these things are fading

Sometimes I can barely remember what it was like to live in Michigan for three years. It seems so utterly far away now: what it was like to be able to step outside and head out on foot to a library or restaurant or neighborhood, shaded by the trees that line the streets of Heritage Hill. I used to head out, messenger bag slung across my body, and catch the bus out to campus from downtown campus; I used to shop for groceries at Meijer or, when I was feeling like a treat, at D&W Fresh Market; I used to jolt awake in the mornings when our bumbling drunk neighbor, Andy—bless his heart—would slam the glass door of our house closed. Sometimes I miss the little kitchen with its black-framed windows, or the way the locusts in the backyard would create a lacy canopy in late summer. I forget what it was like to be cold so many months out of the year. Most often, I miss being able to distract myself from myself by simply taking a long walk around the city, or what passed for one. 

But more often, I can’t remember things, or I can only by trying very, very hard. It seems that we have always lived here, shared this one Honda, always holed up in the sticky summer heat. Always been disappointed by the grocery stores in this town. Always had these friends, always been able to drive down to Jacksonville for twenty-four hours and then back up the coast. I have always turned off the interstate and rolled down my window, I have always driven the last ten miles to town while listening to some alt-country song, I have always worn Ray-Bans and a plaid shirt, I have always seen the haze of burning fields and the shady pecan groves as I wind my way back to the little house on the corner, where my aging dog waits for me to come home.

glad to know it

We were at AWP Minneapolis last week/end. When we left Georgia, the azaleas were almost done blooming. When we landed in Minnesota, the fields were brown and starting to thaw. It snowed briefly on Friday morning and was sunny and warm enough to eat a picnic outside the convention center on Saturday. Meanwhile, back home, the season had turned from spring to summer. In the four days we were gone, the trees unfurled into full green. 

Driving home from the airport Sunday afternoon, I marveled at the lushness, the closeness of all the foliage. MSP had been a lovely buzz of all the things--reunions with grad school advisors and peers, the release of my prose chapbook Rook & The M.E., breakfasts and beers with former colleagues, closing down the conference on Saturday night reading at a bar--and it was good to see people, good to come back to something that felt equally full.

I found out the week before AWP that I am the new assistant professor of creative writing at this school of ours. This coast--where we've been for the last four years--will be our home for a few more years, it seems. The droop of Spanish moss, the little ferns that wave from the limbs of the oaks. 

This is an adopted landscape, but I'm glad to know it. 

rivers + roads

I would like to tell you that we met our next-door neighbors on our second day in Georgia. On the day we moved in, a sweltering July day in 2011. I will tell you that, actually, because I think it is true. I know that I was sweating profusely after moving all of our possessions into our house, the lease on which we'd signed approximately one hour after arriving in this town on a Friday afternoon. The next day was a Saturday, and the heat index was predicted to be 105 degrees, and the B and I were up early, fresh from the Baymont Inn, and stocked with Gatorade, ready to wrestle a couch.

As physical moves go, that one was surprisingly easy--having your own driveway leading up to a one-story house is so very, pleasantly, different than trying to move furniture from an 1880s home with no driveway and limited street parking--and we were finished by perhaps 11 am. I was wearing a Buffalo Bisons t-shirt from the 1980s. Our neighbors came outside at some point, and they noticed my shirt, and it turns out we were all from the same corner of New York State, and then they greeted us and went back inside. A few weeks later, I wrote to my friends in an email We hung out with our neighbors on Saturday night, which was fun, and it will hopefully become a routine. 

In literature, this is known as foreshadowing. 

Or maybe I should start earlier, in the 1990s, in the suburbs of Buffalo where I grew up. For a couple short years, there were about four houses on our block with young families, families like ours. As an adult, I've actually wondered how well all these adults got along, since in retrospect these families were pretty different. But what matters more is that in photos from that time, the adults are standing in each other's driveways, drinking cans of Labatt Blue. The kids are sitting on blanket, watching for shooting stars, or dressed up in Halloween costumes, or swimming in an above-ground pool. 

