I am sitting here in Maine thinking about New Jersey. This feels very strange. Not only have I started rereading Richard Ford's most recent Frank Bascombe novel, The Lay of the Land, which is set in New Jersey, but I am editing a book about the Slow Food movement in New Jersey, which will be published by the state's university press. Add to this: my own poetry publisher is located in New Jersey, my best friend died in New Jersey six years ago this week, and half my ancestral heritage is from New Jersey. Clearly I am suffering from spooky Garden State vibes.

Yesterday I received an email from a friend in New Jersey. She hoped that my "weather in the north has as strong a hint of spring as ours does today." My weather does not. Maine is eight degrees above zero and drowning in snow. Mostly I do not wish I were living in New Jersey, but March in Maine makes a person want to be anywhere but here. It is the worst month in the calendar. We imagine spring, and all we get is another foot of snow. Meanwhile, the chickadees sing their little two-note spring song. This only makes us gloomier.

Now is the moment for a pithy quotation about New Jersey, but my 1939 edition of Bartlett's has no entries for "New Jersey" in the index. It does, however, have entries for "New Deal" (Herbert Hoover makes a decimal-point joke), "New England" (the oddness of its hermits), "New Hampshire" ("Anything I can say about New Hampshire / Will serve almost as well about Vermont"--I give you three chances to guess that author), "New Niobe" (she of the "clasp-ed hands"), "New Testament" (nobody has anything interesting to say), "New World" (ditto), "New Year" (it "waits / Beyond to-morrow's mystic gates"), "New York" (James B. Dollard is sick of it), and "New Zealand" (metaphorically equals a place so dull that you might even find yourself taking an interest in the Catholic church). (In unrelated but possibly synchronous news, my copy of Bartlett's once belonged to the United Methodist Retirement Center Library, which is also not in New Jersey.) So because I cannot offer you any snappy New Jersey one-liners from the early half of the twentieth century, I will instead share a few 1970s-era memory snapshots:

Hot sun, and acres of red dust edged with poison ivy. A sweaty orthodox rabbi clings awkwardly to the back of my uncle's combine, in hopes of making sure that all of this wheat chopping is kosher. I have my doubts. His glasses look pretty dirty.

Pizza is called tomato pie. Peaches actually grow on trees, and my aunt makes ice cream from them. My cousin throws up in the hallway after we get dizzy from dancing to Village People 45s. Someone, somewhere, is smoking a cigar. I suspect my father.

Grandparents are Republicans. Parents are Democrats. I don't know what aunts and uncles are. There is arguing. Meanwhile, the kids inspect the Reader's Digest Condensed Books and wish someone would turn down the air conditioning.

Scrapple tastes bad but you have to eat it anyway.

During after-dinner card games, the Republicans and Democrats stop arguing, start drinking martinis and highballs, and energetically josh each other. The kids invent ever louder and more elaborate games in the back room until the dishes in the jelly cupboard start to rattle, an uncle appears demanding decorum and threatening to whale a few tails, and the game is temporarily reduced to hisses and giggles. Repeat till midnight.

I don't read many other blogs. I don't know why. My habit is to make frequent repetitive visits to a very small number of familiar sites rather than to seek out novel and unfamiliar excitements. I suppose, given my rereading habits, this pattern is no big surprise.

But one of the blogs I regularly check is the very first blog I ever started reading. In fact, it's the blog the made me think that I might be able to manage one myself. It's called Monkeysquirrel, and it functions as the occasional notebook of Scott Hill, a writer, reader, illustrator, photographer, and extraordinarily good high school English teacher whom I met at my first Frost Place Conference on Poetry & Teaching.

I visited his blog yesterday, and this is what I read. Once you've read it too, you may understand why I keep going back.

