Okay, so the sun played hide and seek Tuesday, but the air was warmer, which is why Word Raccoon begged to take a walk. She was convinced that if we went looking, we might coax the sun out to play.

We hadn’t been out in a while. By which I mean: this was our first continuous long walk since the cortisone shot. We moved slowly, but we stayed out for over half an hour, which once upon a time would’ve been nothing. Yesterday, though, it felt exactly right.

WR is already campaigning to repeat it today. She’s over here pretending to be Rocky, all because of a walk.

She also cannot stop chattering about squirrels and birbs.
“I saw my favorite birb,” she said, reverently, and went on about it at length. I tried not to roll my eyes. I know how she admires her wildlife.

Before I forget, I need to tell you about the most romantic proposal scene I’ve ever read. If you haven’t read The Dictionary of Lost Words and want to avoid spoilers, skip ahead a few paragraphs.

The novel is set around the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, but its real heart is the words that never make it in. Esme, the main character, grows up literally under the tables of the lexicographers, listening as men decide which words count. She notices early which ones don’t: women’s words, working people’s words, everyday language. She starts collecting them, almost without meaning to.

When she grows up, she begins going about with Gareth (I can’t say “dating,” that seems too reductive and too modern), a printsetter who sees what she’s been saving, and when he decides to propose, he doesn’t give her a ring. He has her collected “lost words” printed and bound into a volume called Women’s Words and Their Meanings. All the everyday and women’s language left out of the OED. The words she’s been keeping mostly in a trunk her entire life.

Word Raccoon swooned when she read that. 

Yesterday was shaping up to be a poetry admin day until WR reminded me, while rereading our writing plan for the year, that she wrote a chapbook of poetry last month and that if I went looking for it, it might actually be trying to become a full-length book.

It took me a minute to locate, because although she’d given it a tentative title I’d already forgotten, she had not put it in the chapbooks folder.

Note to self: organizing your poetry is imperative if you have a bunch. Every mistake like that teaches me what I need to do better next time.

Instead of being stuck in “hello, here’s a poem, hope you like it” submitting, she and I started arranging the newest collection. We’re learning things about it and about ourselves. Like how you can end up writing the same poem three times without realizing it when you’re trying to say something just right. Which is fine. Once you’ve done that, you choose the one that fits and let the others wait in limboland.

Limboland is crowded.

In other news, in the quieter domestic sense:

Yes, the indoor tree and the porch tree are now dismantled. Bit by bit, Christmas is leaving us. I’m ready. I even cleared my listening cue of all things Christmas this morning.

Over the weekend, Stanley and I put together a clothes rack to help me tackle my ongoing clothing storage saga. He’s excellent at cheering you on, but he had me briefly convinced I’d assembled it correctly when I knew one of the sides was wrong. Reader, it was wrong. We fixed it.

I also found an email from an editor in my spam folder asking for an author bio and photo. Yikes. Check your spam, poets.

Last night, WR and I received a poetry rejection masquerading so hard as personalized that it was glaringly not. Mind you, it didn’t even include my name. I think it literally said “no thanks” towards the end.

WR did a standup set featuring it that had me snorting. She kept spouting “No thanks,” loudly at regular intervals and giggling. “No thanks,” like we had offered them limburger instead of a poem.

We laughed, archived it, and moved on.

This morning, WR is being sneaky. She says we have to go out because my car desperately needs a wash.

“And you’d like to write somewhere you can comment on the plumage you see on the streets?” I asked.

She’s whistling.

I’ll take that as a yes.