Next stop: Idaho

Today I turn my tired eyes westward toward Idaho, where next week I'll present a paper at the biennial conference of ASLE (the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment). I've never been to Idaho but wow, does it look great online. Mountains! Waterfalls! Lakes! Rivers! Buttes! We have many lovely land formations in Ohio but we suffer from an unfortunate dearth of buttes.

And then there is the conference itself. This will be my third ASLE conference and I've enjoyed every one, from the engaging panels to the networking opportunities to the many people passionate about literature and nature. It was at an ASLE conference that I first encountered Joni Tevis and bought her first book, The Wet Collection, which was the start of a rewarding relationship; next week I'll ask her to sign her new book, The World Is On Fire, which is also terrific.

ASLE lacks the intensity and pretense of a big conference like MLA; no one is interviewing for jobs or trying to impress anyone, so the atmosphere tends to be relaxed. I won't even pack a power suit. Instead, I'll take lots of hiking clothes and hope to get out into the wild a few times. 

But where? 

That was my morning project: finding locations I'd like to visit within an hour's drive of Moscow, Idaho. I'm staying in the dorm on the cheap so I can afford to splurge on a rental car, and I'm accepting suggestions for terrific things to see. I don't know Idaho, but I like what little I can see from this distance.

Rest stop at the end of the road

By the end of my week of essay-reading in Louisville, I was thoroughly tired of people. 

Nothing personal--I love people! Some of my best friends are people! I had a great time with my regular AP roommate and some other charming individuals, but I am less enthralled with people en masse. I just can't spend eight or ten hours a day working, eating, and being shoved to the back of elevators with the same thousand people without wanting to sit in a quiet room all by myself and stare out the window at birds.

Which is what I intend to do today.

Yes: finally I am back home. It took some work. We were dismissed later than usual, and then the drive home was impeded by an overturned truck on I-71. I dropped my colleague off first and then hied me on home by around 11 p.m., which means that the five-hour trip took us a little over seven hours. Who's been driving trucks all over my eyeballs?

My front lawn is screaming to be mowed and my garden cries out for weeding, but it rained all night long so I think I'll just sit here and stare for a while. The hummingbirds are zipping around already. They toil not, neither do they spin--and they never shove me to the back of the elevator. This day is for the birds! 

Kentucky fried

On my last full day in Louisville I walked upriver in search of chickens--and found them! Yes: the chickens have come home to roost! Along with the geese, ducks, flamingos, and guineas.

Last year I wrote about my failed quest to introduce a new acquaintance to the Flock of Finns, my favorite spot in Louisville, only to discover that the colorful steel folk-art birds had been shipped to Oberlin, Ohio for repairs and repainting (read it here). They're back now, brighter and cheerier than ever, although they looked pretty hot out there in the sweltering summer heat. (Broilers or fryers?)

I know my brain is pretty fried after six full days of reading student essays. At some point tomorrow the final essays will be read and we will be officially released from the big ol' reading room, at which point this Kentucky fried reader is going home to roost just as quickly as my wings--er, wheels--can take me there.

 

An elevating experience

It's hard to maintain contact with the outside world when you're sequestered in a hotel in an undisclosed location and spending your days in a room full of super-smart people trying to thwart an evil plot to take over the world.

Except that's not quite what I'm doing. Once again I find myself in Louisville reading essays for the Test That Dare Not Speak Its Name, sworn to utmost secrecy about every detail of the test on threat of being beaten about the head and shoulders with a sheaf of student papers. So I really can't reveal anything about the actual work, but I'm happy to talk about elevators.

We spend a lot of time in elevators, of necessity. In past years my roommate and I have avoided the elevator problem by walking up and down the steps, but this year we're on the 22nd floor, which has its advantages (great view, no traffic noise) as well as disadvantages (I'm not walking up 22 flights of stairs; I walked down once and got horribly dizzy from all the turns). In the morning we hit the "down" button on the elevator and wait wait wait until an elevator finally stops for us, often empty--but it doesn't stay that way for long. With something like a thousand people all wanting to get down to breakfast at the same time, the elevator tends to stop at nearly every floor, so those of us who got in first keep getting pushed further back as new folks enter. Just at the point when I have my back shoved up against the wall and my nose jammed into some tall person's backpack, someone up front says, "Sure, we've got room for one more!" 

But somehow we've survived morning elevator madness and we were smart enough to bring fleece jackets to fend off the Arctic blast in the great big reading room. Ninety degrees outdoors, something like twelve below inside: how am I supposed to dress for that? And the food hasn't killed us. Yesterday there were blueberries on the breakfast bar! They almost made up for the "meatloaf with tomato gravy" served at supper, which appeared to be soggy cardboard topped with watery ketchup.

But, as I've said, we're surviving. So far. Two days down, five more to go. We can do this! (When we're done, I'm swearing off elevators for a while. No, we don't have room for one more!) 

Verse for a holey week

In On Poetry, poet Glyn Maxwell directs me to consider the shape of the white space surrounding, preceding, and following a poem, the nature of the emptiness that calls forth lines. Today I consider the blank spaces in my week: the void at the end of my driveway where the cow stood staring, the shape of the air that keeps my canoe afloat, the birding excursion that vanished into nothingness when my car broke down, the blank Word document begging to be filled with grant-application verbiage, the hole opening up beneath an old filling in a tooth I don't remember cracking--and now the loss of yet another valued colleague, who just announced she's taken a job elsewhere starting immediately so we won't soon be sitting around the department office comparing our dental woes, as women of a certain age tend to do.

I may not be a poet, but lately I feel like an expert on emptiness:

Empty chair
holey tooth
buoyant air
fading youth

docs to write
cows to shoo
birds to sight
pills to chew

(bitter pills--
better start!)
voids to fill
open heart





So that's the poem of my week. How about yours?

From Lunchbox Envy to Mechanical Mourning

I was heading for an early rendezvous with the local birding group when my car decided it had other plans: first the check engine light came on, then the traction warning light (on a clear summer day!), then the battery and oil pressure lights, and I didn't even realize that I had no power steering until I detoured into the nearest parking lot, where my car came to a crooked stop right in front of a wooden "welcome" sign with a cheery painted bluebird perched on top.

That was the end of my birding for the day, which is fine, actually, because I have a ton of stuff to do before I leave for Louisville next week and I'm not really in the mood for another round of Lunchbox Envy. This birding group consists of retired people with enough time on their hands to go on all-day (and sometimes multi-day) birding expeditions once a week all year round, and they're always equipped to survive the birding apocalypse, whatever that might be. I don't envy their expensive spotting scopes and smart-phone birding apps and precision binoculars with names I can't pronounce, but every time they sit down for lunch with their colorful insulated multi-compartmental lunchboxes, I find myself transported back to those thrilling days of yesteryear when I would eat lunch in the grade-school cafeteria surrounded by fancy-shmancy lunchboxes with pictures of The Partridge Family on the front and real thermoses inside while I sat there with crumpled paper bag containing a peanut butter sandwich and an apple.

