Saturday morning, 5 a.m., and I am gearing myself for the weekend. Two days of intensity: writing and talking and sharing new work; and at these moments, just before they happen, I always wonder if I am up to the challenge. In truth, I know it will all be fine. Merely, I'm in the wobble-hour, when my brain  encourages me to panic and I have to talk it off the bridge. I expect you have those hours too.

Yesterday I finished a big stack of editing and sent it off to the press. I vacuumed and dusted and washed floors and cleaned bathrooms. I started reading John Cheever's novel The Wapshot Chronicle and I worked on a poem draft and I talked to my friend Donna about our children's-book reading project. I did three loads of laundry. I poached quinces in syrup, prepping them for the tart I'll make at some point this weekend. I made meatballs and watched the torrential rains and winds whip the leaves from the trees.

And now I'll spend my weekend in a chair, in front of a screen, talking with a dozen people about the Odyssey. The housework-wordwork continuum. What a peculiar life to lead.

 Last night I went to my second session at that Thursday-evening poetry salon I told you about a couple of weeks ago. Maybe salon isn't quite the right word, but I can't think of a better one--a group of regulars who gather in the same place each week to write, eat, talk, and share new work. Would you call that a salon? Or would we need 18th-century hair to make that word work?

Anyway, I wrote a draft I was thrilled with, and came home so excited I could hardly sleep. Maybe this group is actually going to be a source for new poems in addition to being a cheerful social event. That would be such a bonus. Another nice thing: having a night away from meal chores and knowing Tom likes it when I venture out, even if he has to eat dinner alone. He's sweet that way.

So this morning I have a new vibrating draft, and sort of a day off. I do need to finish up the end of an editing chapter and do some class prep, but then I'm going to switch over to house stuff. I'll be teaching all weekend, so I need to get the housework done early, and I have six quinces to make into some kind of tart or dessert, and now I have a poem to revise too. Good thing it will be raining all day.

I'm hugging my new poem to my heart. I don't know why it felt so good to make.  But I do know why it felt so good to read it aloud and have the room explode into laughter and recognition. I need to make sure that doesn't become the drug.

Round about 3 p.m. yesterday, I suddenly wilted--that's best word description I can find for my shot reaction . . . though, of course, I have no idea which vaccine I was reacting to. I was not sick or incapacitated. I cooked dinner and stayed awake until my normal bedtime. Merely, I wilted. 

But this morning, after a solid night's sleep, I'm back to normal: girded to edit footnotes, excited about my midday haircut. Plus, a second well known poet has enthusiastically agreed to blurb my book, so how could I not feel peppy?

Yesterday, despite my growing indisposition, I finished editing the bulk of a chapter, went for a long walk with my neighbor, and made black-olive yeast rolls and chocolate pudding and enchiladas. Today I'm hoping for less cooking and more writing; I haven't allowed myself to take any writing time lately, and I need to turn on that faucet. I feel as if I've been writing well, when I've had the chance to do it, but I've been so overbooked with work that I've had to deliberately squelch myself. I think the reactions of these kind poet-blurbers are maybe reminding me that I should stop doing that.

I went out yesterday evening to get a flu shot, and came home with a flu shot and a Covid booster. I didn't even know I was eligible for a booster yet, but the nurse was enthusiastic, so now I have two band-aids instead of one. So far, no untoward side-effects, other than a slightly sore shot arm. But if I collapse later, I  will have plenty of couches and tea to sustain me.

The weather was gorgeous yesterday . . . bright sun, low 60s--a fine day to stroll out into the neighborhood and be surprised by the world. The other day I passed two masons fixing someone's front stairs while also listening to recipes on the radio. That is the kind of surprise I like.

It was a good day, mostly, even though it was mostly a desk-work day. Round about noon, I got an email from the poet I'd asked to write a blurb for my new book, and it was so generous that I started to cry. I never know how to handle these things; I am always overwhelmed.

Now it's raining a little outside, and I am getting ready to hoist myself into another routine day, but something, I'm sure, will make me jump up and say, "What? Wait a minute! What is this?"  Something always does.

The other night, for instance, I was so enchanted by my own warm house that I couldn't stop taking pictures of it. The Alcott House may be plain and unfinished and have a history of electrical craziness, but she does have many sweet charms. 

