Afternooning

There are great things about being a professor in the middle of Kentucky: May, June, July, most of August, few distractions, no urban attractions, and the time to enjoy slow afternoons in the field. The mosquitoes haven't yet arrived and the humidity has remained at bay. The students are gone and our quiet town has become downright sleepy. We're settling into the pace of summer (yes, early May is summer in these parts!). J is writing a lot. I'm resting a lot. I know that I have much to do: three more new classes to plan and two articles to massively revise. But first, I'm taking a breather.

I'm reading crappy novels in bed. I'm berry-picking. I'm garden touring. I'm stitching. I'm cooking. I'm jogging and breathing and generally enjoying my poorly paying but richly relaxing summer holiday.

And it's only week two!

Coming out

I’m like a 22 year-old gymnast trying to stage a comeback just before the Olympics. I can’t really compete with the 15 year-old pixies whose bodies remain lean and limber. But I’m trying to come out of retirement for one more moment of glory. And I’ve been thinking about just what event—which competition—merited a comeback to this space. Everything seemed just shy of enough.
 
Like that rainy day in March when the miraculous happened: a self-peeling banana showed up in my fruit bowl. It was so unexpected, so delightful that I contemplated it as the object of my return. But then I thought, "A banana, really?" After five months of silence a banana seemed hardly to suffice. It lacked personal interest and what really could I say about this miracle of fruit (other than I was too freaked out to actually eat it)?

The same problem plagued my other March miracle. I woke one morning to find the "weeds" that I had been pulling all last summer had transformed themselves into rosy bleeding hearts. I tried to write about this, but kept recurring to cheesy lines about hearts that never die. I couldn't help but writing cliches and so I gave up before I posted.

But in April there was a much anticipated reunion of our canine lovers, a sure thing to get me back to blogging. For several months we prepared Homer for Lucy's visit. Every time he was naughty, we threatened him with the notion that Lucy would have to stay at home. And yet, she arrived--with her humans in tow--and Homer had 72 glorious hours of romping, humping (Homer is, needless to say, always a bottom), squirrel-chasing, and co-sleeping. But even this somehow lacked the compelling visual interest to get me back here.

And then there was a whole lot of quick making, but taken one project at a time, I couldn't justify ending retirement for so paltry an offer. The world is a fertile place these days and I found myself scrambling at the last minute(s) to finish these:

The quick making, though, seemed to zap all of my energy (not to mention the three new classes, the housework, the reading, the annual spring blues). I wanted to come out of retirement with a glorious culinary feat, but J and I have lived on beans, tacos, and mediocre avocados for several months now.

So here's the rub: no one project, no single event, no stunning read is enough to get me back here when I've been gone so long. My only hope is that by checking in more often, I won't need the Olympics to compel my return. Instead, I'll again find the prosaic enough to get me here...and hopefully keep me.

 

once again

I’ve been wanting to get back to this space for weeks -- er, months -- now. I think about it often. I imagine that little thing I wanted to share. I even imagine an image that would perfectly show that little thing. But then life -- er, work -- intervenes. Not only have I not been present here, but I’ve not really been present to myself. Whole parts of my life -- the creative, the meticulous -- have fallen away under the pressures of a new job.

Instead of painting -- and then sharing -- the window trim that has been glaring at me for a month now (ever since I ripped down the interior shutters in a hasty move to get more light), I try to figure out how I’m going to teach Whitman on Thursday or paragraphing next week. When I do snatch a free moment to vacuum -- that most satisfying of domestic duties -- I find myself thinking about next semester’s syllabi instead of extra-academic projects. And god knows, I don’t want this blog to be exclusively about syllabi and my students’ comma splices.



I thought about abandoning this space altogether, letting it sit as a memorial to my past self, but I’m not quite there yet. I want to believe that I can find something back here because finding something back here means finding some kind of balance for myself. It means taking the time to see Homer. Taking time to eat up his sleepy loveliness.