But I'm not here to complain about my sad, pathetic inability to get with the program, lunchbox-wise. I'm here to talk about my garage mechanic, who responded to a phone call at 6:45 a.m., drove five miles down to where I had pulled over, fiddled with my car there in the parking lot, and then let me follow him in his car while he drove my car back to his shop, where he scanned the car's computer, located the loose clamp that had caused a particular part to come loose (thereby messing up the oxygen mix and making the oxygen sensor shut down the engine in alarm), replaced the clamp, cleaned the corrosion off my battery, took the car for a drive to make sure everything was back to normal, and let me get away for a mere $60.

Is he the best mechanic ever or what? I can't count the number of times he has come to my rescue. He's had some helpers over the years but he's mostly a one-man shop, and we have always found him helpful and trustworthy--and I always come away from his shop with a smile, even after I've paid way more than $60.

And now he is retiring!

For good!

I suppose he deserves a break, considering how hard he's worked over the years, but I fear that I'll never find another mechanic like this one, who seems to care as much about us as he does about our cars. Anywhere else, we'll just be customers.

So I guess I should be thankful that I had one last chance to spend some time with my mechanic before he shuts down for good. It was $60 well spent--and besides, it saved me from once again exposing the birding group to my pathetic lunchboxlessness.   

Powerless before the bovine invasion

Today I find myself facing a challenge for which a Ph.D. in literature provided inadequate preparation: how to get a cow out of my driveway.

It is not my cow. I do not have a cow, except occasionally in the form referred to by the colloquial expression "Don't have a cow, dude." Nevertheless there is a cow in my driveway and it needs to go away. Why? Because this driveway isn't big enough for the two of us.

Where did the cow come from? Whose cow is it? Why did the cow cross the road? The cow is supremely unhelpful, only gazing placidly at me without uttering a peep. (Or a moo, I guess. Cows don't peep. As far as I know. I've never seen a peeping cow, I hope to never see one....But on the other hand, I have seen a pooping cow. Don't get me started.)


The cow isn't really doing any harm in my driveway; in fact, if she keeps chomping on the weeds alongside the drive, I may not have to mow out there this week. But what happens when the weeds run out? Will she notice greener grass over in the meadow and then move inexorably toward the garden? I can't have a cow eating my tomato plants. Time to call in the cavalry! (Cowvalry?)

It doesn't take a village to reroute a wayward cow, just one neighbor on a four-wheeler, who leads the cow to pasture. Finally, the cow has left the driveway, allowing me to drive off utterly cowfree. (Udderly?) 

A welcome home with woodland creatures

A doe nursed a tiny spotted fawn on the shore as we sat in the canoe silently, hardly daring to breathe, wondering how long the deer would endure our presence. How long did we sit there bobbing on the water while watching the deer? Five minutes? Six? Ten? Eventually the fawn finished feeding and went bounding through the shrubbery while the doe simply watched us, and then, having apparently decided that we posed no threat, she turned and walked calmly into the woods. The fawn took a few more playful leaps through the greenery before mother and child disappeared from view.

Moments like that are why we love canoeing. This morning didn't look like a good canoeing weather, with temperatures starting in the 50s, overcast skies, and a light but persistent breeze, but the gloomy outlook must have discouraged other boaters because we saw only one small fishing boat when we set out from the dock and not another boat or person as we paddled the full length of Lake Hope. At the upper end we snaked through pink water lilies and yellow lotus blossoms and shoved the canoe over mud flats to find the channel through reeds into a feeder creek, which we followed until we met a dead end at a very tightly constructed beaver dam.

We didn't see the beavers, but later we watched a muskrat washing its face, a great blue heron fishing, and hordes of tree swallows swooping over the water's surface to snatch insects. Once a slender dragonfly perched on the top of my husband's baseball cap, transforming it into a propeller-beanie. 

Lake Hope is small and not at all spectacular, but it's a good easy starting point to our canoeing season. How can we have avoided canoeing up to today? Bad weather, too many weekend commitments, too much work--I can't remember the last time we took a whole day off together. I was a little worried that it would take a while to readjust after being away from the canoe since last fall, but the minute I felt the boat under me, muscle memory took over and I felt at home.

But not so much at home as the doe and fawn we watched on the lakeshore. I've never seen a fawn feeding in the wild before and I'll probably never see it again, but I wish I could thank them for letting us share their peaceful moment even for just a little while.

Enraptured by raptors 'n' writing: H is for Hawk

Speaking of birds, here is a paragraph from H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, from an early chapter in which the author describes her first childhood experience observing goshawks:

We walked in dark winter light over fields furred with new wheat. Vast flocks of fieldfares netted the sky, turning it to something strangely like a sixteenth-century sleeve sewn with pearls. It was cold. My feet grew heavy with clay. And twenty minutes after we'd set out, it happened--the thing I expected, but for which I was entirely unprepared. A goshawk killed a pheasant. It was a short, brutal dive from an oak into a mess of wet hedge; a brief, muffled crash, sticks breaking, wings flapping, men running, and a dead bird placed reverently in a hawking bag. I stood some way off. Bit my lip. Felt emotions I hadn't names for. For a while I didn't want to look at the men and their hawks any more and my eyes slipped to the white panels of cut light in the branches before them. Then I walked to the hedge where the hawk had made her kill. Peered inside. Deep in the muddled darkness six copper pheasant feathers glowed in a cradle of blackthorn. Reaching through the thorns I picked them free, one by one, tucked the hand that held them into my pocket, and cupped the feathers in my closed fist as if I were holding a moment tight inside itself. It was death I had seen. I wasn't sure what it had made me feel.

I'm not sure what this paragraph makes me feel but I've been trying to figure out what makes Macdonald's prose so compelling. What happens here? A young girl sees a hawk kill a pheasant and feels something she can't quite describe, and yet the adult's description of the child's feelings breathes life into the scene. How does she do it?

Macdonald's sentences tend toward the opposite of flamboyance--they don't jump up and down and wave their arms calling "Look at me! Look at me!" Instead, they amble toward the edge of the hedge and invite readers to peer quietly at mundane treasures.

"We walked in dark winter light over fields furred with new wheat" could be a line of poetry, offering compression, rhythm, alliteration, and an interesting image--furred fields, as if the earth itself were a sleeping beast. Then comes the next sentence, with the apt "netted" and that unexpected pearl-encrusted sleeve, one of the longer sentences in the piece at 19 words. The longest sentence is a mere 38 words, the shortest 2, and the average words per sentence is 13.4--hardly Faulknerian, but her prose carries me forward one careful step at a time until a simple statement delivers a gut-punch: "It was death I had seen." 

