Outside, our neighbor's cat, Jack, is waiting impatiently for Ruckus to emerge from a bush or behind a garage. The two have become sudden friends, though Ruckus is, unfortunately, the bossy overbearing pal and Jack is the humbler, more anxious one. He is constantly peering through our doors, wondering if Ruckus can come out and play. Meanwhile, Ruckus pretends he doesn't notice or jumps out at Jack from around corners.

Still, as cat relationships go, it's a friendship, and I am amused by the way they crouch under bird feeders together, prowl among the garlic fronds, play-bat in the grass, and recline tail to tail pretending to ignore one another.

In other dull news: supposedly my car will be fixed today--hurray for transmission #3!--and on Friday I should be able to fetch the boy from college as planned. He's halfway through now, which seems impossible. Didn't he just leave home yesterday? Do all parents feel this way?

Spring is such an odd season in northern New England. It waffles back and forth between winter and and summer but rarely settles into any stretch of sweet moderation. I recall the springs in Philadelphia, where I went to college, as long and intense, an affectionate respite before the summer's humidity kicked in. But spring here is hard to depend on. Yesterday was hot; today will be 15 degrees cooler; the soil is drying out, but the nights are chilly. The small plants are struggling, and my transplants are peaked. No amount of watering seems to cheer them up.

Oh, well. At least the clothes are drying well, and I had the pleasure this morning of unfolding a crisp, clean kitchen towel smelling of air and sun.

Now that my classes are over, I am starting to reconfigure my days. My current editing projects all involve poetry and fiction, and now I have to allocate time to reading faculty collections and writing introductions for Frost Place poets. My college son will be coming home for a few weeks, and the patterns of our household will shift accordingly. The schedule says summer, even if the weather does not.

Yesterday, at the request of a kind poet, I sorted through my Chestnut Ridge poems and submitted a batch for the journal she edits. Most, if not all, have already appeared here on the blog, but otherwise they have gotten no press.

It's a kind gesture, and it adds to my welling hope for the collection and its poems . . . and I mean hope in a complicated yet grateful way. Nothing will change for me acclaim-wise; that's not what I'm trying to say. More, I'm basking in a sense of grace, a sort of aroma of celebration from people I admire and respect. That's an awkward metaphor, but I can't think of a better one. And anyway, I'm an awkward person. I'll embrace my ungainliness.

My email inbox was filled with sadness this morning--friends in the midst of change, struggles with age and despair, dissatisfaction with the paths of their lives. So now, on this dim post-holiday morning, I am feeling a bit like blotter paper, damp and stained with spilled ink. I wish I could be helpful, but all I know how to say is "Yes, it's hard," and "Keep talking to me." Perhaps those are the only possible responses anyway.

I'll be back at my desk this morning, copyediting a poetry collection, sorting poems for an invited submission, hoping to hear from the transmission guy about my car.

But the weather will be warm; I'll be able to open all of the windows; the cardinal will sing and sing in the dense maple shade. The photo at the top of this blog is the view up into my tree cathedral. Below is packed dirt and ugliness, but look up and there is glory. That description sounds like a silly metaphor for something or other, but in this case I speak the simple truth.

Yesterday may have been cold and dank, but I still hung my very first load of Portland laundry out on my new clotheslines. Of course it's still hanging there today because there was no way those towels could dry quickly in this weather. I don't care: I was happy to look out the window this morning and see them twitching in the vague breeze. I can hardly believe that I haven't hung laundry on the line for more than a year.

In other surprising news, Tom and I saw a pileated woodpecker in our yard. That was a shock: who would have expected to see the pterodactyl here in the city? In Harmony spring always meant cold laundry and the scream of the pileated in the clearing, so I take his appearance as a friendly omen . . . though Tom takes it, more sensibly, as an omen that there might be something rotten in our trees.

We did manage to buy a trimmer yesterday, a battery-powered one light enough for me to handle easily, so today I'll finish whacking down the mess of goldenrod and other assorted weeds along the stone wall. Hidden under them are few sad patches of lilies and at least one frail little peony. But basically I'm just going to have to start over with that eyesore.

