Going on.
We are in the time of lovely and unexpected fruits.
The beginning of being gone.
Every time I teach my summer course, I forget how much it takes. I never forget how much it gives; that's immeasurable and immense. But I always forget how much it takes.
Coming and going.
My next batch of students is here already, and I have met them, and they seem lovely and eager. Tomorrow--in just under 12 hours, in fact--we begin three weeks of high emotion and excitement and enthusiasm, whcih will come mixed with fear and anxiety and worry and stress. For me as well as them. But the photocopies are clipped and stacked on the kitchen table, and a banana bread is in the oven, and I will take a deep breath and go to bed early and get up in the morning ready to change all our lives for a stretch of days that will last so long but pass so quickly.
Short parting.
Continuing to pack books for a move two weeks off, I have reached a point where I have to decide what goes to my old office (from there to be moved by others to my new office) and what goes to my next year's home, a process made all the more intriguing by the fact that I'm only roughly guessing at how many books I can fit onto the shelves I requested for the new office--shelves that I can see up in the windows of said office, every time I pass the new officehouse! and yet cannot visit or fill as of yet!
The sorting process is easier if done while packing boxes, rather than after boxes have been delivered; I learned this first-hand when I had to sort through my book boxes in Rochester, the week after my move there, in order to find the things that I wanted to be able to reach during the year I lived there.
Outside my study, a deer I cannot see steps slowly through the woods, crushing each time she moves.
The hardest thing about sorting books is keeping myself from not-packing the ones I think I'll read tomorrow. These are many.
Out to dinner.
Tonight my excellent friends and I piled into their car for a field trip to one of our favorite restaurants, an hour's drive to the northeast through fields and tiny towns and sprawled rippling farms dotted with cows. The corn's green thickens. The wheat fields turn toward yellowing. At the end of our journey, a street fair full of motorcycles and live music, a whole other world happening just around the corner from the plate glass sealing us in with our lovely artisanal food, each dish laden with layers of unexpected flavor, or of the expected done perfectly.
On the drive home, I clicked my lens to manual focus and sought to catch our coming.