In a few years, of course, things would change; families would fracture, or move away, or the friendships borne of geographic convenience would shift as kids entered high school. Still, for those years, I entered my neighbors' unlocked doors as if their houses were my own. I stood on their back porches and asked them questions through their screen doors, and they would motion for me to come in already.

Later, when we lived in our little white house in Minnesota, five of us and the dog squeezed into that shoddy place, we never locked the door. One of the roommates didn't even have keys to the place, and anyway, like all grad students, we had nothing worth taking. Some nights, when I walked home from night class or came home early from the restaurant, I would have to push open the side door. Coats and boots would be piled in front of the door, most of them not ours. Our friends would be over for dinner, or to watch television, or to sit on our couch. In those moments, I knew that we had built something in that town. We had friends. We had a community. 

Here's the thing: when we left Minnesota in 2007, I had had that experience twice in my life. I didn't ever expect it to happen again. I thought perhaps it was something faintly magic, that it was something like lightning. 

Once in Buffalo, well, that was what happened in the suburbs when all the houses are only ten feet apart. And in Minnesota, well, that was happened in graduate school, when time and pressure and booze--great rivers of booze--and slightly damaged, pleasantly misanthropic people found themselves locked in classrooms during cold winters, workshopping poetry and prose. 

My theory held up for a while, too, because our circles of friends in Wisconsin and Michigan were good, very good, but not quite the same. I figured we were Becoming Adults, and part of that meant that the raucous dinner parties and the whole community thing was a natural casualty.

Then we met our neighbors here in Georgia, and they blew the fucking roof right off of that theory of mine.

Our neighbors are funny and incredibly kind and charming. They worked for the same university we do, and through them we met a whole network of university-affiliated ex-pats. They helped us navigate this town, its Southern-ness and its quirks, and we developed our own shorthand: a Statesboro moment, for example, like when you go to the pharmacy and though there are five other people conceivably waiting for a prescription, no one is in an actual, recognizable, line. Or when the local grocery store runs out of all milk--all of the milk, from full-fat to skim, all sizes, like the entire library of milk is currently closed for business--and the clerk just shrugs and tells you there might be more, you know, tomorrow. If y'all want to come back then. 

Our neighbors and I would talk about what it was like to go to college in small cities in New York State, stories that inevitably included chicken finger subs. They brought us things when they went back up north, like cases of Western New York beer, or this shirt referencing McKinley's assassination, which I wear when I work out, not because I want to ruin it with pit stains but because I want to wear it as often as possible. They gave us copies of their house key, and we gave them ours. We swapped dogs and brought in each other's mail during holidays and gossiped over text messages about what the other neighbors, the weirdo ones, might be up to.

Our neighbors and I would sometimes go out to get the mail about the same time, both home from work around 5:30, and we would stand in the driveway with our arms lightly crossed, our dogs sniffing the grass near our feet, and we would talk, swatting gnats, until it was time to go in and start dinner or the sun set behind the old elementary school across the street.

Our neighbors came to our raucous dinner parties, our taco nights that ended in dance parties. And they held their own, nights that earned the ex post facto nickname of casino nights, because hey, it would be seven o'clock, then ten-thirty, and then suddenly it was four in the morning and we were drinking whisky out of a glass bottle shaped like a soccer cleat.

Our neighbors invited us out to dinner and to soccer games and took us to the way-sketch pool hall downtown. They knew the restaurant owners and seemingly everyone who was also out on those nights, and, though I'm making them sound like much bigger party animals than they are, that's because our most famous Boro nights happened in the company of our neighbors, and because they like to talk to people and make connections. They are those kind of people.

And other times, we didn't see our neighbors for days or weeks, because we were all busy, but I knew they were next door, coming and going as we were, and knowing they were home fifty feet away just made me feel better.

