When do you get a chance for full immersion? A chance for a whole lot of what Sandy Longhorn calls butt-in-chair time?

This was butt-in-chair time, luxuriously.

This past week, with the next grapes still ripening on their vines, my husband and I splurged and dashed down to Palm Springs. Three nights at our favorite hotel, the Viceroy.

We were going to take the tram and go hiking, but it was closed for maintenance. And at desert-level it was much too hot for us fragile northerners.

That left us with two and a half days in the heat by the pool with a manuscript and a stack of books.

Here was the menu:

• Virginia Woolf and her World, by John Lehmann
• Four books of by Fanny Howe (Robeson Street, The Vineyard, One Crossed Out, and The Lyrics)
• The Winter Sun, by Fanny Howe
• My sequences manuscript

I started the manuscript almost a year ago, and many of the poems are inspired by the rooms and the gardens and the general ahh-ness at the Viceroy. Revisiting the manuscript there felt perfect! (Even when the manuscript didn’t…)

And the irony (?) of reading Fanny Howe while nesting in luxury’s lap did not escape me. But this is when I have the time.

This was my way to have a writing or studying residency and a vacation with my husband–with sun and lemons.

Now we’re north again and it’s still hot out–just like summer–but I’m back on the bus, I started my three weeks of Plath immersion.