I know this is obvious, but I'm still always amazed at how restorative a full night's sleep can be. I went out to write last night, came home to visit a bit with Tom, then sank into a deep, unbroken slumber, filled with dreams about slowly riding a rusty tandem bike by myself through what appeared to be a giant cornfield. These were singularly un-anxious dreams: just me, poking along on a barely held-together bike, without any particular goal or intent. Possibly this could be a metaphor for writing poems. Possibly it could be a metaphor for me. Either way, I'll take it over those dreadful guilt-shame-worry dreams.

This morning: recycling to the curb, sheets in the washer, exercise class on the floor of my study. I'll edit, mow grass, pull carrots and leeks, cook a French-style pork roast. And I'd really, really like to dig some first drafts out of my notebook. I haven't worked on a poem since the before-Covid times, and I wonder if I still know how.

This weekend will be extremely busy: I'll be overseeing a Frost Place zoom class on Saturday afternoon (a teachers' session on using the Poetry Out Loud program creatively in the classroom, led by Holly Smith). On Sunday I'll be driving upstate for a reading in Wayne. So I feel okay about stealing some of today for myself.

Outside, it's 39 degrees, our coldest morning yet. Summer is fading fast.

I admit to being exhausted: yesterday's teaching gig was my first full day in public since I'd gotten sick, and it was sandwiched by two long drives. But it was also buttered by friends who babied me, and my students were a pure delight. This was day 1, when most of them were meeting for the first time, when the program and I were still suspicious unknowns. And yet from the get-go they leaped into the work. They chattered intently about poems, they wrote searching first drafts, they bubbled over with excitement about each other's poems, about just being in the room. Talk, talk, talk! Delight abounded; they were so happy to be there.

In other words, the magic continues. I am relieved and I am excited.

* * *

Today I'll pull myself back into regular life. I've got a massive stack of laundry to deal with, various desk errands to do, plus the eternal editing lying in wait. My hope is to feel rested and focused enough to go out to write this evening, though I slept badly last night, so we'll see. I really did think I had mostly recovered from Covid, but my friends up north thought differently, and maybe they are right. I'm not quite sure what regular me is anymore.

While I was away, I got notice that the Maine Arts Journal has published a collection of poems, curated by Betsy Sholl, written by several members of our Thursday salon. Betsy's essay explains how how our writing group has evolved, and the poems are illustrated by a few of Tom's photos. Maybe you'd like to take a look.

This afternoon, after working and getting a haircut, I'll head up north for tomorrow's opening day at Monson Arts. I'm excited, also a little nerved up. A new class is always an unknown. But it will be good to be back in the room.

The leaves are barely starting to turn in Portland, but I expect they're further along up north. Tomorrow morning, on my way to class, I'll drive down the gravel road, past Kingsbury Pond, under its shimmer of morning mist, and I'll feel my heart clutch, as it always does, at the beauty, at the loss I'll never get over . . . oh, the days when this place used to be my place.

But at least I have a seat at my friends' table, a bed under the eaves. At least I can come back.

And now, once again, I have a classroom without restrictions. I teach what I want to teach, and how I want to teach. It is hard to explain what a gift this is at the high school level. High school is not only controlled by curriculum but also driven by test expectations, and this is true in both public and private settings. A private school might have more scope for college-like seminars, but it is also under extreme success pressure, that external goal-oriented hammer that is anathema to art. The kids I'll be working with won't be dealing with such professional-class demands but with the endemic political and cultural issues of rural isolation. School is a hard road. And meanwhile, all students, wherever they find themselves, are a pressure cooker of feelings.

I woke up this morning to learn that I've got a poem up at Vox Populi: "The Unicorn Is in Captivity and No Longer Dead." This is a piece that arose from one of the communal writing prompts at my Thursday-night salon. Now I can't recall exactly what the prompt was, but I do know that it forced me to push together a number of unlike things, and, voila, the unicorn story surfaced.

It's a treat to wake up on a workaday Monday and remember that once I wrote poems. I've got a lot of things to get done today, and few of them concern poetry. Instead, I need to do housework and get the groceries in and finish editing a chapter and otherwise prep myself for heading north tomorrow afternoon. It's going to take some time for me to get back into the swing of these northern trips. Plus, shed construction is not conducive to weekend housework, though I did get the bathrooms cleaned and the air conditioner stowed and various harvest things accomplished. Ergo, here I am, on messy Monday, trying to snatch together all of the frayed ends.

