A busy week and a good one
I’ve written six poems this week and an essay – an almost insanely productive week. Who can say why some weeks are barren or almost so—maybe one poem eked out word by word and then one of those deleted. Or weeks when other things take precedence, such as the time before my annual juried intensive poetry workshop. Who can say why on another week when there’s plenty else to do, poems insist on being written. It isn’t that they flow like water. Each one goes through revision after revision. But they come. I even had an idea for a story but there’s a huge problem with it that I haven’t yet solved. I began to write it then realized by the time I’d written one page that my plan wouldn’t work. I needed another way in. We almost had a fire with an old heating mat under the tender plants like peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, cukes, etc. They need bottom heat to germinate. Now we have new ones, but we were quite frightened. Afraid we almost burned the house down. Our gentleman cat Mingus finally had his sewn shut eye with the two tubes sticking out fixed Thursday morning. It looks quite normal now. After the first 36 hours after the operation, he did not complain being one-eyed but tried to get about his normal activities. But with his eye restored, he is happier and playful and back in the mix with the other cats. He is back to paying a great deal of attention to Willow, who enjoys that, especially since Xena has fallen in love with Schwartzie and they are spending more time together. We didn't get any snow at all Tuesday, but high winds. If our friend Michael hadn’t taken down some trees he noticed were dead, we probably would have had one of them into my bedroom. Seventy mph winds coming straight across the marsh have taken down trees before. The dead trees were on the blind side of the house, the north side. Nothing there but woods sloping down to the marsh. There are one or two windows on that side but none of them where the dead trees were. Open Road who is publishing my novels electronically so they can be read on Kindle asked me through my agent to write an essay about the poem I wrote in 1971, “Barbie Doll.” It has always been anthologized a great deal and often taught both in high school and college, but they said there was a swell of interest in the poem in the past couple of months. They wanted an essay to put on line about the body shaming of women now as opposed to when I wrote the poem, especially under Trump. So I did. I have a lot to say about that, so it was a easy job to get it out. My agent had one suggestion I incorporated and Open Road liked it. The whole thing took 48 hours from request to acceptance. I wish everything went so smoothly. It’ll go up on their site March 28th. I had to go for my regular eye exam for glaucoma, something I truly hate, but it wasn’t so bad this time. My pressure is a bit higher. I got help from Cannacare to get on the state site, so in a month if nothing goes wrong,… I should have my card and go into Boston for marijuana in some form to try to reduce my glaucoma to a better pressure. The state site is so difficult, even the expert at Cannacare took half an hour on the computer to get me registered. It took Ira a month to get his health insurance under the state plan befoe he was old enough to get Medicare. But once he sas on it, it was a good plan. I was so upset by Trump’s budget I lay awake much of the night fussing – not that it does any good. I’ve signed about five on line petitions, but I don’t view that as effective. Something more needs to be done.