Wake to a dramatic shift, the sound of a kind of silence I have not heard in fifteen months. He has not just run an errand to the bagel store. He has gone on a business trip. In this household, it feels like the pandemic has made a major shift. I feel immense relief, gratitude and a little sadness too. I wake early, but he has left very very early. I write my weekly Aim for Astonishing blog in the quiet house. It’s not raining, but it’s soaking green. I take a long refreshment in the forest bathing in the lovely sounds, scents and cleanliness. We take a way through the tall trees that we have not taken in awhile, Charlie and me.

In the afternoon I finished the last poem from the letters! My first draft now complete. Very gratifying. There are, currently, sixty three poems from the letters. Tonight I dug into the revision, with a little trepidation and some confusion, but also energy and enthusiasm. What to do? I revised the first three in some minor, but significant ways. I am eager to keep at this steadily to get once again through the entirety.

I have found pictures, while writing my weekly prompt, of the farmhouse on Libby Hill Road in Newport, Maine that I wrote about visiting on Friday. The house that is no longer standing. I had forgotten I stowed a stack of old pictures to go through on the top of my bookcase and went looking for the one for my blog, and found these. House that is impossible to return to– impossible to leave.