On the bright side, two weeks out from Covid, I am feeling pretty good. Brain fog has lifted, energy is back, sinuses are recovering, and I am basically a regular person again. And on Wednesday I'll be back in the classroom, with a new batch of kids and a mandate to do whatever I want. We'll be looking at poems by Dorianne Laux and Vera Pavlova, we'll be talking about what the students want to learn, we'll be discovering how a studio classroom differs from an academic one, we'll be figuring out how to trust and leap. It will be thrilling.

Another cool morning . . . I think they will all be cool from now on. But we haven't yet needed to turn on the furnace, and the bedroom window still stays open all night. And last night I didn't even start a fire in the wood stove: the day had been so sunny that the house stayed warm well into the evening. Plus, I was baking bread, roasting green tomatoes, roasting eggplant, making red beans and rice, so there was a lot of ambient coziness.

Slowly I am whittling away the summer garden. Yesterday I tore out the peppers and the basil and harvested what will probably be the last eggplants and cucumbers, though I'll leave those plants up for a few more days and see what happens. I've got a few more pickings of beans, but by next weekend they'll likely be done. The groundhog has decimated my fall crops--kale, chard, lettuce, cilantro, and parsley are alive but terrible, and the bitten-up fennel is weedy and tough. But I've still got handsome leeks and green onions, a second sowing of carrots to harvest, and a good-looking batch of arugula in the cold frame. And the marigolds, my favorite garnish flower, are blooming bravely. Things could be worse.

It wasn't a great harvest year, thanks to drought and that greedy woodchuck and my father's illness, but in the freezer I've got red tomato sauce, green tomato sauce, green beans, peas, corn (from the farmers' market), blueberries (picked up north), peppers, kale, and pesto. I've got freshly dried cooking herbs--dill, thyme, tarragon, sage, oregano. I've got flowers and grasses drying for winter vases. That's not a bad haul for a teeny-tiny city garden.

Yesterday, before dinner, I sat outside breaking up kindling while Tom finished cutting notches into the boards he'll be siding with today. The boards are cedar, and cedar is ideal fire-starter, so we are saving every sawed scrap for the stove. As I filled bucket after bucket with slips of wood, I thought again about how many years we've been at this: the two of us, squirreling away in tandem, hustling against winter.

It's a cold morning, 45 degrees, and the winds from Hurricane Fiona are rippling along the coast. All night long the air rushed and sighed, and this morning the dog walkers clutch caps and and coffee cups, as the dogs lift their muzzles into the breeze.

I had a restless night, then slept a bit late, and am now trying to tamp down a headache but mostly feeling pretty much okay. I've got to work this morning, doing a zoom session for the Maine Poets Society, but I'm hoping to get outside eventually and tear down another patch of worn-out garden.

I did my exercise class yesterday, went for a walk with my neighbor, mowed grass, and did not take a nap; it seems that my energy is climbing back to its pre-Covid level, despite lingering fog, taste, and sinus issues. And even they are better than they were. At my desk I prepped for the Monson class, whittled down the editing stack, worked on Frost Place scheduling; and today I'll be talking poems all morning. I'd say I'm 90 percent myself again.

Of course there's the sad news about Hilary Mantel. Those Cromwell novels are among the best historical fiction ever written, and I feel very lucky to have stumbled into them, and to have learned so much from Mantel about the subtleties of setting and dialogue, and how to use them as portals.

In a couple of weeks I'll turn 58, creeping closer and closer toward my next decade. At 70 Mantel was not so much older than I am: with a body of work, and I have a body of work, and she died in the midst of writing, and likely that's how I will die too. And I think, Godspeed, that's not such a bad way to go.

I made my first foray into the social whirl last night, with an evening among my poet friends. I was very glad to see them, though it was harder than I expected: my poor brain struggled to switch back and forth among conversation threads, and responding to prompts was also difficult . . . not unproductive, but tiring. Anyway, I did it, and then slept well last night, and am now feeling relatively peppy--ready to haul recycling to the curb and wash sheets and such.

All day yesterday the rain poured down. I think we got two inches, after another inch earlier in the week. It is a relief to see the drought begin to lift, even so late in the season, and I am hoping to walk out this morning in search of mushrooms.

In the meantime, I am sitting here with my cup of coffee and noticing that, finally, it doesn't taste terrible. Maybe my Covid-damaged taste buds are beginning to return to normal.

And just knowing that I have a couple of scrawls in my notebook is making me feel good. They're likely irredeemable as poems, but they're a new beginning, and that's worth a lot to me.