Up, finally, after a congested coughy snorey night infested with unpleasant dreams. Bleck.

I'll be back on the road today--teaching in Bangor all afternoon, then spending the night with a northcountry friend. This head cold is making me stupid; I hope it won't show too much during class.

Tiny blue scylla is beginning to bloom in my front garden. The garlic shoots are sturdy. Daffodils are pointing along the house-edge. Tulip leaves unfold, uncurl. A dim haze of green flutters in the roots of the brown grass.

A big short-tailed possum scuttles across the backyard and into the neighbor's garage.

I sit in my red bathrobe in a darkened living room, drinking black coffee. My sinuses swell against my cheekbones. My nose feels like an elephant seal's. Fortunately it does not yet look like one.

The squirrel-proof clothesline is up. Now I just need to wait for a few rainy days to pass through, and then I can celebrate my inaugural spring washload. In the meantime, there's always housework to do and garden paths to lay. I'm feeling somewhat squelched under the pressure of a brand-new head cold, so I'm not organizing my energies too well. Plus, I need to drive to Bangor tomorrow morning, and then teach all afternoon, and then be a tolerable houseguest all evening. Here's hoping that the head cold stays home.

Anyway, today: classwork, and then yoga (if I can breathe through my nose), and then maybe that aforementioned garden path, if the rain behaves itself. Last spring, as a quick measure, I used some old floor tiles as stepping stones in my new beds, but they are ugly and now crumbling, so I'm slowly replacing them with stones from the reclaimed side yard . . . an early spring chore before the plants start taking up space and time.

After a long weekend of late nights, early mornings, and two time-zone switches, I think I've managed to reset my internal clock, though it did require sleeping through the alarm. Now I'm groggily peering though the downstairs windows . . .  thinking mostly about coffee but also a little about George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, which I'm rereading because the volume was the perfect size to bring on an airplane and also because I adore it, though lately I've given up rereading the ending because it upsets me too much.

I'm back on the classwork train--online poetry class in full swing, Saturday's essay workshop to prep, next Friday's poetry workshop on the horizon--but I have a brief editing hiatus. Yesterday afternoon I went out into the barren muddy back yard and began to mark the borders of perimeter beds--using old bricks, broken limbs, rocks. The future beds are layered with last fall's leaves, and now I am beginning to sprinkle them with the compost I've been saving all winter. My plan is to sow shade wildflowers and plant some annual seedlings as I gradually build the beds into viable ground for perennials and shrubs. I can't do much more back there until Tom gets the deck built, but something is better than nothing. Meanwhile, scylla is budding in the front gardens, the first lily sprouts are up in the side garden, and I am getting excited about my second spring here. What I need to do today is buy squirrel-proof clothesline. No more clothes in the mud. I've had enough.

On Monday, our last full day in Chicago, we went to the zoo and the conservatory, ate Ethiopian food, played pool, listened to a jazz quintet at the Green Mill, once a favorite hangout of Al Capone. It was one of those slow busy days, filled with long saunters, watching and wondering, getting cold and getting warm, walking first with one person and then another, a friendly desultory ease. My son's partner is as simple to love as he is.

And then yesterday, after riding on every kind of transportation except for boats, magic carpets, and dragonflies, we finally bumbled up our Portland back stoop, greeted our annoyed cat, ate dinner from our understocked fridge, and watched a Hitchcock movie under our couch blanket. The visit to Chicago was so sweet; I cried, as always, when I parted from my son; but being home is its own denouement, and it should be.

Sunday in Chicago: Blueberry pancakes accidentally spiced with hot sauce. A walk through a foggy glass city. An invisible neighbor practicing the tuba. Teeny-tiny dioramas of the ancient Egyptian embalming process. The best banh mi sandwich I've ever eaten. An addled man urinating against a giant mural of Frieda Kahlo. An elegant glossy theater containing a play about angry drunken steelworkers. Spatters of cold rain. A family at midnight in a dive bar, drinking surprisingly good beer and shouting happily at each other over a dreadful jukebox soundtrack of death metal.

Monday in Chicago: Me getting up too early because I have to work. Wishing for more coffee. Listening to traffic and trains. Watching the clouds scud over the churches. Blue sky.

After getting up at 3:45 a.m. and subsequently spending many hours spent sitting in tight plane seats on the tarmac and not going anywhere (because of broken bathrooms, another plane hogging the gate, etc.), we finally managed to arrive in Chicago. And now, after a giant taco dinner and a long night's sleep, I am staring out of my older son's third-floor into a wilderness of roofs, facades, steeples, scaffolding, crosses, mysterious metal things that might be old cisterns, and beyond them the glass and steel monsters of downtown. The flatness of the landscape is apparent even from up here; the view through the wavy window glass almost seems to be two-dimensional.

I don't know what we'll be doing today, but apparently there will be big waves on Lake Michigan, so maybe we'll go look at that. There's been talk of the aquarium, museums, a plant conservatory. Tonight we're going to the theater to see Lynn Nottage's Sweat, which I've looking forward to seeing for a long time. If you haven't heard about this play, you should check it out. My younger son, the apprentice director, calls Nottage the best playwright working today. He's quite excited we're going to get to see her work onstage. I wish he could be here with us.

My desk is clearing, thank goodness. Just a few more project-threads to snip, and then I can leave for Chicago with a cleanish conscience.

I appreciate all of your enthusiasm about my new gig. The funny thing, of course, is that what for me is great money is, for real employees, spit in a bucket. However, I refuse to let my spirits be dampened by comparisons. In my world getting paid for anything is not so easy.

Today I'll do some online-class prep, write an intro for the student poems completed during my recent high school residency, go to yoga class and the grocery store, watch a little tournament basketball, wash clothes, pack suitcases, read a Trollope novel, take a walk. It will be a mild-mannered day, unlike tomorrow. If you don't hear from me anytime soon, don't worry. But I'll try to check in by Sunday.