If I encountered that sentence in a student paper, I would probably suggest that the student write less monosyllabically and avoid the "it was" construction because it tends to multiply words without adding much to meaning, but Macdonald somehow makes six common one-syllable words speak forcefully, placing "death" at dead center of attention. How does she do it?

I'm only three chapters in to H is for Hawk but it's slow going because I keep needing to re-read passages like this one to see how she produces such powerful prose with so little apparent effort. And aside from the writing (if it's possible to talk about the content of a book aside from the writing), the story is engaging as well, describing the author's attempt to cope with her father's death by training a goshawk. Far from the typical "seven stages of grief" self-help cliches, Macdonald's memoir has much to say about topics that touch all of us daily--the weather, for instance, and the lasting significance of apparently insignificant details drawn from past events, like those six copper pheasant feathers.

Say that out loud: "six copper pheasant feathers." Or try the whole sentence: "Deep in the muddled darkness six copper pheasant feathers glowed in a cradle of blackthorn." How many people could produce even one sentence that perfect in a lifetime? And here Helen Macdonald has boiled down her life into a memoir full of sentences like that. I don't know about you, but I want to follow her into that hedge and see what other treasures she'll find there.

Birding with words

Birding without a camera means I don't have any photos of the birds I saw, so let's put them into words while the memory is still fresh: 


1. A prothonotary warbler, my first, perched on a branch low in a willow alongside a quiet backwater at the lily-clogged edge of a lake, the brilliant yellow and gray bird bobbing down to the lilies and back up to the willow branch over and over, giving us a warbler show without making us crane our necks toward the treetops.  

2. A cerulean warbler, also my first, singing its distinctive song deep within the dense tree canopy so that all the bird experts present know just what they're hearing without being able to catch a glimpse until finally, just for a moment, he shows himself, a flash of blue and white on a branch, and then flies off.

3. A hermit thrush building a nest in a thicket of ferns atop a boulder deep in the woods at Conkle's Hollow, popping out on a nearby branch before flying off to forage for nesting material and then returning with a beak full of twigs.

4. A prairie warbler sitting on the third branch up the trunk of a dead pine and singing its heart out--and best of all, being the first to spot him, despite being the least experienced birder in the group.

And what about the indigo buntings, yellow warblers, and yellow-breasted chat? And the solitary cedar waxwing sharing the branch of a dead tree with a pushy brown-headed cowbird? And the great blue herons, blue-grey gnatcatcher, and northern parula? They sang my sorrows away today, taking me to a green world where nothing much matters except a burst of song and a flash of color high in the treetops.  

Watered-down writing

I don't need water to write, right? That's what I keep telling myself as I postpone starting on the next stage of my writing project while waiting for the plumber to arrive and fix the well pump. We haven't had running water at our house since Saturday night, but the lack of water really should not prevent me from getting down to work. Right?

In fact, the lack of water ought to open up extra time since it prevents me from doing so many other things: cleaning the house, washing dishes, doing laundry, showering. (I haven't washed my hair since Friday. You don't want to know what it looks like.) Yesterday we did our annual Memorial Day putting-in-the-garden thing, which was impeded by the need to haul water out of the cistern and carry it down to the garden in buckets. We're also using cistern water for flushing the toilets but you wouldn't want to bathe in the cistern water or, worse yet, drink it. It's kind of green. In a pinch we could boil some, but we have five-gallon jugs full of drinking water so it's not an emergency. Yet.

And now look at those dark clouds rolling in! If we get a hard rain, I'm taking my shampoo outside and washing my hair. (Which I clearly can't do while writing. Right?)  

Literally no tomorrow (figuratively speaking)

"There's no tomorrow," says a deep, calm, trustworthy voice on the radio. "We end at 9:00, so there's literally no tomorrow."

That's not the kind of news I like to hear when I turn on my favorite NPR station to hear the morning news--and why does he sound so calm if this really is the end of the world?

But wait--it's not the end of the world; it's just the end of the fund drive. What a relief! 

Oops, better pledge quickly so I can get one of those crank-up radios designed to keep me connected in the event of apocalypse. That way, I'll be able to keep listening to my favorite radio newscasters when there really is no tomorrow--literally.



 

Fruitful conversations across disciplines

We've reached my favorite part of the daily schedule at Writing Boot Camp: colleagues reading each others' drafts and offering comments. I love to eavesdrop as colleagues from different departments discover commonalities, such as the two who got into a passionate discussion of the joys of actuarial science. (We don't have an actuarial science program, but where two or more get excited about a potential program, you never know what might happen.) Yesterday an expert on Buddhism gave me some great insights on an essay I'm writing that deals with a Buddhist nun, and right now an expert on the economics of oil and gas markets is conferring with an expert on petroleum geology. We're rocking and rolling!

Best of all, this week we've experienced the benefits of working as part of a community of scholars, encouraging each other to refine ideas and reach writing goals. I've challenged my Boot Campers to form writing partnerships over the summer, linking up with another colleague to offer regular encouragement, offer updates on progress toward goals, and meet periodically to read and respond to drafts. We'll see how it works, but first we need to wrap up this week and wander over to the all-campus picnic before it's over.

They're still talking. I don't want to make them stop. Why can't we keep this conversation going all summer long?

Getting a boost at boot camp

I was in a meeting all morning so I had no idea that the weather had turned from wretched to wonderful. I stepped out of the library expecting dark clouds and oppressive heat and humidity, but I found instead blue sky and a dry breeze. This is the nicest weather we've seen for weeks. It ought to be illegal to sit inside on a day like today.

However, I'm delighted that I had the chance to attend my meeting today, along with similar meetings tomorrow and Thursday. Today I led the inaugural session of our faculty writing boot camp, beginning with goal-setting and writing sprints, then an hour and a half of intensive writing time, then feedback from colleagues, then lunch. We had a small group (seven including me), but I'm pleased that anyone signed up at all considering that we are two weeks into summer break and there are no stipends or other rewards for participation.

Well, there are intangible rewards: distraction-free writing time, feedback from fellow scholars, encouraging discussions during breaks--and let's not forget the free lunch. Most of the participants are untenured and eager to boost their scholarly productivity, and this three-day workshop is designed to get the momentum going so they can ride it all summer long.

I'll be riding that wave too. I managed to write 1000 words on a conference paper draft this morning, and then I got some good advice about how to shift around two paragraphs to clarify the argument. I've hit a bit of a snag at the start of the next section, but I'm not worried. I'm counting on tomorrow's writing boot camp to hoist me over the obstacle and propel me down the course.

