Settling in and Finally Making It Up to the Cats
Two readings this week, one on the North Shore at Endicott College in the cold windy downpour. Right on the shores of an arm of the Atlantic. Got home about 10:30 to six hungry cats.I’ve finally recovered from the nasty bug we both picked up on our Midwestern trek. I still cough now and then, but I’m getting my energy back and have returned to work writing. Three poems this week and a short story. Thursday I gave a reading for a women’s event at the Zeiterion theater in New Bedford. Many New Bedford streets have no street signs, so we drove in frantic circles trying to find the location. Finally a security guard eating a sandwich in a deli helped us. We bought some sandwiches there as a thank you and they turned out to be excellent – our supper.There were at least two hundred people at the reading. Four local women poets read before me. It was a great crowd, responsive, laughing at the right places and responding to the poems. They even bought a bunch of books afterward. We got home after eleven. I thought the cats would be angry but they were all so happy to see us that they just crawled all over us purring. We traveled so much recently, I am feeling guilty toward them.It’s gotten much colder. I am still hauling woolens out and putting lighter clothes away. It was warm so long this fall that I never got around to it in October. We’re putting the gardens to sleep. Woody got a truckload of manure yesterday. He brought in the last four hot peppers – cayennes – and a big beautiful pumpkin he found in the hedge where it had been hidden until the leaves fell. We still have kale, Chinese cabbage, leeks and Brussels spouts. Woody brought in the last of the red cabbages last night and I cooked them for supper with red onions, turkey kielbasa, apples, red wine and raisins, served with brown rice.Speaking of red, it has been ages since there was anything red to wear. I love red and have been looking for a red sweater and a red dress. I think I may finally have found them in a catalog from England, inexpensive clothes for sizable women.The last few years we have been having Thanksgiving at friends who have more and more luxurious space than we do. I will be making the desserts, rum pumpkin pie [we grow pumpkins every year] and strawberry mousse. I froze strawberries in June. There’ll be twelve people and great food. Then those friends will go off to Puerto Rico where they have a condo and spend the winter, while the rest of us stay here. I love winters in Wellfleet. We see friends more and I write much more efficiently. I like battening down and having less distractions. Then when the distractions start up again, I like that too.Soon I’ll be opening up the juried intensive poetry workshop I teach every June here in Wellfleet. This year it will run from the 17th of June to the 21st. December first I’ll post a notice on FB and here.