A productive day.

Up early (not by choice, thank you Cassie) and I sorting through a stack of poems for a novel in verse that I had started two years ago. I have 32 poems but probably 1/3 of them don’t belong in this book. I am torn on the direction of the plot. I find that I have pieces of Hugging the Rock, piece of Plant Kid and piece of something else. It may turn out that none of those belong in the book and all I really have is one poem. Time will tell.

I’ve also sorted through the bulk of the poems I want to use in the juvenile hall poetry workshop that starts Monday. I am nervous. Nervous in the way that one who hasn’t taught or spoken for over a year often is. I realize the things I fear most are that my memory is going – I can’t pull things up from the recesses of my brain as fast as I used to. I’ll bring a big bag of tricks with me to fill the dead air.

At noon we headed outside to work in the yard. It was a lovely, sunny day here and we worked outside until the moon came up. The only thing, and I mean the ONLY thing we did, was work on reshaping the creekbed. Somehow when we added the rocks it sprawled wider than I had intended and ended up looking more like a flatened drainage ditch. Plus it was missing big rocks. I finally found some rocks on craigslist and today was the day of removing creekbed rocks, digging holes, and sinking the big rocks into the creekbed. A lot of artistic decisions went into the reshaping effort. It’s not all done but probably 90%. (It was too dark for taking pictures by the time we were done.) I still need to remove some more small rocks, add some pebbles to the center of the creek and then add more plants. Yes, MORE plants.

I’m so sore that all I can do is sit here on the couch and veg out in front of the tv but it is a good kind of sore from a hard day’s work.