When the B and I decided to elope last summer, we did so because of our neighbors. Through them, and in them, we had made and met friends here that felt like a real community. We had built something, something tangible and firm, something that felt like home. It felt right to go to the courthouse, then back to our house, and turn on the music and make tacos and push the furniture out of the dining room and turn it into a dance hall. Our neighbors brought their dogs and we all danced until 2:30 am, even as we ran out of liquor and the stove randomly short-circuited and we had to kill the breaker.

Part of working for a university, especially when you are contractual faculty and your friends are staff, means you make friends that won't always be around. Your friends are often on their way up, promoted and moving out, looking for a place that's a little closer to home. I should have known. I've done it myself a few times now. So in fall 2012, when I came across a song by the band The Head and The Heart, which starts, A year from now we'll all be gone/All our friends will move away /And they're going to better places/But our friends will be gone away, I played that song for anyone who would listen, including our neighbors. I played it twenty times in a row. I knew that it would apply to nearly all of us. I knew it might apply to me and the B, again, one day. 

Last week, on the night our neighbors told us they were leaving for Binghamton, I sat on the kitchen floor and played that song three times. 

This, as it turns out, is my love letter to our neighbors. Though of course you already knew that. Foreshadowing.

I am sad, so terribly sad, that my neighbors are leaving. At the same time, I am so happy that they are, in fact, going to a better place, a better university in a town nestled in the hills, nearer to their families. I keep trying to steel myself for the day that is rapidly approaching, when their cars are no longer in the driveway I will think of, always, as theirs. 

I will sorely miss them, and what they helped us make here, in this town. They are, in some ways, our first four years in this town. But I am forever grateful that they were an integral, heart-beating part of our life here. I am grateful that they helped us build a life here that resembled something I now fiercely defend. 

I wish them the very best on their journey over the rivers and roads that will lead them back north, toward something brighter, maybe something even better than we--together--got to build here. 

a certain kind of aloneness

Yesterday morning was clear and chilly, the first time since March that it felt like summer might be really and truly over. On Friday night, a cold front had swept through, and the sky on Saturday was bright blue, the kind I used to see in Minnesota, in Wisconsin. It had been two long weeks of grading six classes' worth of essays and narratives, and hosting visiting writers, and wrangling InDesign, and on Thursday I dropped my trusty old iPhone hours after ordering my new one, and its screen, already lined with dozens of microscopic cracks, shattered. First world problems, to be sure, but they are the ones I know.

It was a good day to get out of town.

I aimed the car north and drove to Augusta. It's a pretty drive, so light on traffic that I can zone out for minutes at a time. The road dips and crests small hills, through some of which homeowners have carved driveways, and the red clay that shows is shocking against the browning grass and sky. It's strange for me to remember sometimes that I live south of Augusta, that now I live just 100 miles from Aiken, the town in South Carolina where we lived for a few years in the 1980s. It was in Aiken that I split open my face on the concrete steps of the Baptist church, where I attended day care, on the day it snowed and I jammed my hands in my pockets, where they remained when I slipped and broke the fall with my face.

Sometimes on the road to Augusta, I think about my parents, freshly arrived in Aiken with two small kids, strangers to a part of the country where everyone drawls maaaaaaaaaam and many stores still close on Sundays and adults admonish children to refer to their teachers as Miss Christina, a habit that I try to break in my college students now.

The route goes through a few small towns, the kind with a Dairy Queen and a handful of gas stations. On one lawn were three convenience-store displays, the kind that you can spin like lazy susans, complete with single-serving bags of chips clipped into place. The sign: FOR SALE/B.O. One town's water tower proclaims it the bird dog capital of the world, a distinction that seems self-appointed. I opened the sunroof. The air was warm, and the cotton fields were starting to puff white. At one small airport, the planes whirred, a man ducking as he removed the blocks from the wheels.

I stopped at the Costco, decided I would, in fact, be the sort of person who bought flannel shirts off the table. While I tried them on over my t-shirt, someone ganked my cart. I sampled the chana masala and liked my recipe better. I priced beer and stomach meds. I bought tenderloins, and big packages of provolone, and bagels, looked down, realized my cart was my father's.