It also means taking the time to get to my knitting group on Monday evenings. On weeks when I’m feeling moderately sane, I join a group of five women, most of whom are mothers, some of whom live off the grid, all of whom get me out of my teaching mind.



It also means eating slowly. J and I are often moving frantically in two different directions. Occasionally, though, one of us gets home early, warms the stove, and surprises the other with a dinner fully formed. We light candles and inhale. I keep hoping that this might happen every night, but given everything else, I settle for a couple times a week.



So I want to get back here. I need to get back here. I really am going to get back here.

refreshing

The best thing about actually living with your partner is that you don’t have to spend all weekend in the airport thinking about all of the things you’d rather be doing. You don’t have to settle for slimy stir-fry from Panda Express because you can make pesto from the basil on the patio. You don’t have to debate the merits of wheelie bags or fight with TSA about shoving those wheelie bags into the overhead bin. You get to buy shampoo in bottles larger than 3 oz., and you get to stay on the ground.

You also get to wake up on a Saturday morning and decide that the dining room chairs that the former owner kindly left are just too gross to keep using. You can then jump in the car and spend $8.96 a pop for new high density foam. You can also gloat about the fact that you were inspired to buy exactly two yards of heavy weight japanese linen on your summer vacation, even though you never buy more than a yard and a half, and even though you had no idea where you’d use it.

You can then look at your watch and realize that you have all evening to reupholster the chairs, unconcerned about catching a flight or having to go to bed at 8 pm for the cheap 6 am one. You can perfect your process as you go, layering foam and thin batting and fabric, developing a heretofore unseen intimacy with the staple gun. You can even go to sleep with 3 chairs done and wake up on Sunday morning, drink a pot of decaf with the Sunday Times and then leisurely move to finish the last 3. You can finish it all by noon and then clear your desk and get down to schoolwork. Ah, weekends. Ah, short-distance relationships.

first dayz

By now I’ve met them all. There are just 43 of them in three classes. All week I was nervous about the start of the semester and I felt the familiar panic as I walked into each classroom. I couldn’t help but worry. These would surely be, I told myself, very different students. There would be men, for one, and after two years at a women’s college, I wasn’t so sure that I’d know what to make of them. And in one important way, I was sure, they’d seem unfamiliar. After all, the college where I now teach exclusively accepts poor students and primarily those from Appalachia. They’d be coming from some of the worst high schools in the country and I was warned to check my expectations before I walked through the door. I read about “culturally responsible” pedagogy and promised myself that I wouldn’t assume anyone had heard of Walt Whitman or Harriet Beecher Stowe. A colleague warned me to “forget everything you learned at Bryn Mawr.”

After I met them, though, I realized that there was no need to forget. Because students are students, pulled into the classroom by desire, by curiosity, by command, by mistake. But no matter the reason, they’re there. Sitting and eager and ready to give me a chance. So our conversations might sound a little different; they surely were on the first day, but they were conversations nonetheless and I feel privileged to be having them.

settling

The syllabi are coming together. Tonight is the opening faculty convocation. Homer gets a walk in the mornings and a run in the afternoons, just like Arlo, his predecessor (whom he resembles more and more each day) did. We grocery shop in the evenings. I buy vegetables on Tuesday and Fridays at the farmer's market. We started the final season of “Friday Night Lights” last night, curled up together in bed around the laptop, just like we did in graduate school. J met his advisees yesterday, all seventeen of them. We both wore regalia and marched into the students’ dedication ceremony yesterday afternoon. I was jealous of the chemistry teacher who sprung for the Carolina blue robes. J’s colleagues are becoming my colleagues. I’m still cooking through Super Natural Everyday. I finally finished my revision, with lots of smart editing from J. We both do the dishes.

Life is settling into a rhythm that still feels new and unfamiliar but each day also feels a little more ordinary. Each day we love this funny mutt more and more.

end of summer

The weather has turned. At least temporarily. It's cool at night and you can almost smell autumn on the horizon. We're frantically writing assignments and plotting out syllabi. I'm finishing article revisions and day dreaming about hosta and fern plantings.

