fifteen days

That's how many days left until the fall semester starts. I have one new prep and need to transform a two-day-a-week class into a one-day-a-week class. I'm looking forward to creative writing at night, to the first days of new shoes and nice shirts. I have been living in a Buffalo Bisons t-shirt and shorts for the last two months.

I bought a set of new Sharpies for the school year. The set included four new "Caribbean" colors, my favorite of which is Manta Ray, a cool gray-blue.

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We don't have a living room. Instead, we have a room missing a twenty by ten foot rectangle of ceiling, and we have furniture covered with plastic drop cloths, and we have a week of replastering and phone calls triangulating myself, my landlord, and the handyman.

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I signed off on a final cover proof. I can't believe this book has a face and a butt. The photograph they chose is not what I expected at all, but I really, really love it. Especially since they had to direct a model to cross a bridge at sunrise wearing nothing but a sheet. All for me! All for some poems I wrote at a little handmade desk in a crumbly room in Minnesota.

Holy shit.

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The coney essay was accepted for publication and I'm getting paid for it. Holy shit, again.

I'm going to keep the coney blog up for a while, even if I have laid off the coneys (as one friend wrote, think of your gut flora!!!!).

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The last road trip of the summer--which was a great blur of travel and photography and snacks and canoes--started in Minnesota and stretched all the way to the Adirondacks in upstate New York. Somebody fell into a lake. Somebody wore a Viking helmet and made a huge Wegmans list. A bunch of Somebodys climbed a mountain and toasted marshmallows indoors on a rainy night and made a sign for the cabin door: No Bears.

Here is a photo of canoes on a weirdly blue evening. Let's paddle them, far away from all the lesson planning and CV-revising and public relation-ing of the next fifteen days. Let's paddle them all the way back to early May, back to the first green leaves, where the whole summer still stretches ahead of us, just waiting to burst.