#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

. . . Then the next day comes, spotless and hungry. . .

~ Excerpt from “The Bowl,” by Jane Hirshfield

We are both awake too early, but it’s nice to have coffee and talk in the dark and cover all the news of our lives, large and small. Then, I go out into a bleak landscape of November. There is no sun, no wind, so very little brightness. All the color muted, and the leaves sloggy and the branches black. I always see something enchanting reflected in the brook, and I settle for that. Not enough pictures to lift my mood, but I keep going. I am only a little bit cold. I see the bright red winterberries in the wetlands, out of reach. I will have to wear better boots to collect some. Once home and dry my mood shifts. Some little bits of sun come out and I wonder why I felt so gloomy. I have such a productive day; so much energy. I prep for two of the many workshops I’m leading next week. My youngest is home, briefly, and we go over our plan for one of the two we’re leading together, and we are happy and warmed up and ready to go. In the afternoon, I have a fire and I re-title a poem and remove a consonant from one word in the poem, and I feel it’s just right now. The new title is better. I feel, well, that’s what it needed. I wish to work on the Chilmark poem, and in the evening by the fire I open the many drafts I have and I feel flat and defeated and hopeless about it. Still, I don’t quite give up. I begin to tweak it a bit. And then I find a couple of things are working better. And I think it’s not hopeless after all. I begin to see I can find my way and I go as far as I can for tonight and will return to it fresh tomorrow. Frank and I did something fun before dinner: we set up the train set his mother gave the kids for Christmas a couple of years ago so they’d have it for Christmas with new generations.. We’ve never set the train up together before; always one of the kids has done it, and we’ve put it under the Christmas tree. But this year I told Frank we could put it on a table in the dining room instead because we won’t need all the serving tables set up for Christmas dinner this year. I kept bugging Frank to do it with me and he finally went to the basement and brought it up and once he did he enjoyed setting it up and getting it running. Now I feel as if the dining room will have a fun presence on a year when we aren’t hosting a big Christmas party or dinner for my all of my relatives. And I felt a playful little bit of our holiday setting up has begun.