Maine

Always nice to find your neglected old blog still hanging around waiting for you when you choose to come back after a long absence.

We went back to Colorado a year ago, then sold up and moved to Maine at the end of April, driving across the country for five days with our two cats in a cage in the back seat. After a month and a half in close quarters in Portland, I found a house and a job in the Brunswick area, about 30 minutes further north. It's like being in a different country from Colorado - so lovely and wet and green. There are red cardinals that fly around in the trees outside, making me feel as if I'm somewhere quite exotic. And then there's Hubert, below, who lives in our garden.

The house came with some interesting new problems, not least of which was a shower of baby mice that fell from the garage ceiling one night a couple of weeks ago, so that when we went to get the car in the morning we found them scattered around the garage floor or huddled in a bucket in the corner. We tried to keep them alive, but they died off over the next hours and days - all but one, who is now all grown up and lovely. We've spent days trying to decide whether to keep her safe or let her go off and take her chances in the world.

I'm working in a law office as a paralegal. Mostly a good thing - it can be dull at times, but it has its interests, and when I come home from work at night and at the weekends my brain is free. Having said that, I feel a bit of cerebral atrophy going on. Though I hated many things about teaching, working constantly with texts and with interpretation was more rewarding than anything I've come across in the non-academic world. I've been visiting PoetryFoundation.org daily to have something for my brain to work over while I'm writing "Please find enclosed..." letters or filling in forms.

I stumbled across particularly rewarding poems yesterday and today. Yesterday's was "Grasses" by Heather Allen, a New England poet. Given my current mouse situation, how could I not like this one? I especially like, "They keep to themselves, / A web of trails and nests, / Burrows and hidden entrances" - but also the ending lines, "crouched and breathless / at the passing of the fox" - where the danger comes so close but seems perhaps set to pass by this time. There's a nice contrast there with the breath of wind across the top of the grasses from the beginning of the poem, too.

Today's discovery was "Ad Hominem", by Nicky Beer. The description of the "alien ciphers" in the writing on the page when your eye drifts for a moment is excellent - it brought to mind perfectly those videos of the empty sea floor suddenly rippling away to reveal - briefly - the outlines of a cryptic octopus, and with that those vertiginous moments in life when the world seems to reveal itself as something quite different to what you'd thought.