Managed to complete [George Eliot's novel] Adam Bede this weekend in a torrid session of reading during a rare extended period of silence at home. And the thing is so dang good. Reader, I cried. I'm not sure I was quite ready for the turn the plot takes after Hetty's fate is resolved, but it's still done so beautifully you just don't care. And to drag out the suspense a little Eliot even parades the whole cast of the Poyser farm out for one last ensemble piece at a dinner; we get to meet the bit players in mini-portraits at the table. I had been wondering why we hadn't seen more of the common laborers on the farm, since Eliot seems to love training the lens on them so much. I wish she didn't wait so long to do it here. But at least this last supper scene lets us savor for one last time the phenomenon that is Mrs. Poyser, who might be, of all the Eliot characters I can remember, the one with the quickest, most biting, most creative wit. And then there is a wedding and then it is done.

I'm in that rosy period where you remember the book and the characters and you can think about it actively and productively and even authoritatively if you are in such a mood. It won't be long, though, before the particulars will fade and I will remember only broad outlines of things and then I will forget even that and only remember that I loved the experience of reading the book. It will turn into pure feeling. Hopefully, I will have room in my life for a re-read by then.

Scott, if you're reading this, I hope you don't mind that I've quoted you here. For me, it is a gift simply to know that at least one other person on the planet is living in and alongside Adam Bede with this sympathy, this openness to heartache. Thank you.

First Monday after school vacation, plus no hoped-for snow day, plus physics homework not finished till 1 a.m., equals two crabby boys to shoehorn onto the bus, but one is crabbier than than the other.

"And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel / And shining morning face, creeping like a snail / Unwillingly to school." Shakespeare, As You Like It.

How is it that WS can be right about every little thing there is? And how is it that the more I read his work, the more right he gets?

I fixed the Clark Gallery and Frost Place links below. I don't know why they weren't working, but now they are.

Next Saturday, March 5, Tom's photo show opens at Clark Gallery in Lincoln, Massachusetts. He is one of only two artists featured in this large show, so please do stand around and eat cheese cubes with us if you can.

Baron tells me that applications are coming in for this summer's Frost Place Conference on Poetry & Teaching and that it looks as if numerous alumni have already registered for the session. How entertaining it will be to see you all again! In the meantime, I've been spending a lot of time with visiting poet Teresa Carson's newest manuscript. I can tell you right now: if you're coming to her reading, you are in for a wondrous surprise.

As you can see, my list of upcoming events is starting to swell. If you live near any of those venues, and you have bright ideas about other places in your area that might host a reading, a book talk, or a classroom visit, please do let me know. It would be good to make full use of that tank of gas.

A bright blue Saturday morning, with much snow waiting to be shoveled.

Downstairs the dishwasher is peacefully churning soapy water among the soiled plates, the washing machine is thumping a clot of towels, the refrigerator is cooling the eggs my hens have laid, and in the cellar my canned tomatoes show every sign of holding out till spring. It is a housewife's dream.

I might even plant some onion seeds this weekend. That's how blue this sky is, and how not blue it is making me feel. First, however, there is that shoveling chore to conquer and a co-shoveling chore-boy to rouse from his squalor of blankets. And first, I have to share these lines from Woolf's The Years, which are the kinds of lines that I have spent my whole life trying to write.

The cold winter's night was almost black. It was like looking into the hollow of a dark-blue stone.

Dinner tonight: A romantic two-person meal: bacon from a Harmony pig alongside scrambled eggs from my own noisy hens. Consumed while sitting on the couch watching a hockey game with a 13-year-old boy. He'll probably suggest an old Star Trek episode for dessert.

The dawn is gray, overcast, heavy. At any moment flakes will begin to sift down onto the icy driveway, the exhausted trees, my filthy car. And then it will snow and keep snowing and have been snowing all the rest of the long day.

Yesterday I made chicken soup and watched three kinds of television with Teenage Head Cold Monster until he finally fell asleep on the couch. Today I will edit, and stare aimlessly out the window at the snow, and worry about the sheaf of rejection letters I've just received, and then forget about them, and wonder who in the world is thinking of me, which may sound like a plea for a comment from you but isn't really. It's more like: do I exist or not? do you exist or not? are we chainsawed stumps in a mangled forest that is slowly vanishing under the snow? or will those sharp crocus leaves poke up through the frozen slush after all? Just the usual dreamy late-winter rhetoric. You know.