Yesterday morning started off on a much more ridiculous footing than expected. Just as I was getting ready to start my exercise class, the phone rang and Tom sheepishly admitted that he had locked his keys in his truck at the hardware store and could I come rescue him. So I got dressed and threaded my way downtown through rush-hour traffic and construction stoppages, and there was Tom, sitting on the steps of the hardware store, and I gave him my key to his truck and . . . it wouldn't open the locks. So back we went to the house, to dig out his other spare key, and back we jaunted to the hardware store, and this time Success! and we could head off into our days. Though mine, at this point, did not involve an exercise class.

With that foolishness, we really felt like we were living it up, Monday-wise, and it was nice to have the silly memory to distract me as I plunged into my very-non-silly editing stack. In other good news, Paul tested negative for Covid and he is out of quarantine . . . I know I have not been updating you on the boy's glum week: no symptoms but a positive test, so he was trapped in his apartment for 10 days. Also, I finished reading those contest mss, and that is a big item to cross off my list. 

So today I'll try again with the exercise class, and stagger on into the editing, and boil chicken stock, and go to a flu-shot clinic, and read Margaret Atwood and P. L. Travers, and deal with some Frost Place things, and maybe rake another batch of leaves, and long wistfully for a haircut because with the crazy bad hair I have, my Thursday appointment feels way too far away.

This dithery letter to you could be a metaphor for how my hair looks: flyaway, and featuring strange looping curls like muskox horns.

Writing as hair style. With that notion, one might imagine Henry James with hair like Fabio's instead of being bald as an ostrich egg.

I guess I'll have to embrace my wide-awake-at-4:30-a.m. issues, as clearly it's going to take me a while to adjust to this time change. Apparently other people's bodies allow them to wallow for that extra stolen hour, but mine does not. So I am greeting a very early Monday morning, here in my couch corner, and hoping that I won't start collapsing into a nap at noon.

I did get that black cake made yesterday, and a batch of bread, and a quart of preserved lemons; and I dusted and vacuumed and washed floors and cleaned bathrooms; and then I spent the afternoon under a couch blanket dozing through an extremely boring football game between teams I don't care about. It was a fine way to punctuate a frenetic weekend, and maybe the football coma will take the edge off this too-early morning.

And now the week looms. I have only four mss left to read for the poetry contest. I'm prepped and ready for the Homer class, and my amended poetry manuscript is with the publisher. The editing stack is still massive, but I'm seeing some light. I've started rereading Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, one of the best novels ever written about housework, and I'm thinking about how to use my dream notebook as a source for self-writing prompts. I've figured out how to tenderize raw kale as a sandwich and salad green so that I can postpone the dreaded moment when I have to start buying store lettuce again. There are still piles of chores I can't seem to get done (scrubbing the refrigerator, washing windows, reorganizing basement shelves, switching out winter and summer clothes in my drawers), but at least the wood is lugged and Tom's work clothes are clean, and I have Margaret Atwood to help me muse dryly about my raw red knuckles and the alluring scent of ironed cotton.

I am up way too early for a Sunday morning because my body believes that it's 6 a.m. even though my phone says it's 5 a.m. Oh, well. I do have a lot to get done today, so maybe getting up too early will turn out to be a good idea. It's black cake day, and also grocery shopping day and house cleaning day and ciabatta-baking day, but at least it's not yard work day too. I managed to get all of that done yesterday. I dug up dahlias, and tore out all of the frosted annuals, and cut down the peonies and spurge and other tired perennials, and reorganized the shed, and put away stakes and hoses and garden decorations, and carried the freezable garden supplies into the basement, and planted wood hyacinths in the Hill Country, and raked leaves, and probably I did something else I can't remember: but the upshot is, let it snow. I am ready for you now.

Thus, today I can turn my attention to house and oven. I'll be teaching all of next weekend so I cannot procrastinate with the black cake. And I'd like to get the housework under control so that I can focus on my desk work tomorrow morning . . . that whole other kettle of obligation-fish.

Yes, I am feeling kind of breathless, but not overwhelmed exactly. I was thinking yesterday, as I was hoicking hoses into the shed and heaving dahlia roots into baskets and otherwise doing the grunt jobs of late autumn, about those exercise classes I've been torturing myself with: all that arm and leg and core work . . . really, they are keeping me in training for my own life. It is good to be 57 years old and still able to spend an entire day lifting and lugging, without any particular after-effects. I don't care if I ever run a mile, but I want to be able to shovel and rake forever.

In that way, I'm very like my father, who turns 81 today, and who still shovels and rakes and digs and plants and harvests, and scares us all to death by chainsawing and climbing ladders. But that is his life, his life's work, his daily rite. He wants to stay in harness.