Our boot camp slogan? "Drop and give me 50! (Words)." So far, it's working.   

Breaking into summer

This is the rhythm of summer break: 

First c0mes the scramble to finish tasks--submitting grades, attending final meetings, assembling assessment reports--while the interlibrary loan books pile up unread amid the flurry of activity.

Then a week of fitful sleep and grumpiness as body and mind adjust to the new, loose schedule and sudden absence of pressing deadlines. I plant some flowers, do some mowing, grab a book but can't seem to focus on any one task for more than a few minutes.

Then one day I find myself so immersed in a book that I forget to eat supper, my mind bubbling with ways to incorporate these new ideas into my research and writing, and when I put the book down I can finally see the long summer break stretching before me, offering both obligations and recreation but also a chance to follow a network of ideas through a variety of texts and spend long hours writing it all down for my next big project.

It takes some time and a little stress to work through the transition, but now that I've shifted my focus from what has just passed to what lies ahead, I'm definitely liking what I see. It's time to let the good times roll.

Crowded out by nature's mysteries

I want to sit on the back deck and read a book in the sunshine but I can't because of the carcass, once a roly-poly groundhog but now a rotting slab of flesh sitting in the grass just a few feet from the deck, probably deposited there by the dog. We've had some hot days so the odor is ripe and the flies abundant--in fact, a glance at the carcass reveals an area so thick with flies that it sparkles like an iridescent carpet. I suppose I could move the rotting carcass to a more distant location, maybe dump it over the cliff at the back of the yard, but that would require first finding the shovel and then getting close to the stench and the flies.

So I go to the bench in the front yard, which isn't nearly so comfortable as my nice chaise longue on the deck but has the advantage of not being surrounded by the buzzing flies and the stench of dead groundhog, but there I confront yet another mystery of nature: wasps scouring the worn parts of the wood, perhaps scraping up bits of building materials for their nests. I am generally unfazed by wasps fluttering nearby, but I draw the line at moving over so they can chomp at the bit of bench I happen to be occupying.

A carcass covered with flies, a bench being devoured by wasps--what sort of world do I inhabit? Close encounters with nature drew me to my little house in the not-so-big woods, but I do have boundaries. I don't mind snakes living under the front door, but the snakeskin we found above the ceiling tiles downstairs gave me the heebie-jeebies--and those gigantic spiders? Outdoors I'm happy to live and let live, but the minute they cross the threshold and come inside, I'm putting on my stomping shoes.

The back deck and front porch are liminal spaces, bits of indoors projecting into the exterior world. My chaise longue, my bench, my space--only the wasps can't seem to stop themselves from building nests in the plastic recesses beneath the lawn chairs, and the dog likes to drag her kills close to home where she can keep track of them. 

Here's a plan: drag the chaise longue up by the herb gardens, where I can relax far from the stench, flies, and wasps and also get a good angle on the hummingbird feeder. It's a temporary solution but far better than spending such a gorgeous day indoors. At some point someone will have to address the dead groundhog situation, but who says that someone has to be me? Let he who misplaced the shovel wield it wisely.

Ramping up the despicability quotient

On the one hand, we have cheery notes from students grateful for the great experiences they've had in my classes; on the other hand, we have a bitter complaint that causes me to wonder who in that class might be familiar with the spelling of "despicable."

Yes, it's the time of year when an entire semester's back-breaking labor gets reduced to a handful of numbers and incompatible comments on course evaluations: the student who wants to banish all poetry from the survey class or the one who wants me to require no papers in a writing proficiency class, with "best class ever" nuzzling right up next to "worst class ever." I get variations on these every semester, but I pay more attention to the real oddball comments, like the one that called me "a despicable person." What did I do? I don't recall ramping up the despicability quotient in any of my classes.

Hey, maybe that student is a fan of Despicable Me, which could be good news if the role comes with minions. Even one minion would be enough to offset the disadvantages of despicability. So sign me up!   

A miobile Mother's Day

Only a small portion of my Mother's Day was devoted to cleaning vomit off a car-seat (because that's what mothers do), which is a good thing because it wasn't exactly the high point of my day. What was the high point? It's hard to say:

Sitting in the front pew at my brother's church along with my parents, my children and grandchild, both of my brothers and a sister-in-law, a cousin, and a pair of nephews, who had all gathered in North Carolina for a fun family weekend involving a pile of old family photo albums, finger-licking barbecue, and lots of stories.

Waking in my motel room to the sound of my adorable granddaughter singing to her stuffed animals--and, later, sitting on a bench at the Wal-Mart where we stopped during our long drive home and hearing her sing "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider" to me as we waited for our traveling companions.

Following I-77 through a long dark tunnel under a mountain in Virginia and then, as soon as hit the other side, hearing my granddaughter say, "Do it again!" (But there are only so many tunnels on the interstate....)

Sitting in the passenger's seat secure in the knowledge that the driving was in the capable hands of my son, who maneuvered us around an interminable line of stopped cars on I-77 by detouring around the blockage on a twisty country road. (The episode of carsickness caused only a small delay compared to the time we would have wasted and the nerves we would have frayed lurching through stop-and-go traffic in the afternoon sun.)
  
Sharing a crackers-and-snap-peas supper with my family during that long drive home, which, despite interruptions, went smoothly enough to get us to bed by 10, exhausted but thankful.

So forget the vomit and the traffic congestion--my Mother's Day put me in the presence of four generations of my family and took me through tunnels and over mountains accompanied by crackers and snap peas and silly children's songs, and what greater gift could I want? 

Baby got back

"So what's it like to be married to a celebrity?" is what millions of people are not asking me this week--but they could! My husband recently made a big splash at a campus event, so big that his photo was featured on the College's Facebook page. When he first arrived at the retirement party for one of my colleagues, my husband was a total nobody, just a friend dropping by for a piece of cake and a farewell hug. Soon, though, his photo hit the big time and suddenly my husband became the face of the event.

Well, not the face, exactly. 

I never thought my husband's back was particularly photogenic, but surely it wouldn't have ended up in the spotlight if someone hadn't seen it as something special. What a back! Such a great photo is bound to go viral, leading eventually to clickbait lists like "Top ten sartorial secrets of  plaid-backed mystery man." How will such a humble, unassuming Everyman cope with the media attention? Who will handle all the calls from Oprah and ESPN and Vogue?

And what if that celebrated back starts to droop beneath the weight of sudden celebrity? The media spotlight can be fickle; how soon until we see speculation about whether it's time to get the back some botox? 

