four weeks

Four weeks until the end of the semester. On the 9th of December, I hold my last class. I collect final projects and flip through broadsides and hold conferences and sit in my office while the snow comes down.

It's been a good semester. It's flying. The freshmen are sort of awesome, in their dopey puppy way (don't worry, I accidentally called them puppies earlier in the semester, so now it's our running joke), and the creative writers are sailing merrily along, even if they like the Open Letters better than Thom Jones.

Nobody's perfect.

The leaves are mostly down here, though a few purple maples stubbornly hold on. I woke on Friday and read through FB status reports from people in the Upper Midwest: snow. A foot of snow.

At times, I do not miss the Upper Midwest.

I raked our back yard last weekend, when it was sixty degrees and sunny. But since I'm a renter, and I have to pay for special bags to put the leaves in for pick-up, my motivations were hazy. Now we have a big pile of leaves in what used to be a flower bed, and I have blisters on my hands, and my neighbors have paused in their chain-smoking to pull back the curtains and wonder why the fuck the girl in apartment 1 even bothers.

I read at my own reading series and sold some books, which I inscribed for students with Hit the books, not the pipe. I got a few poems picked up, including the coney poem. I am arranging a manuscript and nitpicking my CV and talking myself out of buying a new winter coat in the hopes that this time next year, I won't need one. The dog and I both got too-short haircuts on the same day. And I have made, strategized, shopped for Thanksgiving. All we need is the wine, the roasting pan, an awesome homemade centerpiece that my designer promises will have "an outer space theme," and my brother, who flies in on the 24th.

It is a gray morning, the sort that I can tell will just slide into early afternoon, then disappear by four o'clock. A good day for this song. Or a good day to finish up some grading and then put on my new Running Dog t-shirt and drive over to Detroit to see Josh Ritter.

Four weeks.