Today's on-the-couch reading: Margaret Drabble's The Witch of Exmoor. Today's dinner: something involving leftovers from last night's chicken kabobs. Plus bread baking and more lovely laundry hanging, rereading my manuscript, grass mowing, a long walk, and afternoon parade noise filtering among the trees and houses.

It will be a cool green Sunday here in Portland. We need a day-long rain but I don't think we'll be getting any. So I'll spend some time this morning rearranging my irrigation hoses, and then I'll run all of the errands I didn't run yesterday.

As it turned out, going nowhere felt like the right thing to do. I sat on the couch and finished Far from the Madding Crowd. I did some desultory laundry. I listened to baseball. I worked on the acknowledgments page for Chestnut Ridge. I studied recommendations for battery-powered string trimmers.

I've been thinking about the Hardy novel, of course. It struck me last night, as I was eating dinner, that a great theme of Far from the Madding Crowd is the power of self-respect. Gabriel, though cast down, never loses it. Bathsheba loses it and regains it. Boldwood and Troy lose it permanently and spectacularly. Hardy makes clear distinctions between notions of self-satisfaction (which everyone but Gabriel exhibits at some point) and self-respect (which only Gabriel steadily maintains). The book is not so much a love story but almost an Austen-like examination of marriage as a contract in which both parties contribute value to the partnership. In this case, niceties of class play no role in the matter; the balance point is usefulness. Bathsheba may be impulsive, but she's an excellent farmer. Gabriel, too, is an excellent farmer, and his steadiness balances her flightiness. There was no such balance her in relationships with Boldwood and Troy.

[If you haven't read the book, then this nattering is meaningless. I could apologize. Or you could read it.]

According to the thermometer, the temperature was 86 in Portland yesterday. Yet here in this neighborhood of enormous maples, the weather was perfect . . . a warm wind, dense green shade, a torrent of birdsong with a trickle of city noise beyond. Even our ugly backyard had its charms, and the cat and I enjoyed an hour there with a glass of wine, two lawn chairs, and a Thomas Hardy novel. Tom, for his part, spent the evening tooling around Casco Bay in his boss's boat, so he had an equally fine summer celebration.

But enough of this weather talk: you are probably wondering how you got so lucky to know a woman who's gone through three transmissions in the space of a month. After much driving and fretting, the repair guys managed to get my car to replicate Wednesday's scary moment in Waterville. Flaw in the replacement transmission, they agreed. So now another is on order, with arrival scheduled for Tuesday or Wednesday. The previous transmission was a low-mileage used part with a three-year warranty, and this will be another one like it . . . which is to say, I won't be paying for anything. But really: this story is getting silly.

I'm so grateful for your good cheer about Chestnut Ridge. Already two poets have agreed to write blurbs for the cover, and that is a huge weight off my mind because I hate to ask people to write blurbs. I'm considering cover photos, starting to finalize acknowledgments, and thus far it's all been a pleasure. This book has been floating for so long.

Today: more warm weather, some thunderstorms, baseball on the radio. Transplanting chard and bok choi. Acquiring a cucumber plant. Buying a string trimmer to deal with the mess of weeds along the stone wall. Best of all: putting up a clothesline.

I am so happy to announce that Deerbrook Editions will be publishing Chestnut Ridge in 2019. I am also relieved and grateful. You know how long this book has been hunting for a home--so long that I thought it might never find a landing place.

The weight off my shoulders is significant. It's funny how heavy an unpublished manuscript can become.

Now, this morning, as I stand at my desk in my green-shadowed study, waiting for the heat of the day to kick in, I am also feeling a sense of quietude that is linked, as so many things are, to my loss of the Harmony land. Although Chestnut Ridge is not set in Harmony, it was the last big project that I completed there. All of it was written at my desk in our bedroom, up the steep stairs, next to the window overlooking the autumn olive hedge and the overgrown mock-orange. I will never write another word in that room, yet every book I have published was born there.

The next manuscript, Songs about Women and Men, is a transitional collection: some poems from Harmony, some from Portland. Somehow that makes everything different, at least to me.