I don't foresee getting the back its own Twitter feed because most of its tweets would consist of some version of "Ow." It's a back that sometimes works a little too hard and doesn't always get the help it needs. However, now that it's a celebrity, maybe the back will get the pampering it deserves. Hey, here's an idea: auction off an opportunity for the back's fans to deliver back rubs. The adoring fans will get a chance to touch greatness and the back will get some attention. Win-win!

Day of reckoning

Now that the semester is over and grades are turned in (hurrah!), I can look back and reckon up the impact of my research course release. No one has asked for a reckoning, which indicates a gap in our culture of accountability--but just in case anyone is interested in how much a dedicated professor can accomplish with a one-course release and a measly $1000, here's the data:

• Revised a journal article and saw it through the publication process.
• Completed research and (most of the) writing for an anthology essay.
• Presented a conference paper.
• Attended a regional workshop on writing successful NEH grant applications and then led a workshop sharing that information with faculty members here.
• Researched, wrote, and presented a talk on e.e. cummings for our campus colloquium series.
• Served on an ad-hoc task force evaluating our course evaluation system.
• Took an art history class that provided important context for my next big research and writing project as well as the capstone class I'm teaching in the fall.

Is that enough? Just looking at the list wears me out. I probably would have done a few of these things even without the course release, but I wouldn't have even considered the grant workshop, the art history class, or the colloquium talk--and without the funds attached to my course release, I would have had to skip the conference.

But the articles? I certainly would have worked on them without the research course release, but probably more slowly. The gift of dedicated research and writing time during the semester means that I can look forward to starting a whole new project over the summer, a multi-stage project that should take me through the next two or three years.

It all starts with a conference paper next month. Better get back to work!  

A new line on my vita

Here I sit not eating cupcakes, which is difficult considering the plague of colorful cupcakes infesting campus right now. With so many retirement parties, book publication parties, going-away parties, and other types of parties, avoiding cupcakes has become a full-time job. 

While trying to avoid the cupcake table at a colleague's retirement party just now, I asked him to leave behind something when he moves out of his office: His streak of good luck. "We need it more than you do," I pointed out. He promised that he will do what he can and then pointed me toward the cupcakes.

Someone left several dozen cupcakes in the department office, leftovers from some student event. I have two more food-related events to attend today; if I start eating cupcakes this early in the day, I'll be comatose by midafternoon. So this is me auditioning for the role of Cupcake-Avoider In Chief.

Won't that look good on my vita?!  

You'll smell me coming

We didn't know we had ramps until a tree fell on them. Who knows how long they've been growing in that little patch of woods between the meadow and the creek? Unnoticed, unappreciated, unloved--until a tree came down with a WHOMP and released from the forest floor the oniony scent of ramps.

For those unfamiliar with Appalachian cuisine, ramps are wild onions that grow in moist, silty soil. Their flavor is pungent, like a garlicky leek, and they are prized as accompaniments to eggs, bacon, or wild mushrooms.

We've overlooked that patch of ramps for who knows how long simply because they look so unassuming, their green tops resembling the early foliage of wild lilies, but as soon as we realized what we had, I started digging up recipes. Ramp risotto with asparagus and peas, ramp carbonara, cheddar biscuits with ramps and bacon, ramp and goat cheese tart--yum! We ought to have enough ramps for all those and more to give away. I had visions of myself waltzing pungently through academic buildings with a basket full of ramps, the Lady Bountiful of wild onions.

But first I had to pick them. There's nothing easier than picking onions--the ripe bulbs practically sit on surface of the soil, so you just give a little tug and up they come. Ramps, though, grow deeper and hold tighter to the soil, and the spot where they grow on our property has never been tilled or cultivated so the soil is tightly compacted and laced with roots.

"Just take a trowel, loosen up the dirt around the bulbs, and pull 'em up," said the resident green thumb, so down I went this morning to the ramp patch with my best trowel.

It was hard. Really hard. The soil was loosest next to the trench plowed out by the fallen tree, so I worked hard there jabbing the trowel into the soil, digging around rocks and roots. Sometimes I pulled too hard too soon and ended up with a handful of greens while the bulbs remained buried in the ground, and sometimes I simply couldn't work the trowel through all the roots and had to move on with empty (but dirty) hands.

I'd worked into a pretty good rhythm and nearly filled a small grocery bag when the trowel broke. Right in two. Blade in the ground, handle in my hand. That was the end of my first adventure in ramp-digging.

So I've got enough ramps to make some risotto tonight but you won't see the Lady Bountiful of ramps waltzing around campus today. Next time I'll take a shovel.

Wake me when the exam is over

My honors students are frantically writing their final essay exams but the biggest question on my mind is this: Would they find it disruptive if I were to lay my head down on the desk and fall asleep? Or would my snores disturb their writing?

My computer's battery is running low and so is mine. For weeks I've been practicing a particular presentation in my sleep, but last night I got to perform it for real in front of a living, breathing, wide-awake audience, which was pretty exciting--so exciting, in fact, that I couldn't get my brain to wind down afterward. 

So here I sit proctoring an exam for students who seem determined to make use of every single second of the two and a half hours allotted. I keep trying to send them silent messages: Give it up! Turn it in! Have some mercy so I can get some rest! 

But it's not working. They keep putting everything they have into their writing while I'm putting everything I have into just trying to remain upright. 
 

A flex too far

Yes, it's true that in trying times of rapid change and strategic retrenchment and decreasing revenue streams and enrollment challenges and [insert alarmist academic jargon here], it is incumbent upon all of us to be flexible. But, as a colleague succinctly pointed out to me just now, "Sometimes if you bend too far, you end up breaking."

I had just been at a meeting where it was made clear that one solution to a curricular problem is for certain people (e.g., me) to "just be flexible while we work this out." Over the years I've proven my ability and willingness to be flexible, to stretch beyond my area of expertise to cover classes or to teach at odd hours to meet students' needs, and I've even developed whole new courses on very short deadlines when that sort of flexibility was called for. So I guess I'm an expert on flexibility, but flexibility has its limits and I may have found mine today.


I'm reminded of a tree felled by the resident woodsman over the weekend, a tall, strong, hardwood tree that had weathered its share of blows and needed to be brought down before it hurt someone. My husband took chainsaw and axe to the hardy trunk, inserting wedges to ease it toward the creek, and when all was ready he just put out his hand and gave a really hard shove. Anyone coming along at that moment would have been impressed--that man just knocked down a big tree with his bare hands! But they didn't see the earlier cuts and blows that had softened it up and made it ready to break.

I'm not that tree--at least not yet--but I've weathered enough blows that's it's impossible to predict which one might just knock me right over. I may bounce back from today's crisis only to jerked in an entirely different direction tomorrow, but at some point I'm going to stop bending over, and when it happens, you'd better stay out of the way.

