This winter the temperature drops like a bowling ball; a day or two later, it’s balmy. We have snow; we have no snow. We have rain sometimes that turns to snow and snow that melts into rain. Whenever the temperature rises and especialiy when it’s sunny, I open the cat tunnel and/or open the door from the livingroom to the sunporch and three of the cats run out. Elderly Sugar Ray, not so much. Then the next day, they beg to go out but it’s 22 degrees. Sugar has good days and bad days. Sometimes he’s happy and sometimes he’s cranky, your stereotypical grumpy old man. Always he is close to his bro, his second cousin Mingus. I am experimenting with cooking with lentils. I used to cook them a lot but somehow got out of the habit. Tonight I made a delicious rice-lentil dish with lamb chops. I am trying to make new dishes this winter to spice things up. I have a bit a cabin fever so we might out to eat tomorrow night. We’ll see what we want tomorrow. No need to make reservations in February on the Outer Cape. I have been writing a poem every day starting Tuesday this week. Having let my assistant go has energized me. A great weight off. Today I started the first seeds downstairs in the storage room’s long sink. My 2^nd husband, Robert, was an amateur photographer and in the old days before digital cameras, we developed our own prints in that room. It was the darkroom then so had this long sink up on spindly legs. I started curly and Italian parsley and cilantro—three plants that will take forever to sprout. I started two kinds of broccoli, two kinds of red cabbage, bok choi, salad bowl lettuce and Indian prince calendula. Salad bowl is not the best, tastiest or most glamorous of the seven kinds of lettuce we grow in the spring, but it grows well in the greenhouse is quite productive and thus produces earlier salads than any other lettuce in our garden. When the seedlings sprout, they will journey upstairs to the bay window for a week and then if the weather isn’t preventively cold, out to the greenhouse. We have pads that give gentle heat and a small heater there, but if the weather is severe enough, the seedlings would suffer. Last winter everything had to stay inside because the snow was so deep we couldn’t get into the greenhouse. No problem so far this February. The ground is bare between the upper door that opens from the sunporch and he path to the greenhouse just past a patch of rhododendrons. We may or may not get some snow this week, but I doubt we’ll get enough to keep us from the greenhouse or other outdoor tasks. People are introducing themselves to other poets on the closed private FB group for my June class. A wide range of experience and publication. I don’t ask for any information with the applications, only 5 poems. I choose on the basis of talent and whether I believe I can work with that poet and take them to a higher level. There are always poets who’ve published a lot, some who’ve had books already and poets who have never published at all. They often range in age from 20 to 70. This is the very first year that they are all from the United States. That’s never happened before. I have always had Canadians every year, have had poets from Great Britain, Switzerland, Sweden, Brazil. Also this year, they are all women. Usually we have at least two or three men.