Solace.

She asks me to send news of glad things in my life, and what I think of first are the flowering trees all along the sides of the roads in the neighborhood where my excellent friends took me to dinner tonight.  The pear trees and the weeping cherries, in the early evening sun, laid out lane after lane of light: the flowers themselves delicate, but their blossoms so profuse and the trees so many and thick that whole houses disappeared behind them.  And I think of the wine we drank with dinner, a 2005 Muga that balanced paella and calamari just so.  And I think of the crabapple blossoms we saw after dinner, spots of near-red just ready to burst, waiting to bloom sometime next week.  And I think of not having had my camera for any of these things, of having now to offer you yet another of my local flowers, since we don't have that profusion of trees or that slant of light.  "You'll just have to remember it," said my excellent poet friend, as we made our way to our restaurant (a restaurant named, in fact, for the very city my glad-things-needing friend will soon visit).

What I think of most, though, is that all these things are, in and of themselves, not unlike all those flowers on all those trees tonight.  They're beautiful and quick; the new leaves will push them all aside in so short a time, and then we will be fast in the thick of summer, with all its thriving and living.  And they were beautiful and brief even within the space of these so-swift last weeks of our semester: I fear that first thing tomorrow, the idyll will break as the reality of the days ahead hits me once again. 

But here's the thing: every one of those days--even on the ones when I don't understand why things are happening the way they are, why relationships shift the way they do, why unfair things afflict people I love--I will see or hear at least one small thing that will salvage the day.  There will be the emergency sirening cardinal hiding in plain view inside the burning bush outside my officehouse, or the cat in the window next door, looking to see if he can see to my kitchen, looking to see if I'll come pet him through the windowglass.  Or the eight curled tulip leaves spearing out of the college lawn, all apart from the other flowers, presumably remnants from some earlier planting.  There will be a hairwashing and a haircutting, and to get to them, I will have to hurry away from school more quickly than I'd usually do on a Monday, but once I'm safely arrived, I'll have the pleasure of someone's tending to my head for a little while.  There will be a set of events I'll have to take care of on Tuesday, but once they're underway, I'll have the pleasure of watching students and colleagues meet a new person's work.  The week will go on like this, five big things after five others, not even one by one by one, and I won't get everything finished, and I'll once again think that the weekend will save me.  But all around me, more birds will make themselves heard, and more trees and bushes will push their fine buds out of their woody branches, because now it is time for these things to be.  

I've been fighting against myself in my writings here lately because some of what's happening with me either feels not particularly interesting or is downright frustrating, to the point where what I'd like to write is something that would come out of anger and sorrow.  But I think of having described this space to a friend, back in the fall, as a project more about a maintenance of a certain affect than about almost any other thing, and I know that what I want is not to blaze out the fieriest things I'm feeling but rather to figure out how to let that fire be there, be present and real, without letting it out to eat up everything I'm doing and thinking and writing in front of other people.  What I want is what I keep on breathing towards: a kind of solid equanimity that, as if it were some big emotional bicep, I'll have strengthened enough in the easier days so that on the harder days, I'll be ready for the heavy lifting.  Lots of things feed that equanimity: the enormous, strange birthday card my parents sent me, which started singing "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" at top volume this morning in the post office; picking my slow but increasingly competent way into a piece by Beethoven; figuring out how to load 120 film into a camera.  And a lot of deliberate breathing, the kind that, at the doctor's office on Friday afternoon, almost put me to sleep while I waited for my nurse practitioner to arrive.

I don't know if all of this thinking aloud constitutes anything like a set of glad things in my life.  So here's a last offering: a sheep I saw nearly a year ago, the day I climbed a mountain in Wales. Because who wouldn't love a sheep like this one, one-third of the way up a mountain?

That's what I've got, other than to say that I'm in the struggle with you, girlfriend.  You're not alone. Every day isn't a good one, and I'm betting that Sunday will be better than Saturday was.

Workspace.

I don't tell anyone how much time I spend dreaming about the perfect place to work.  Not the perfect job, or even the perfect work--though I do dream about that, too.  But the perfect place for working, the perfect space.  The two years I spent with a tree-height office in the officehouse gave me a good space; the few months I had in the strange downtown above-the-bike-shop loft-studio (before the weird and ultimately fraudulent debt collector company took the place over in the middle of the night and stashed our stuff in a storage closet--as longtime readers may recall) also gave me a space that was nearly what I needed.  In both: a second-floor perch, big windows, interesting things to see out windows, good desks, space for books, high ceilings.  And quiet. 