It's all over but the missing

Last day of classes! And I feel rotten. Didn't sleep well. Dreamed of floods. Woke with a rotten headache. Please may I be excused from class today?

Fortunately, I don't have to think very deeply in today's classes since we are reviewing for the exam in one and doing some final peer review in the other. Instead, I'll think about all the things I'll miss when classes are over:

You know that one guy who always has something interesting to say about the reading because he has not only read the required texts but also read lots of other things and thus understands both content and context? I'll miss him--a lot. I don't get students like that every semester.

My neighbor in the next office has provided laughter and insight and new ideas, but he is moving to a real city without even a job in prospect--because he can. I'll miss him but I sincerely hope that the college will hire someone to fill his spot, not just in the curriculum but in that office. Otherwise, our little hallway will get really lonely.

I'm teaching mostly first-year students in the fall so I'll miss my English majors, especially the one who seemed so annoying at first but who grew on me over time and the one who always comes in with a smile and something cheerful to say and always writes spectacular papers. 

I'll miss the graduating senior with the personalized peanut-butter jar and the one with the impressive camera and the one who likes to flash that big, bright Pioneer smile. I hope they all have Pio-tastic lives and come back to see us sometime.

And I'll miss the great works of literature I've taught this semester, the daily encounters with writers as diverse as Yann Martel, Zora Neale Hurston, and Homer. I'll see many of them again in future class, but some will inevitably stay on the shelf. By the time I find myself immersed in Ruth Ozeki this fall, I will have forgotten everyone and everything that came before. Except that one guy....

Tiptoeing through the tautologies

If I'd known I'd be spending the morning in TautologyTown, I'd have packed something to read besides this stack of quizzes. Of course, without the quizzes, I wouldn't have missed my turn and entered the neverending labyrinth of nonmeaning.

I asked a class to analyze a poem. A villanelle, if you must know, a form we had encountered in class only a week ago when we read Elizabeth Bishop's  "One Art." I outlined the structure on the board: 19 lines, with the first and third reappearing in certain set places, and only two end rhymes. "You will see this form again in next week's reading," I told them. "Be sure to keep a lookout."

So naturally when I assigned Theodore Roethke's "The Waking," I assumed that little lightbulbs would go off over their heads--or even if they didn't recall the word "villanelle" or the pattern we'd discussed in class, I assumed that they would notice that the first and third lines kept being repeated. But just in case they didn't notice the repetitions when they read the poem before class (assuming that they did so), I gave them a reading quiz with the whole poem printed on it and asked them to describe the pattern of repeated lines and draw conclusions about how those repetitions contribute to the meaning of the poem.

Some of them did a lovely job. I saw lots of little a's and b's or stars and check marks or arrows showing where the lines were repeated, and some students made strong connections between this pattern of repetition and the concept that learning requires a lot of feeling around in the dark and bumping into the same obstacles over and over again.

One student claimed that the poem follows no set pattern, which suggests a lack of attention to the most obvious features of the poem. Many more, though, wrote something like this:

The author uses repetition to repeat what he's trying to say.

The repetition reinforces the content by repeating it. 

The meaning of the poem is repeated so readers can understand what he's trying to say.

I could go on, but my brain is screaming at me. He repeats what he repeats! He means what he means! He repeats what he means and he means what he repeats! How did I get stuck in this miserable maze--and can someone please show me the way out?   

Midweek mutterings

Note to the person driving the green SUV in front of me this morning: I'll bet you could find someone to fix that muffler so you don't blast holes in the eardrums of every random stranger who crosses your path. Then again, maybe the noise fits the lifestyle promoted by your bumper sticker: "Asshole: It's not just a word; it's a lifestyle." 

Note to whoever is responsible for the current weather: New windshield wipers definitely improve my outlook on life (and my ability to see where I'm going through the rain), but could we maybe have a day or two when windshield wipers aren't necessary? I'm not asking for much; just let me see the sun once in a while. (Cue massive drought.)

Note to every student who has e-mailed to ask for extra credit this week: As a rule I don't offer extra credit, but this semester I broke that rule twice. You've had two opportunities to do a little extra work outside of class and earn extra points toward your grade, but you did not take advantage of those opportunities. My best advice? Time machine.

Doerr delivers, in print and in person

Tony Doerr with then-student Joy Frank-Collins in 2009

Now that Tony Doerr has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the whole world knows that he is a terrific writer; when he visited Marietta College six years ago, we also learned that he is a great teacher of writing and a marvelous human being.

We invited Doerr here after I had read The Shell Collector and recommended it to colleagues and just after he had published Four Seasons In Rome (which I reviewed here). While here, he read portions of the story "Memory Wall," which became the title piece in his second collection of short stories (which I reviewed here). At his reading, he told us that writers try to draw readers into a dream and hope they don't wake up (read about it here).

His acclaimed novel All the Light We Cannot See weaves together the dreams of a young German soldier and a blind French girl during World War II, touching on many themes common to Doerr's work: memory, alienation, human suffering, and the moments of meaning and beauty that bridge the distances between people and across time. The novel well deserves the Pulitzer and I hope it will draw more readers to his other work as well, but I will always think of Tony Doerr as the guy who sat with our students and talked about their writing with an intensity and insight other writers might reserve for their own work. 

He treated our students like writers. In my book, there is no greater prize.    

Countdown

Two weeks left, and one is finals week! It's almost over! How many essential activities can I squeeze into a mere two weeks?

Classes to teach: 8
Extra optional bonus workshop on documentation to lead: 1
Drafts to read/respond to: 17
Exams to write: 2
Exams to grade: 28
Papers to grade: 17
Reading quiz to write: 1
Reading quizzes to grade: 17
Extra optional bonus reading quiz to write: 1
Extra optional bonus reading quizzes to grade: some number between 0 and 17
Meetings to attend: 9
Meetings I fully intend to skip: 1
Colloquium talk to polish and present: 1
Anthology chapter to revise and submit: 1
Grades to calculate: all of 'em
Hairs to pull out: not all of 'em (I hope)

See,that's not so much. I can handle it as long as my house cleans itself and the lawn stops growing. Piece of cake with ice cream on the side!
 

Color on the wing

A flash of blue, a hint of rust--an eastern bluebird emerges from a box alongside the highway and disappears into the nearby woods. I wonder whether the bird sees me too, whether its eye is drawn to the flash of blue (but no hint of rust) that is my car zooming down the highway.

A splash of green and red outside my living-room window--a hummingbird, the first of the season, looking for the feeder that we haven't taken time to hang out there just yet. We hear and obey: time to brew some nectar.

Every glance out the window lights on color: a horde of goldfinches feeding on thistle, a fat yellow bee buzzing around the shrubs, a brown-headed cowbird coordinating nicely with the reddish-brown spots on the brown thrasher's breast. The dead brown ground is greening up. Time to get out and mow! Hope the noise doesn't blow the birds away.

