lucky life

Ahhhhhhhh. Seventy degrees and climbing. There are plants on the patio. The summer course is sailing along. My spine feels as if it's finally--weeks and months later--unkinking itself.

Every now and again in a life, the present feels like the past. When everyone moved out of this house last summer, making me the senior resident by default, it felt exactly like the end of the first year in Minnesota. Right now, at the end of the second year in Michigan, it feels like--what else?--the second year in Minnesota.

Early summer 2006. It had been a rough year. I felt as if I hadn't slept in months and months; in part, because I hadn't slept well in those months, since our downstairs neighbors threw keggers every weekend. But also because the year had been hard in ways I hadn't expected it to be. I was brittle at the beginning of that summer. I was tired and achy and I just wanted to hole up in the backyard with a stack of books and not talk to anyone for a long, long time.



Ever since my birthday, which was a lovely, buzzy celebration of the end of the semester, I've been (mostly) quiet. I've been drinking coffee on the back patio and watching squirrels run along the back fence, and I've been walking down to the library and checking out books, then reading them and returning them for others. The summer course, even with the changes I've implemented, basically runs itself, and so I find myself with lots of hours on my hands. And these hours are luxurious and lazy.



In March and April, I was communicating somewhat regularly with a small college in a Midwest state (one I haven't lived in yet) about a tenure-track creative writing job. In an economy like this one, and with a market so saturated, I was fortunate just to be one of the finalists. Ultimately, they chose to offer the position to someone else, and a part of me is relieved--suffice to say that it raised questions about geography. I don't know that I'm cut out to be a resident of a county whose tallest building is an abandoned grain elevator.

On the other hand, hello. It would have been a TT CW job offer. So now it looks like we do have at least one more year here on the mitten, and another year of hunting and applications ahead of us. But we also have a summer in which we do not have to move, and instead there are manuscripts to be finished and books to be read and friends who drop by with bottles of something clear and brown.

So it goes.

Already the memories of the last months--broken feet and leaking ceilings and tough crowds--are fading. I had my first Blizzard of the season today. There are new plants on the patio--big herbs with big scents. There are repurposed mustard jars filled with strawberry-jalapeno jam in the fridge. There is a dog who runs into the house with grass clippings clinging to his legs, and there is his rock warming in the sun. There are two weeks until I drive over to Minnesota, and five until I join my family on the Outer Banks.

And sometimes, when we are sitting out back eating our eggs in a baskets, we are joined at that little table by the coolest dog in the whole neighborhood.



Lucky life.