I’ve begun this week reading the manuscripts for the juried intensive poetry workshop I hold here annually in June. So far I’ve read three of them and produced at least a couple of pages of notes on each. Next week I should read another three, and so on, until I’ve read and annotated all 12 mss. Dale and I have also begun to go over the lectures and examples for each day of the workshop. We’ve done Monday and Tuesday so far. Each year I tweak things a bit. We got all the tomatoes planted, the 10 maincrop types, the cherry tomatoes and the paste tomatoes. Also I got all the cucumbers and the hot peppers into my garden of raised beds. Most of the tomatoes are heirlooms, but there was a few modern hybrids. Then we put in the yellow squash, pattypans and zucchini plants that were getting impatient in the greenhouse. Finally on Friday, most of the eggplants, the Oriental longones and the Italian type pear shaped ones. then Woody started on the sweet peppers. Last weekend I put the pumpkin plants – both the New England pie pumpkins and the big red Cinderella pumpkins, the rouge Vif d’Estampes – in the lower garden. Today I hope to plant the winter squash seeds there, mostly butternuts but smaller amounts of a few other varieties. Thursday Judith Lorel came to Wellfleet from Western Massachusetts to talk about green burial, a subject I care about. I was extremely disappointed that so few residents came out to hear her. It isn’t as if we aren’t an aging community most of whose residents should be concerned about how their death and their bodies should be handled. We supposed to be a ecologically savvy and caring community, and I assumed people who have tried to lead green lives would care about not polluting the water table and the land after their death. I had arranged for her to come. She charged us nothing and only asked to be put up and fed supper. I arranged for that with the help of Carol Parlante of the Bookstore Restaurant and Martha Wilson, my dear friend who runs Pinemoor cottages. I felt embarrassed by the small audience when Judith had driven to far to talk with us. Thursday was a very warm day, more like late June than mid May, and perhaps that had something to do with the poor showing. At our house it was 78 at 11 in the morning. Felt even warmer around noon and 1 pm. Chuck Cole, in whose private cemetery I can have a green burial, was there and Judith was glad to meet him. She plans to tour his cemetery when it can be arranged. I wanted to plant Thursday but the new rototiller wouldn’t start, so Woody couldn’t plow. Very disappointing. I have begun belatedly putting away warm pants and warm skirts and sweaters and hauling out lighter clothes. For the last several days, I’ve been wearing summer dresses and short sleeved tees with my jeans. The evenings are still chilly but the days have been quite warm and dry. Tonight friends Lois and Ramon are taking us out to supper at the Bookstore restaurant, so I can plant longer, since I won’t have to make supper.