On not knowing what we don't know

At first glance, it appears that the primary problem in this pile of student drafts is that my students just don't know what they're doing, but that would be wrong. Most of my students know some of what they're trying to do but none of them know all of it and, more seriously, they don't know what they don't know and therefore they don't know how to find solutions to the questions they don't know they need to ask.

By this point in the semester they ought to know some things really well, like how to punctuate and cite quotations, which is why I get frustrated when I have to remind them to go back and review the quotation handout that the class covered thoroughly back in January and reviewed several times since then. I post all those handouts on the class website for a reason: because I refuse to re-teach the concepts individually to every student on every paper. Some of my students are probably sick of hearing me tell them to go look at the handout first and then come to me if they have more questions, but they'd save us all a lot of time and angst if they'd just go look at the stinking handout.

It's less easy at this point to try to re-teach the difference between summary and analysis; I can't do that in a handout or in a marginal note on a draft, and if they haven't mastered it by this point, how much can they improve in the next seven days? Nevertheless I'm telling them, for instance, that there's not much point in identifying metaphors if they're not going to unpack the implications of those metaphors and examine how they contribute to meaning. Naming things is not enough! Let's shake 'em upside-down and see what falls out.

(Which provides another metaphor they'll need to unpack. Practice makes perfect!)

And then we have the whole complicated issue of citing sources, which is a problem when some students don't even know what those sources are. Asked to produce articles from peer-reviewed academic journals, students find book reviews or quote from the article abstracts they find in the library's research databases, suggesting that on the internet, no one knows if a source is a dog. And then I'm once again explaining to a student that the word "Print" in a Works Cited listing means that he has relied on an actual hard copy of a text with pages that turn and therefore have actual printed page numbers that ought to appear in parenthetical citations, and I'm hearing, "Oh, so that's what 'Print' means. I guess I don't have any print sources." I guess not. Time to go find some!

And don't even get me started on the student who assures me that no one has ever written anything about a particular topic when a cursory search would reveal that among the many scholars who have examined that topic is, ahem, your obt. svt. 

But we are all still learning, aren't we? I'm learning diplomatic ways to tell students to go back and do it right this time, and they're learning the consequences of not having learned some essential skills earlier in the semester. So far, I give myself a B+. The students' grades will have to wait until after they revise their drafts.  

Blossom time--for students and wildflowers

All Scholars' Day brings out the best in our students--their best suits and ties or dresses and heels, their best presentation skills, creative ideas, and enthusiasm for learning. This morning I heard students describe results of research into fruit fly development, learning disorders, and the impact of romantic fiction on attitudes toward domestic violence, and I heard artists describe the impetus behind their painting, photography, or graphic design projects. I learned about tendencies toward depression among migrant farm workers and I marvelled that students I knew as raw freshmen are doing research on topics that can make a real difference in the world.

Then I went home and stomped around in the mud to see how our long, bleak winter affected the wildflower population, and I'm pleased to report that things are booming on the wildflower front. I saw trout lilies, trilliums, wide swaths of blooming bloodroot, dutchman's breeches, squirrel corn, coltsfoot, and even some perfoliate bellwort blooming where I've never seen it before. I saw a few delicate fronds of Solomon's seal sprouting from the wet hillside, and I enjoyed once again the delicate pinks and greens of buckeye buds popping open. 

It's hard to believe in trilliums in the dead of winter, but here they come again just when I need them. Likewise, the chill wind blowing through academe may fill me with gloom, but here comes a whole crop of talented students to prove that what we're doing still matters. 

So I'm going to try to stop griping and bloom where I'm planted--even if I'll never be as adorable as a clump of perfoliate bellwort.   

 

A lasting blow

Two nights in a row I've awakened in a cold sweat from nightmares of thwarted communication: I'm writing a book offering advice to first-year students and the manuscript is due at the printers but I haven't finished the first chapter, or I'm struggling to produce a newsletter for a scholarly organization that suffers from a severe dearth of news. These dreams suggest, I think, continued angst over campus events too sensitive to be fully bloggable.

The good news is that several endangered programs seem to have escaped the chopping block--for now. The bad news is that a group of junior faculty members serving in threatened departments have seen the writing on the wall and announced that they will be leaving at the end of the semester, all for perfectly understandable reasons: to take a better job, to be closer to family, to live in a less--er, more culturally vibrant location. Nevertheless, these departures represent a real blow to the College, a blow that will echo far into the future.

Why? Because my departing colleagues are all champions of the liberal arts and really terrific teachers, mostly on tenure lines, who contribute to campus in a variety of essential ways inside and outside the classroom. Not all of them will be replaced immediately, raising questions about whether those tenure lines will be lost and how that will affect the future viability of certain programs. Departments permitted to fill these suddenly empty spaces will be searching for one-year replacements; since contingent faculty are not expected to serve on committees, this will reduce the number of faculty available to staff the committees that will  work very hard to help the college emerge from its current difficulties. And in the long term, these departures create a serious age and experience gap and decimate faculty diversity. Even after we emerge from the current budget crisis as a stronger and healthier institution (as I sincerely hope we will do), I don't know how we will fill those gaps or regain those losses.

Last semester a committee I chaired sent a letter to top administrators pointing out the outstanding level of teaching skills on campus but warning that we would have difficulty holding on to these terrific teachers if conditions continued to deteriorate, and while the administrators agreed that our concerns were valid, it was probably already too late to prevent the current exodus of talented colleagues. I love my job and I believe in the future of the institution, but before I can roll up my sleeves to start working toward recovery, I'm taking a little time to mourn our losses. 

Writing on an obstacle course

A financial windfall never covers as many purchases as I expect, so I shouldn't be surprised when a gift of unscheduled time fails to accommodate as many projects as I'd like. In the distance it looms toward eternity, a big blank spot on the calendar, but as time goes on I pencil in projects and meetings and other commitments. Three whole free days! I can do anything.

But I can't. I can write a chunk of an essay before running to a meeting and then write a letter of support for a student before going to another meeting and then maybe scribble a little more on that essay before the jazz concert tonight. And then tomorrow? All Scholars' Day: I'll support students' research projects by attending presentations scheduled at various points in the day starting at 9 and ending at 5, but I do some more writing in those odd-shaped hours tucked between presentations.

And then Thursday? One class and then a whole lot of writing time to finish the essay that's due at the end of next week--except I also have student drafts coming in and a pile of papers to grade.

So my three relatively free days to focus on writing have turned into three days of snatching a few moments to write here and there between other important (and therefore distracting) events. My big empty landscape somehow got crowded with obstacles! Fortunately, there's nothing like a looming deadline to keep me focused while traversing those welcome empty stretches between all the obstacles.  

