Submissions for my June juried intensive poetry workshop are arriving every day.  I’ve set side next Tuesday to read the ones I haven’t decided about.  I’ll go over each five poem submissions twice to judge whether I can work with that poet and take them to a more advanced level. Usually I guess correctly.  I will accept 12 poets and two alternates.

There are only a few small tasks left outside and one onerous one –covering the remaining roses with compost or manure. It was too warm for the fall crops I like to grow. We got plenty of lettuce but no Chinse cabbages, no bok choi, no radicchio.  We have to figure out a way to grow cole crows in our increasingly warm falls.  What we did get in the fall were leeks, Brussels sprouts, winter squashes and pumpkins. 

Covid feels like a permanent part of our lives as far as we can imagine.  With so many people refusing vaccination and new mutations emerging every couple of months, we will just have to live with it.  We both have had our boosters.  My chosen daughter Melenie came to cook with me for Thanksgiving as I hope she will be back here in two weeks.

We’re recklessly going ahead with the solstice party we’ve hosted for friends for the last twenty years – excluding last year when we saw no one for the holidays. 

I emailed invitations between 10:30 and 11 a.m. last week and by late afternoon, nineteen people had accepted.  People here ae starved for a party and getting to see people they haven’t in two years.  It’s a risk, but we miss socializing and miss the friends who have been out of our lives because of Covid.

Chanukah came very early this year.  The first night marks my mother’s yahrzeit – a date that changes every year with the Jewish lunar calendar.  It’s strange to have it all starting in November.  I have a ZOOM reading for a Bloomington Indiana synagogue this Saturday evening.  I’ll tape the Michigan-Iowa Big 10 Championship game.  I couldn’t believe the field at the Big House after my college beat Ohio state after so many losses.  There must have been thirty thousand people crammed on that field celebrating.

I’m furious about the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, essentially.  Now women will be dying again of botched abortions, as I almost ended my life when I had to do it to myself.  I worked for decades to make abortion safe and legal.  They have handed down so many ugly and destructive decisions.  I am also worried about Trump.  He destroyed so much that it will take a decade undo the damage, and now he may come back.  I give whatever I can to candidates I think have a chance of winning, in spite of the gerrymandering the Republicans are doing to rig the midterms and beyond.

We put up a tree December first.  We let it sit in water in the livingroom so that the cats will get used to it and the branches will spread out and down. I grew up with a tree every year.  My mother had felt deprived as a child and my father, who wasn’t Jewish or anything else, expected one.  Of course some years, there was no money to buy one, so we’d wait till late on the 24th and go out to a lot that had closed and steal a tree. 

When I left home, I never had a tree until my mother died and left me a box of ornaments, most from my childhood.  We cut a table sized pitch pine on our land.  For several years, we would go onto the old railroad bed and cut a bushy pitch pine.  When Woody was elected a selectman, he said we couldn’t do that any longer, so we began buying a balsam fir. We decorate it gaudily with mostly animal and vegetable ornaments.  Today we’ll begin decorating it.  Yesterday, we put on the lights.