I feel as though I have lived one day per hour today. So much to digest. I wake too early, my mind is spinning, processing feelings about change. Letting go of expectations. Frank is leaving for Montreal, we talk a bit before he leaves and I want to talk for hours I have so much to say. Then, it is me and Charlie and Suzi in the yard, walking toward the river, and beside me under the trees in the leaves and needles a little fluff-fluff skitter of a tiny creature – I startle and cry out. It’s only a baby bird and I don’t stop, I hurry on, because the dogs are a bit ahead of this drama and haven’t caught sight of it. Good. We mean no harm. I see the mother bird then, a jay, I guess, and she is watching the hatchling, and there’s food in her beak. Perhaps the bird was trying to fly, or learning to fly. The dogs and I greet the river. I have the draft of a poem I will revise for tonight that I wrote last week in Vanessa Gabb’s poetry workshop at IWWG. The meadow is full of Queen Anne’s lace which makes me happy. I revise my poem and it’s different than how I’ve been writing. I don’t know how it will be received, and today is a mood of detachment; letting go of expectations. I meet my poetry friend for dinner at Flour Bakery in Harvard Square and we catch up on her mothering and her poetry and my mothering and my poetry; our baby birds have left our nests, and poetry feeds us. We will be presenting as a pair in August, a shared reading, the two of us, in Somerville and we plan what we will do with our event. At my poetry group, I listen to the comments from the other poets and my mentor, and I see that with this poem about breaking paradigms that I have broken through into a new slant of my voice and power of my craft. This is a very satisfying surprise.