The recognitions

Pinecone, anyone?

A time of recognitions: I watch my granddaughter sing and laugh and play and I see my daughter's energy and her soundtrack and her constant curiosity about the world, but then I confront an unexpected reminder of my own childhood and for a moment I don't recognize that girl, the resentful little pleaser always working too hard to entertain her friends and not disappoint her parents.

I don't particularly like the little girl I was, the one who was always embarrassed by her clothes and who couldn't stand coming home to an ugly house but lied about loving it to protect her parents' feelings (when they had so many burdens to carry that the little girl's dislike for that house would not have even registered a blip on their radar screens), and I'm also not especially fond of the adolescent know-it-all who confronts me in an old note to a friend, the smarty-pants trying to turn every iota of pain into comedy.

But maybe it's time to embrace the little girls who turned into the adult me. Somewhere deep inside I'm still carrying their pain, but maybe it's time to say "there, there" and let it go. I wouldn't want to pass that pain on to the next generation, which has other things on its mind: spring puddles and potty training and singing singing singing. I recognize the tune and no one can stop me from singing along.   

So much water so close to home

Ah, the sounds of a spring morning: the birds cheeping; the spring peepers peeping; the creek roaring...

Wait a minute: if I can hear the creek roaring while I'm lying in bed, then something is amiss. What did all that dramatic thunder, lightning, and rain do to my calm little creek?

Turn on the radio: flood warnings, school delays, further rain in the forecast. Will I make it to campus?

My creek is over its banks but hasn't quite reached the driveway or covered the bridge. I drive between farm fields that have turned into sudden lakes, skirt overflowing ditched and debris washed over the road, and make it to campus, where more rain keeps the morning dim and gloomy.

If the rain keeps up I may have trouble getting home later on, but inside my office I'm warm and dry and surrounded by books. I just hope I don't have to sleep here tonight!

  

How do I shut up the internal critic?

When I start urging my husband to stop being so darned reasonable, you know I need some help disabling my tiny puritans.

They live in my brain, these tiny puritans, passed down through generations of workaholics suspicious of pleasure. Their squeaky little voices shriek at me that I'm not working hard enough or wasting time on silly things or being selfish. They shriek loudest when I'm thinking about spending money on something frivolous instead of  saving for a rainy day or putting it to more practical use. If I want to spend money on myself, they kick and scream and ask what I've ever done to deserve something so nice.

You can't reason with the tiny puritans that live in my brain because they simply don't care about reason. Right now they're jumping up and down angrily simply because I'm thinking about buying a new camera, which would be a perfectly reasonable purchase, but they don't care. Selfish, they say. What did you ever do to deserve a new camera? You broke the old one!

This is true: it took me more than a year to quiet the tiny puritans enough to permit myself to buy a canoe--a used canoe--which anyone who knows me would tell you was the smartest purchase I've ever made. The tiny puritans wanted me to spend the money on paying down some debts, which would be prudent and reasonable, but here's the thing: the canoe money came out of the sky when I won our college's top prize for excellence in teaching. I earned it! If winning our top teaching prize is not evidence that I deserve a (used) canoe, then something is wrong with the universe.

So now I need a new camera but the tiny puritans are having a hissy fit. Even when my husband marshals all the reasons, the tiny puritans can't be persuaded that it wouldn't be selfish and frivolous and not at all deserved. They are loud and annoying and they won't leave me alone. 

Someone needs to beat them to a pulp, those tiny puritans, or at least bind and gag them long enough to let me have some fun. But where do I put out a contract on my tiny puritans?   

Running out of words

Ineffable, anthropomorphic, symbiosis, syncretism--all words I've written on the board in classes this week, and if you think it's easy to define ineffable in terms a freshman would understand, go ahead and give it a try. A.R. Ammons once claimed that "Nothing that can be said about [poetry] in words is worth saying," but I haven't yet figured out how we're supposed to talk about poetry without words. 

Semaphore?

And speaking of words, a student this morning had trouble with the word nestles, pronouncing it nest-less. A freshman shoved rudely out of a warm, cozy home without a reading habit might well feel nestless, lacking words to describe the ineffability of her overwhelmedness, but the cure is to nestle into a world of books, starting, perhaps, with the dictionary.

But this is the time of the semester when words fail. We're all too tired, too busy, or too lacking in energy to seek out the words we need. I find myself speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in this naked and endless head--or wait, that's not me; that's Allen Ginsberg.   

Shutting down the shutterbug

My camera has accompanied me to woods and wetlands, beaches and big cities from Seattle to Florida, San Francisco to Prague. It has photographed alligators, bloodroot, cabbages, daffodils, eagles, flickers, grasshoppers, herons, indigo buntings, jewel weed, kingfishers, limpkins, mullein, nuthatches, orioles, pelicans, queen anne's lace, redbuds, seagulls, trout lilies, unidentified flittery things, veronica, warblers, xylobolus, yarrow, zebras, and more. 

My camera has helped preserve the memories of my daughter's wedding, my son's college commencement, my granddaughter's birth and growth and puddle-jumping. I have taken my camera to college poetry readings, class field trips, church dinners, and long walks in the woods with my birding-and-botanizing colleague.

And now it's heading for the landfill.

I fell. Stepped in a bit of mud the wrong way and landed--hard--on hands and knees. The camera landed in the creek, in pieces.

The pieces are sitting on a towel to dry off, but their condition does not appear compatible with survival. I don't quite know what I'll do without a camera with trillium season right around the corner followed by my adorable granddaughter's two-year-old birthday, but I'm not prepared to make that big a decision when my entire body hurts. 

Not to mention my pride. 

I fell hard in mud in front of other people and broke the camera that has been my faithful companion through thick and thin for seven years--I think I've earned the right to sit in the corner and lick my wounds for a little while.

And the worst part is, I can't even show you a picture.      

Pop quiz!

"Sorry, we're out of everything--but we have everything else!"

In what context would the above statement make perfect sense?

Prized plumage

White ibises were all over the place.

Oh, to live familiarly with ibises and egrets! 

--But not too familiarly. Last week in Florida I saw a family tossing breadcrumbs to a group of ibises alongside a lake. I doubt that stale crusts of Wonder Bread are suited to birds that generally subsist on a diet of crustaceans.

The fact that I've downloaded and sorted these photos suggests that I'm finally caught up on the work I missed last week. I feel as if I've spent the first half of this week running a marathon but now I can take a moment to sit back and savor some beauty. 

But not alone. You come too!

Great egret

Ibises in flight look prehistoric

Great blue heron

Nesting ospreys

My first limpkin (of many)

Tricolor heron