BUSY BUT NOT WITH WORK

This week was not much for writing but very crowded nonetheless. I did revise my new short story, How to Seduce a Feminist [or Not] and sent it to my agent, but that was about it on the writing front.  Last weekend we went in to AWP in Boston.  I found it quite depressing.  11,000 MFA students circling like hungry sharks hoping to get published so they can get a job. Editors, publishers of many presses and zines were sitting there hoping somebody would buy something, forlorn, bored.  Authors waiting to sign their books if only somebody would actually fork out money for a book.  But I saw my old friend Mary Mackey and we had lunch and caught each other up.  Worth the trip. We had two great warm days, Saturday and Wednesday.  Got into the garden to uncover and the greenhouse to thin seedlings.  All the perennials are up and growing.  I started my first batch of tomato plants and today they started hatching.  These are the paste tomatoes, one six-pack of earlies and cherry tomatoes. Now it’s cold again and two more storms coming.  We’ve started uncovering the perennial and herb beds.  I unmulched the rhubarb but the ground under the heap of manure was still mostly frozen.  Now it isn’t any longer as the sun finally warmed it. On the way back from getting a haircut Friday afternoon, we went to look at Newcomb Hollow Beach. Half the parking lot has been chewed up by the ocean storms and there are two great heaps of broken off asphalt. A house nearby was dangling over the newly cut up cliffs.  The ocean broke through in Truro and made the rest of the Outer Cape an island for a while.  Years ago during a huge winter storm, the ocean broke the Cape in two there and filled the entire Pamet river valley with salt water deep enough so that pilot whale swam through what are normally backyards and marshland.  We stood in deep snow on the hill with a bunch of other locals staring at it all in disbelief. We go off to Ohio next week on Tuesday driving into a snowstorm to do a powerpoint presentation based on my research for SEX WARS, and the novel itself on Wednesday night in Alliance Ohio at Mount Union College and then the next day a class visit and a poetry reading at Youngstown U.  We’ll get up at five Friday morning and drive back, getting here on the late side.  One of the librarians feeds the cats while we’re away.  The cats are all quite social.  When we’re in the livingroom in the evening, all five are with us, except for an occasional break to chase each other by Xena and Mingus. I had a committee meeting this week for the Friends of the Council on Aging.  Then a friend who was just operated on at Mass General for melanoma came home – actually not home.  He is staying in the house of two friends who winter in a condo in Puerto Rico inherited from the husband’s brother, one of Andy Warhol’s lovers.  They have lent their house to Dale as the master bedroom is on the ground floor – also it’s much more luxurious than Dale and Stephen’s house which is much like ours.  Homey.  Funky.  His sister, a nurse, has come to stay with him while he’s recovering from the operation and undergoing chemo when they start it.  Wednesday night we and two other friends brought a meal over we and they had  made and we ate there together. Today I hope to finally get back to writing.  Don’t have to make supper as a friend is hosting a big St. Patrick’s Day Party, which gives me more time to get down to work.  I’m also paying special attention to the cats, since we’ll be gone from Tuesday till late Friday.  I haven’t been to Youngstown since I was a little girl, when one uncle worked in steel when there used to be a steel industry, back when we actually made things in the States bigger than a Big Mac. Today the sun is shining and although it’s chilly, we can probably get outside this afternoon. Cabin fever sets in.  The garden beckons.  The trees are budding.  Still I have to get some writing done today.