I'm fixing to get lots of these things back when we make our move to the new officehouse. 

But I'm dreaming about them for home, too, scheming a bit for a house like a brain.  So many things are logistical impossibilities right now, and will be for so many years, that it actually doesn't make sense not to dream like a banshee.  And so I do.

Spring monsters.

Life starts again here in the smallest ways.  Some of them are expected: I know which trees to watch for which signs, and when.  I know the rise and fall of these last weeks, the ways I will see something that is required of me and all but turn my head away from it--only to turn toward another thing that is required of me, so that it should be difficult to feel bad about putting things off, which doesn't always stop me. 

Squirrels race and fall in the high-sunned downspout just outside my bedroom.

Last night, after one of the most joyful readings I've ever attended, I saw the near-full moon coming up behind the new officehouse on the hill, and all I could think, again and again, was When the cupola is finished, can we go and see the moon? 

In my dream overnight, I was moving house, again, as I will do soon.  And in the dream, my old landlord was somehow planning to rent my new house from the friends to whom it belongs--only so that he could then rent it to me at a higher price.  Meanwhile, I did my best to convince everyone that the house (which was not my friends' real house, though it was theirs in the dream) could be split into two flats, since I had never used one whole floor when I had lived in it previously. 

When my beloved classicist retired from the college, his wife handed me an empty box during one of my visits and told me that I wasn't allowed to come back into their house until I'd filled the box with books from his old office and packed them away in my car.  For several days, I have contemplated making a similar move with myself, though on a vector from home to office, in the hope of minimizing the trauma of hauling large numbers of book boxes in May and June.  Each time I go in to the office, I tell myself, I should carry one box of books with me.  Which would require the car each time I go.  Which might not matter, since these days I'm coming home so late most nights that I'm driving the car anyway. 

You see the circles in which my mind is running these days.  It seems clear to me that loading a camera with film and going out to take slow pictures would be a good idea right about now.

And yet, and yet: one of these days' small dissonances is that underneath the gritted quickness of so much of what I do is a kind of persistent and solid pleasure in this place and in this particular life.  It's no inviolable joy, no perfection; small and inexplicable sorrows have sprung up as the spring's unexpected afflictions.  Instead, it's a kind of contrapuntal determination toward a strange, sad, and sweet kind of joy that I think I've known for much of my life but am perhaps only now embracing as my own.

Small mechanicals.

When I returned home after another long day, I found a package slip waiting in the dirt-verge just outside my front door.  Sure enough, it turned out that my UPS man had delivered a mysterious square box--which I soon realized was not mysterious at all: it contained the two floating shelves I'd ordered on the weekend so that I could get some of the feet-high piles of books beside my bed up off the ground.  Now, here's a sentence that might make you giggle: because one is supposed to mount these units directly into a stud, I dug out my studfinder and my drill and got ready to work.  For a long time, I believed that my studfinder was somehow broken.  A couple of weeks ago, though, I discovered that I just didn't understand how it worked, how its magnet responds to the nailheads in a stud, and how you have to be careful to track down the level at which studs have been nailed if you want the finder to make its little demonstration of joy that you've found what it's looking for. 

Tonight, armed with that knowledge, I soon had two stacks of books suspended, one above the other, on the wall beside my bed, into which I climbed soon after, and where I am soon to be sleeping soundly.

Cavity.

I find myself hanging on to wise things wise women have told me, and I find myself fingering the iron ring on my right hand, remembering what it's there for.  Remembering its silver lining. 

In the dentist's chair, I learn that all of my teeth's pockets are of normal depth.  All thirty-two teeth, one through sixteen up, around, and back, seventeen through thirty-two down, around, and back.  The dentist sticks his little crook into one of the wisdom teeth the old dentist never took; the crook sticks; I know it's small bad news; and indeed it looks as though I'll soon get my life's second filling.  Briefly we talk orthodontics, the possibility of tooth removal and re-straightening.  Only later do I realize how fully another stint in braces is not in my future.  And only later than that do I realize how much Parker Posey has to do with my refusal to get re-braced.  

All day--except for a brief spell in the late morning when the sun shines through the high windows of the campus auditorium--the sky spits snow, hurls tiny balls of ice at us.  I wear my winter coat for the first time in weeks.  I think, and I think, and I think, and it turns out to have been a down day, and that, I trust, will turn out to be all right, when all is said and done.