(In January, when the B and I bought this Costco membership in order to purchase our new mattress, we came in on a Saturday morning. He's never been to a warehouse store, and a Saturday morning is obviously the busiest time, everyone wrestling oversized shopping carts and pausing to cram tiny hot dogs into their mouths. He looked a little startled. But for me, it felt just like those high school weekends in Amherst during the 1990s, my father and I making the rounds to BJ's and Wegmans, our carts filled with pork and cheese for homemade pan pizza. This is how we function: he shows me how to walk through fields of cows, and I show him how to navigate suburban hellscapes.)

And after Costco, I took Walton Way across town, past the university and the mansions, the road curving around the pines. As I headed downtown, the mansions were replaced by gas stations and pawn shops. Over the canal and in the little shopping district. I walked up to Farmhaus Burger. I ate my chili dog and sweet potato tots outside, watched four guys brunch, complaining that the pimento cheese wasn't as good as they remembered. Another little family fed their dropped fries to the golden retriever at the other table. Tourists wandered the streets. The talking crosswalk had a Southern accent. The sun felt warm on my yellow cardigan.

I was alone. I was content.

There is a certain kind of aloneness that I'm used to, that I miss if I go too long without it. It's not loneliness, which I knew too well during those first months in Mankato, or that hard year out of grad school, or that year I lived in the murphy bed apartment in Michigan. Those were hard times, not knowing if they'd end or stretch on for years yet. Those were lonely times.

But aloneness is different. Aloneness is nice. It gives me time to think through the minor annoyances of the week past and sort them out; lets me listen to the same track eight times in a row, rewinding it each time the spot right before the drums kick in; lets me drive with the window down and the air whistling through the car, too loud for conversation anyway.

Aloneness is a safe and structured time. At home, there is a husband and dog waiting for me, and the same old fires to put out in my inbox, and the little life I've built for myself. The same five-mile walking loop through town and trivia at the bar on Tuesdays. I love my routines. I build them because they comfort me. I will return to them soon enough. But sometimes on a Saturday, it is nice to be alone, to be a stranger for a few hours, finding my way around a city I don't really know, enjoying the first day of fall.

would you look at that

Would you look at that. As soon as I stepped away from this space, I had things I thought I might want to say here. Mainly, because I am the biggest narcissist of all time possess a healthy ego, I missed my own voice.

I don't journal, so this little blog and some Gmails to two grad school friends serve as my biography. As the years have gone by, and we three find ourselves busy in Wisconsin and Minnesota and Georgia with our full-time jobs and local lives, the Gmailing has slowed down. Turns out I miss writing to my friends. I missed writing here.

Summer 2014 was a good one, though pretty work-oriented. There were a couple conferences, and an online course, and I agreed to freelance for my department and fix our janky-ass update our web site. Friends bought a house in Florida. Other friends bought a house in town with a pool. The B holed up and revised three hundred thousands words of a novel-in-progress. I carved out just enough time to turn some new poems--and salvaged parts of Dear Stupid--into a new manuscript.

Now it's September, and there are six classes and lots of committee work on the schedule ahead, and summer feels like a long time ago.

What else is new:

Work is up here and here and here.

There are job openings at our school. In May, we'll find out whether we live here for a long time or take off for someplace new. I'm rooting for the former. Georgia has her claws in me these days. Still, if it's the latter, I feel like we can handle it. There are benefits to being in my thirties.

Current projects: an essay drawing comparisons between Pablo Escobar's hippos and a Wisconsin lion story my father-in-law told me two years ago. A game of telephone I'm playing with my Canadian visual artist friend. A chapbook about doomed explorers.

Thai basil won the garden this year. No bugs eat it and it donates itself gladly to this awesomely easy weeknight dinner. It's the steady middle child of the garden, not requiring any attention, just quietly succeeding at life.

I didn't get to the photo albums this summer, but I did order the prints. The Snapfish art deco prints (above) are velvety smooth and worth all the pennies they cost.

