Back in May in the course of some spring cleaning I moved a chair to get to the outside of the kitchen window, only slowly realizing that I was standing in a cloud of aroused wasps. I tumbled over the deck table, leapt into the parlor, slammed the door, not a single sting. Later I crouched and peered under the deck from a safe distance, eight or nine feet, and spotted the nest: fist sized, recycled-paper gray, subtly textured, anchored by paper pasted up through the gaps between the deck boards clear

Back to Maine weekly from my visiting professor job at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, a five-year position at that marvelous campus on its hill. The drive is three-and-a-half hours, down on Mondays early, back home to Maine on Wednesday evenings, 230 miles, a yo-yo burning about eight gallons of gas each way, stopping in Portland for dinner, usually taken at the bar at Fore Street.

But a couple of Wednesdays ago I had an evening literary event to attend-Baron Wormser,

August 27, 2007

There it is, the first fiery leaf at the edge of the forest, and only mid-August. And now that I'm looking, I spy several distinctly yellowing popple trees off in the distance, and a shade of purple taking over some of the grand ashes spotted through the canopy. The broken old box elder in the yard is all but bare. I tell myself these are stressed trees, not harbingers. But the field weeds are dying back, too, only the golden rod in its glory, the first fresh monarch

What's scarier than a for-sale sign on a house only two neighbors away in a neighborhood sparse as this one? Nightmare scenarios assaulted me: Loud Larry's Motorcycle Mudtrack; Jack's Giant Backhoe Farm; Arnie's RV Park and Draft Horse Crematorium. And if those were unlikely, it wasn't hard to picture a paranoid survivalist settling in behind gun turrets and razor wire, German shepherd dogs barking all night, searchlights, camo ATVs. Or my God! A retired Karaoke orthodontist from Connecticut (my