list is much longer, but none of it is urgent--more like a slow seasonal windup, an amble toward winter, shutting down the summer cottage, turning off the lights.

While I was immersed in my housekeeper duties, I started rereading Susan Strasser's Never Done: A History of American Housework, a complex and well-written exploration of not only the shifts in household burdens since the colonial era but also how those changes linked to industry, public health, economics, and corporate marketing. From the beginning, housewives have been at the mercy of the salesman--eager for anything that might relieve them from the brutal labor of hauling water, slops, and fuel. Yet here I am, blithely turning on a single burner of a spotless electric stovetop in order to make a cup of tea. Nobody in 1860 could turn on a single burner. Nobody could waste time and fuel just to make a personal cup of tea. Women felt lucky to possess a stove at all, given that their mothers and grandmothers had cooked in open fireplaces.

But in addition to all of this housework study and action,  I've still got my word work brewing. I spent time on my draft yesterday, adding new stanzas and then moving around the order to see how each episode might talk to the others. One thing I noticed was that as soon as I started moving the order, the pronouns took on new power: I had to really begin to think about I, you, they, not just as generalizations but as speaking and listening voices with a dramatic relationship to one another. Pronouns are so powerful, but they are also traps. Sometimes you in a poem is way to avoid saying the riskier I.  Sometimes you is a way to pontificate, or to avoid creating an individual character. Sometimes they bestows victimization status on the speaker or allows the poet to evade close examination of self-other issues. The traps are myriad, yet pronouns are also an elegant and efficient way to consider and invoke community and individual relationships without boxing these explorations into explicit fictions, as proper names and specific nouns can do.

I woke to 42 degrees of chill pouring through my open bedroom window, and even toyed with the notion of turning on the furnace until I came to my senses and realized that downstairs was still plenty warm from last night's wood fire.

I did spend some time with the Iliad yesterday, and was just beginning to shift my poem draft around on the page, but then the phone rang and my poetry idyll was cut short. Today the paying work has started sifting back into my schedule. Among other October happenings, I'll be reading manuscripts for an annual poetry-press prize, and those collections have started showing up in my inbox. I know that fresh editing manuscripts are also on the way, and I might be teaching a day-long high school class later this month, and I've got that Homer weekend to prep for . . . [which you should hurry up and apply for because we only have three openings left, and the mix of participants is lovely, and this class has been specially designed for you] . . .

But it's October now, and I love October . . . my birthday month, the season of brilliant blue skies and cascading leaves. Maybe I'll be able to get outside into the garden, and start tearing out sunflowers and tomato plants. Maybe I'll sit outside with a sweater and a book and a big cup of tea.

 

First evening fire of the season, amid all the comforts of home: a balm at summer's end, a beacon on winter nights. In the lexicon of homesteading, there are few things more satisfying than the knowledge that the wood is stacked and covered and will last till spring. All of ours is stowed neatly in the basement, within dry and easy reach during snowstorms. We've got plenty of kindling and paper starter. The new green logs are outside, tarped and curing. Only a shelf filled with canned tomatoes would give me the same kind of farmwife frisson--but, alas, my jars are empty. I just don't have the quantity to fill a canner, so I settle for second-best and sauce them for the freezer.

Today, on the last day of September, I am sitting in my accustomed couch corner, in my accustomed red bathrobe, holding my white cup-and-saucer of black coffee, and feeling extremely grateful to be here. Things are going well in Vermont; everyone is holding up and--finally--beginning to relax into optimism. I don't need to feel guilty about coming home, and I am not feeling guilty. I spent much of yesterday catching up on piles of laundry, cleaning floors, and dealing with my harvest: making tomato sauce, freezing green beans, picking broccoli and peppers. I made a big vegetable gratin for dinner and a sour cherry flan for dessert. I fiddled with some class marketing and planning, both for the Frost Place and for a possible Monson Arts day-long session for vaxxed high schoolers. I read books, and I talked on the phone to Paul, and I looked forward to Tom's arrival home from work.

Today I've got bathrooms to clean, grass to mow, garden clean-out to begin . . . but mostly I need to reinsert myself into my poet mind. I'm going to sit down with the Iliad and then turn to some of my own recent drafts; and whether I end up actually writing or not, I will at least know that I've given the work its due space and attention. As Donald Hall reminded me, when I was reading his essays in Seasons on Eagle Pond, I am a poet who frames her life with the agricultural seasons. I am not a farmer who moonlights as a poet on winter nights. It's important to recognize which vocation is my true one.

I write to you from the extreme comfort of my own shabby couch. I can't tell you how glad I am to be home again with my husband and my little habits. I have so much to catch up on here--housework, garden work, desk work--but yesterday afternoon I lolled and then Tom took me out to dinner, and this morning I feel ready to get back at it.

The best news, of course, is that my mom is doing very well. I left her with a number of pre-made meals; caught up on my parents' housework and laundry and a few necessary big jobs, like cleaning out the freezer; helped my dad cope with his anxiety; and was able to spell my sister, who lives locally so has been carrying the weight. A 24/7 job, but now they're ready to move forward into their own routine. So, success! I feel very fortunate that my sister and I are close and don't squabble or disagree about what needs to be done and what we each need to contribute to make that happen. And I also feel fortunate that my parents trust us to help them even as they want to be independent.

I've got lots to do around here, but I'm going to let myself dawdle through it. Having just spent the last week as a live-in housekeeper and invalid nurse, I feel I have the right to take plenty of reading and tea breaks, go for an ambling walk, and allow myself to enjoy hanging around in my own space without obsessively focusing on obligations. Not that the chores don't need to get done, but why all at once?

I barely had a chance to read a book while I was away, though I did take Sunday afternoon off and teach my chapbook class in my sister's basement while she assumed my housekeeper duties. It was the most relaxing three-hours in my entire stay: sitting around with six smart people; throwing in a word now and again, as the others talked and thought about a variety of manuscript experiments.

Today, among my other tasks, I'm going to work on a Part 2 scenario for this class: what are some next steps in thinking about manuscript creation, and how can I construct a useful session for this particular group, which has learned to work so well together over the course of the past three weeks?

Good morning from Vermont.

Inside the wall above my bed a mouse is running up and down, up and down, squeaking and scrabbling. Outside, in the distance, a barred owl is crying Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? 

Life is trudging along here. I cook and clean, and occasionally I read a page from a book. But today will be a change: at noon I'll haul my zoom studio stuff to my sister's house, and I'll teach my chapbook class from there, while she takes my place here and spells me for dinner prep. This will practically be a vacation.

I'm hoping that recovery will advance faster this week. On the phone last night I was feeling so homesick for Tom. This is a hard job I'm doing, in more ways than one.

A better night last night: everyone slept well, thank goodness, and today I'll be processing corn with my dad and otherwise keeping up with house chores. My mom is making great process, and spirits are high. She's got a long road to full recovery, but I think by some point next week my parents should be able to manage here by themselves.

Unfortunately last night I received the terrible news that a poet colleague, Kamilah Aisha Moon, has suddenly died. Rumors are that it was Covid-related, but I don't know for sure. Aisha taught for me at the Frost Place and was a dear friend and support to many. This is a terrible loss, and so many of us are reeling.

Hard times, hard times.

Hello, everyone! Just a quick check-in to let you know that my mom's surgery went really well and we're all hanging in as she recovers. My time is definitely not my own, and also I've gotten almost no sleep, but maybe tomorrow I'll have the wherewithal to write a real letter to you. Adieu till then--