I truly dislike freezing spinach. First of all, it’s a lot of work. Second, it’s dangerous. I’m handling boiling water and moving it around and the floor gets slippery Third, it takes longer than freezing broccoli or beans for instance.  But I love the results.  Frozen spinach is easy to cook, delicious and makes a number of great recipes in the winter months. So I do it while I still can.  I froze 12 pounds this week and that’s enough, fortunately. When I finished Tuesday and Wednesday, I was soaked to the skin through a thick apron and my clothes. I have to rest for an hour at least, usually an hour and a half when I come upstairs.

Every year in the last 15 or 16 Junes, I’d be working full time to finish reading the last poetry manuscripts and writing a critique on each for my juried intensive poetry workshop, going over the lectures and hand-outs and assignments. I’d have no time for anything else and all the garden work would fall on Woody. This year, although still a bit weak from pneumonia [my cardiologist said it could be months before I regain the strength and stamina I had before pneumonia]  I am able to do some outdoor work –planting, weeding, picking. My herb garden and my regular garden look great; last year they were overrun with weeds and neglect.

I will miss meeting 12 good poets and making them better.  It was a great workshop and almost all the poets who took it have books out.  But at 88, I can’t do it any longer.  It always wore me out, but last year, it took the entire weekend to recover and I hadn’t done anything for the house or gardens or land for more than a month. I still tire more quickly, but I figure that’s as much caused by age as by pneumonia after-effects.

I finally got my last planting done – for a while till it’s time for pulling done plants and putting in succession crops. We’re not seeing anyone this weekend as we have a lot of catch-up to do inside and out.

My agent is back from London and is starting to read THE HOUR OF MY DEATH. I am nervous, of course; it’s such a strange Japanese form I don’t know if she will want to handle it. If she won’t, then I’ll have to figure out which small presses might be interested in it.

This group of cats are as much involved with each other as with us – a great combo.  Shaman made the difference. We’ve had a clowder that really cared about each other before, but often it’s just pairs that bond – Malkah and Efi, Sugar Ray and Mingus.  That works well until one of them dies and the other may never get over the loss.  I also am fascinated by their world in the house – so much under and over where we walk and sit and carry on our activities.  And then at night, they have their own world too. Many adventures we only know about when we find a mouse they have dispatched.