Out My Office Window

After such long isolation, when we could go someplace again, what I did with our new freedom has mostly been doctor and dentist appointments, especially the latter. Not exactly fun vacations.

I’m hoping to finally venture to Boston next week for the first time since early February.  At that time, we also took a mini vacation in New Hampshire, but then the world was closed down by the plague and I was stuck at home. We have made plans to travel to Maine in mid-September.  For about 40 years, we’ve gone to Maine to shop the outlets and pick up naturally raised lamb at a farm there.  Last year, we couldn’t, obviously.  Now we hope to resume.  Who knows if outlets still exist?  I haven’t been in a store in so long, probably I won’t know how to act.

I have been reading manuscripts [somebody complained of my constant use of ms. and mss abreviations] for my annual juried intensive poetry workshop. I’m hoping the poet from Canada will be allowed to enter the country.  We are also working on the lower garden, the one down by the road at the foot of our hill.  I had planted pumpkins there I started inside, but the other four raised beds are empty.  We want to plant a combination of pole beans and winter squash in them, plus sunflowers at one end.  The sunflowers I started inside, but the veggies we grow from seed.  Woody spent the last couple of days, clearing, plowing, putting down the drip irrigation hoses. Today when he returns from shopping, he’ll put up bean towers and teepees and then we’ll plant. 

Tonight we’ve been invited to a friend’s house in Harwich for supper.  There has been for more than a year no possibility of visiting or dining with friends.  And tomorrow night, we’re invited to another friend’s house, this time in Wellfleet.  Since we’re working so hard outside and I’m also working hard inside, it will be a real treat to have supper made for us instead of having to cook when I’m exhausted.  I like to cook and I enjoy having people over, but I appreciate reciprocation. We have friends who eat here many times a year but never have us to their house.  It’s frustrating.  Paul and Dam who died a few years ago were a couple who often entertained and were wonderful cooks.  I still miss them.

In a recent ZOOM program, I was asked what I’m reading now.  My honest answer was the manuscripts from poets in my workshop.  I don’t think I’ve read anything else in the past two weeks except those and one newspaper and one archeological magazine.

I’m hoping maybe we can go to the Finger Lakes in October. We’ll see.  We want to find a new place to stay, probably on Seneca Lake this time.  I won’t even think about it until we do a little local traveling so we can see how it goes.  My ankle is still painful and probably always will be.

While I’m reading so much of other poets’ work, it’s hard to write my own poems, but this week I did manage to write two poems. That made me feel good.  I look out my office window at the main garden and can see the broccoli heading, the spinach larger every day, the Spanish bluebells in bloom all over.  When I moved here, I planted three of them.  Now there are so many, all over the land, especially the uncultivated areas, spreading into the woods.