My Dad came for a visit last week. We barely kept up with him. In two long days, he managed to replace a broken window, fill lots of cracks, glaze the basement windows, hang pictures, fix half a dozen doors, install a range hood (we have light!), fix the electrical problem in the kitchen, give me a closet doorknob, fix the shutters, hang curtain rods, bandage my wounds, and probably several other, life-saving things that I'm somehow forgetting.

We also had a good hike, and even down a lung, he kept us moving. It seems so terribly hollow to say that I feel grateful for visits like this one. But I feel grateful for visits like this one. It's been eight months of worry and sorrow, and so visits like this one feel nothing less than blessed.

We bought summer treats at the farmer's market, like the exclusively grass-fed meat that he can't find in Michigan and lots of tomatoes. Last night I made tomato preserves with our leftovers. I'm sure that I overcooked it, but it was my first foray into canning (another Dad lesson), and now I know what not to do.
I'm thinking about buying a bushel of tomatoes on Friday and canning them whole...Ah summer, ah tomatoes.

sampling life

My calendar says August 14, but surely that’s a misprint. It must still be July. What happened to June? Where has the summer gone? How is it that I’ve found myself in the middle of August with not a single complete syllabus and classes beginning in just ten days?

I suppose that I could blame the puppy. Or I could curse the house that needed so much love. I could blame myself for driving off to Michigan and then back East for quick vacation with J. I could accept responsibility for planting lantana and clover instead of drafting assignment sequences for composition classes. I could reckon the time it took paint the house against the time I spent at my computer. But I won’t.

Instead, I’ll scramble this week and next. I’ll feel unprepared when the term opens and probably still unprepared when I turn in grades in December. Because that’s the way it always feels at a new place during a new year. New students, new problems, new questions, new curiosities. Such, such will be the joys!

Last night I finished up my single needling creation of the entire summer. As I corseted it to the frame, I wondered how it could be that I have not a single knitted gem to share. I guess that’s what happens when a former, hour-long commute turns into a five-minute walk to school, when evenings spent with phone buds in my ears and hands free to knit turns into an actual, live relationship. That might be why I’ve had sheepishly little to share here.

Except this, a late summer foray into crewel, the design by Alicia Paulson. I finished most of it during a long, long car ride East with J behind the wheel. The whole while I felt like I was channeling my 18th century sisters, working our first samplers to practice our stitches and prove our domestic prowess. I’m not sure where it will hang, somewhere, hopefully, where people will appreciate the A, B, Cs.

Remastered

The previous owner of 408 (the seemingly appropriate name for our manse from here on out) had a thing for window coverings. These were the kind of curtains that a poor Maria von Trapp would have made into knickers. For a dozen children. They were so bad that J almost refused to buy the house because they made every room look like it was 1977 in Kentucky. Oh Kentucky. I, on the other hand, saw money signs in my head. Bad decor = lots of opportunity.



But home gyms from 1984 = kinky delights or just pure danger? We were undecided.

Anyway, this was the "master bedroom," an add-on in the 1960s and one that has been settling ever since. The floor is so sloped that you can drop a tennis ball at the doorway and watch it pick up speed all the way to the far wall. The room did have two gloriously large cedar closets (no fights over hogging hangers) though little else to impress.

But after getting a new ceiling and several coats of primer and paint (we're not sure how long we'll stick with the color. It might just be too passive), we ended up with this decidedly more airy bedroom. This was no quick fix and will be a work in progress for the foreseeable future.



It now needs some appropriate curtains. I'm thinking light and gauzy, hung high and extending a bit beyond the window casing to make those skimpy panes look a big bigger. It also needs a funky textile for above the bed, a good, clean rug, some bright art, an ottoman, bedside tables, ceiling lights, this and that.

But for now, it works. And so much better than before. And that glory in the middle? Well, that's our marriage saver, a Tempur-Pedic mattress, our best investment yet.