Done!

I am done with another semester, another season in another place, but it doesn't seem that time has passed. Thanks to air conditioning, the air felt just this cold when I got here. I have so few entries to add to my list of places where I've slept. I've gotten acquainted with many new people, but I've lost contact with many more. I have made a few new friends.

I am done with seven presentations, eight classes, thirteen textbooks, twenty credits, and one hundred and fifty one single spaced pages of academic writing. I know I know more than I used to, but what? Would I know more if I had actually read all the textbooks, or maybe at least bought them? No. I would just be more poor, more tired.

I am done with a big chunk of work that I needed to do to prepare myself for my vocation. And for all the times I thought I wouldn't be able to get it all done, it really wasn't that bad. It was good.

God is not done working on me, not even for the semester. As I rest in celebration of God becoming human, all the pieces of me that are still flying through the air will settle into something, and I will see what God has done. For, when all is said and done, God has done it all.

Walk

I'm squeezing snow into heel-shaped wafers
as blank-flavored as this air,
from which all impurities have fallen
because it is so cold.
The far away is louder than the near
because it is so quiet here.
The only sound is squeaking, squeezing snow.

I sure hope not.

Professor Vallone keeps saying that I am a researcher, but I'm pretty sure that I am an old woman reading poetry on the porch of her cabin in the mountains. I must go there to meet her. Country road, take me home, to the place where I belong. Somewhere west. The whole world is west of here, but only half the universe– assuming we are in the center of the universe. I sure hope not.

not my own

When the toaster oven timer quit ticking, I paused from preparing a lesson plan for students I still don't have. Someday I'll find out if preparing lesson plans really takes so much time. I hear that I won't really find out what busy is until I get to "real life." Well, this is my life.

This is my life: eight classes, a lab called "teacher aiding," a job at the writing center and an endless drone of assigned reading and assigned writing. Sometimes this life gets interrupted to live a little bit– to share with roommates, to talk to my boyfriend, to cook something at my dresser-top kitchen.

I opened the toaster oven door on my supper: pumpkin bread with raisins, pears, and chocolate-chip swirls. It was still dough for the most part, but since the top was starting to burn, I had to take it out and eat it. Delicious. Not bad at all for a half-dead toaster oven that I bought at the thriftstore, that Lori brought home in her backpack, and that Bryna immediately started making plans for. I still call the toaster oven mine, but I'm not too possessive. Especially since only the top coils ever glow.

While I enjoyed the aroma of my almost-burnt-but-still-not-ready creation, I glanced at my watch. "Gospel choir soon," I thought. I looked from the computer to the open syllabus on the floor to the books sprawled across my bed. "It's going to be a late night."

Tonight I'll study for a quiz, finish that lesson plan, and write the rough draft for a twenty page paper. Tomorrow who knows what I'll do. I'm not worrying. I will keep on doing what I need to do each day because I know this isn't my life. Sure, I might always be this busy, but not this busy. And someday I'll cook in a convection oven… or in ember-covered earthenware. As long as I don't always cook in a half-dead toaster oven, I'll be fine. As long as things keep changing, I'll know that one thing stays the same.

I am being made whole and wholehearted. I won't always distract myself with half-cooked messes. I won't always feel so brain-fried and so undone at the same time. I'll find my consistency, but not for myself. No, this isn't my life. I am not my own.

Scars from a Semester

It's easiest to see the scars when it's cold. One is on my left hand, on the middle knuckle. Sometime while I was lugging my luggage from Heathrow to my hostel the handle of the rolling one took off a piece of my skin. I still have my London transit card that I bought that day. It's called an Oyster card and it's sitting on my desk. The jacket that it came in says, "Don't throw away your Oyster card, you can use it again and again." It's not the comma splice that bugs me. London can make up their own English grammar and I don't care. I just don't like it because it's false. I can't use my Oyster card anymore. But I still won't throw it away.

The other scar is on my right hand, on the middle knuckle. It is in perfect symmetry with the first scar, except that it is four-and a-half months fresher. The handle of my rolling luggage gave it to me on the day I left Spain.

In Spanish, notable sentences like questions and exclamations get punctuation on both sides. My body is making up its own grammar, where notable periods get periods on each luggage-pulling fist. The little round scar on the left let me know that something was definitely going to happen and the little round scar on the right let me know that it was finished. Now I hold my cold fists at my sides and try to read this sentence inside me. I question, I exclaim, I declare, and I hope these scars never heal lest I start to doubt.

Election Night

I promise to be in bed in an hour, which might work out to be right around the sugar low of the giant bowl of ice cream that I just ate. It was for the election. Ice cream is the extent of my political involvement. I didn't vote.

The week that my voter registration card proved useless and my car got donated to the Right to Life, I didn't really care about the government. It makes me sad– not that I don't have a permanent address and not that I don't have a car, but that I am less informed about the candidates than the average homeless woman. Whoever gets elected I better learn about, because I'm going to be teaching full time in a little over fourteen months. Somehow my students' president means more to me than my own. I don't think that's a sign of selflessness. I think that's just a sign of procrastination.

summer and winter

I saw it snow today. First time since the night I sat behind the wing and watched them de-ice the plane as we counted down the last ten seconds before 2008. I've seen snow since then– that mountain range somewhere between Heathrow and Madrid, those ski runs in the Sierra Nevada and those ice fields we trecked across to summit Mulhacén. One morning at Sol Duc I woke up cold and looked at the peaks past the pools and saw fresh snow. Even when Rachel visited me at the end of the summer we slid down snow to sit by the lake just inside the high divide. But I think this is the first day that I saw it coming down.

I saw a raccoon tonight, hanging from the sidewalk like an upside-down sloth. He reminded me of Ricky and Rocky and the one that showed up later who I called Rooky. Those raccoons would do laps around the edge of the roof of the Sol Duc lodge in the middle of the day. The guests would get so excited. Sometimes in the evening they would peak into Ryan's window. Amy would go outside and feed them out of her hand, and I still regret not doing the illegal deed with her. That's not the only thing I regret not doing this summer, but it would have been the easiest to do.

I saw a bare-branched tree shaking in the wind and I felt my nose stiffen from the cold. Winter will seem so long this year. But then, I've had a long summer.