Jed's going to stop by here today on his way back from Mississippi, and I'm trying to get awake enough to shovel out the house a bit. I wish I were an instinctively neat housekeeper, but it's a little late in life to be worried about it. If I can just stay awake long enough to get this novel finished, then I'm going to sleep all summer. No, actually, when I finish this one, I'm thinking about rewriting that first "romance novel" that I wrote when I lived up on Oak Trail.

I've been trying, for two days, to read Stephen Ambrose's book Crazy Horse and Custer, but it's too disturbing, so I think I've given it up. I've requested several from Bookins that I want to read, including Bel Canto and The Mists of Avalon to re-read. I also want to read A Season of Fire and Ice, but Bookins doesn't have it, so maybe I can get it from the library. I've forgotten what the book club book for February is. Maybe that was A Season of Fire and Ice? I took We Took To the Woods off my Amazon listings. I couldn't possibly sell it; that's one of the best books anyone like me ever wrote.

I keep going back to look at the snow pictures. The poet Conrad Aiken wrote best about winter, and rain.

Winter for a moment takes the mind; the snow
Falls past the arclight; icicles guard a wall;
The wind moans through a crack in the window;
A keen sparkle of frost is on the sill.

and

Beloved, let us once more praise the rain.
Let us discover some new alphabet
for this, the often-praised, and be ourselves,
the rain, the chickweed and the burdock leaf,
the green-white privet flower, the spotted stone,
and all that welcomes rain; the sparrow, too--
who watches with a hard eye, from seclusion,
beneath the elm-tree bough, till rain is done...

I recommend memorizing poetry. Or what I do--read stuff over and over for years, until it sticks in my head. It's one of life's surest comforts.


I noticed yesterday that the hard wind we had Monday night blew down a tree in somebody's yard down on Rowan Road. Thankful none of mine went down.