Ways that I loved the 456 miles to where I'm now sitting.

Singing along, for one thing, and in that many miles, one can listen to quite a lot, and then listen to it again. Issuing dispatches from my driving self to my poet and critic selves (by way of my iPod+iTalk combination). Grinning and even laughing a bit to myself about feeling so very much as though I were on the lam, slicing southward alone, even though I was actually driving a longish haul to bibliography camp. Getting sunwashed, just enough to pink-glow my nose and chest and to give me abundance of more freckles on my left arm.

But mostly, looking:

(Mossy and Oak Hill, it turns out, are separate places in West Virginia.)

Later, I'll offer some pictures of where I'm calling from (room 33 on the West Lawn at the University of Virginia, for those of you keeping score at home; room 13 was Poe's, during the short time he was here). You can expect me to be probably at least a day behind, this week, while I'm cramming my head and my fingers even more full of format and collation and foliation and pagination and patterns and pattern-breaking. Here, everyone is a bibliophile. Here, we get to roughhouse (gently) with old books. Here, I think I'm going to start sleeping soundly again, under the enormous fan and behind the screen-shutter-doors of this historic accommodation. In my optimism, I've even brought along the books I haven't been able to make progress in reading, all these intense and far-flinging weeks: Dillard, Ammons, Stern, Whitman, Faulkner, Keats, Plato. In my optimism, I am carrying my poetry notebook and my camera. In my optimism, I've brought my bocce set and my new dress, the black-on-black one with the pockets, and my dangly necklace and my sparkly shoes. For the one thing I know is that one never, ever knows, and there is that Thursday evening antiquarian bookseller expedition to anticipate.