This weekend was what all should be: a soccer tailgate with friends on Friday night; a pool party and kebabs on Saturday; a lazy Sunday with new nonfiction and roast pork and a nap on the couch. Now the thunderstorm is roiling overhead and the dog is whimpering in his red-and-white bandana.

Here's another fork. See you around.

eleven scenes from a frozen south

1. We woke to US Airways calling, telling us that B's flight out to MSP had been canceled. Charlotte was grounding flights. Savannah was grounding flights. Outside, something that sounded like ice but might have been just pine cones bounced on the roof.

2. I made coffee and pancakes. I took a hot shower. In this way, Wednesday was essentially a Saturday.

3. The power went out as we played Scrabble. Something down the street--a transformer--went blue three times and then silent.

Out in the front yard, a pine branch fell on a cable that ran from the pole to the corner of our house. It wasn't live, but it swayed over the road. In ten minutes, three cars drove into the cable, then panicked, slammed the car into reverse, and backed up. In doing so, they hit the cable twice.

We called the non-emergency police line. We know about the cable, they said. In the hour that it took them to send someone, fifteen more cars drove into the cable, panicked, backed up.

B dragged the recycling bin to the road, in front of the cable. As he did so, a woman in a red Camry slammed on the brakes, honked, threw up her hands. B pointed to the cable. The woman didn't see it. He pointed again. She waved. It was an angry wave.

The third time, she got it.

4. The pines in the backyard looked gray, hung with ice.

5. I desperately wanted beer.

6. I scored two turns of 48 points apiece and still lost Scrabble by 50 points.

7. The police volunteer said, You put this out here? That was a good idea. As he said so, another car nearly hit the recycling bin.

He replaced our bin with two cones and drove off.

8. Friends texted: We have no power, but a fireplace, beer, and hot dogs.

9. On the way over to their place, the lines wrapped twice around each drive-thru.

10. The beer was delicious. We played cards and roasted hot dogs over the fire. The dogs slept on our laps. I was dressed as if it was BockFest, in layers of pants.

11. The power came back on. We left at midnight.

On the way home, cars were lined up at the Wendy's. Each waited for three minutes before realizing that that the employees must have left the lights running when they left during the power outage, hours earlier. Each time a car pulled out, another pulled in, not realizing that no one was working.

Inside, the lights blazed yellow in an empty restaurant.

like a blur

Eesh. Two months, and they passed like a blur.

It's almost-fall today in Georgia. The sky is gray and a little wet. The students are wearing more jeans than shorts. The dogwood leaves have turned brown-red and fallen. Soon, the pecan and live oaks will go brown, or what passes for brown, and we will have to close the windows at night. For now, it's enough to put an extra blanket on the bed and wake to a chill.

Another semester, another daily grind of online teaching and hard-copy essays. Red pens, flannel shirts, leftovers packed into matching containers for lunches. The house is a series of small victories: finally, a new screen in the one window that didn't have one and air whooshes down the hallway. The front room, decked out in furniture my brother couldn't take to California, has a guest bed and a world map. I have been re-reading books I've already read, and some new ones that changed me a little. The poetry manuscript keeps making its endless rounds, but at least new work has found a home or two.

It's been a good semester for music, too. When we moved here, we thought perhaps the bands would come through Savannah, but they rarely do; too many art school kids, maybe, or just not worth stopping south on the way from Charleston to Atlanta. So instead, we have been driving: to Atlanta to see The National; to Jacksonville to see Frightened Rabbit and Augustines; to Athens to see Son Volt. How good it feels--how good it's always felt--to stand with a beer in one hand, dripping its condensation on my oldest shoes, and press in to hear.

And on a Friday night, we gathered in the kitchen and had another Libras, Gettin' Older party. There were some new friends, and some old ones. The cakes were the same as the year before. Carrot with cream cheese, almost-flourless chocolate, white buttercream. The dog sat on a chair. It was enough to drink beer from the new growler station in town, and make a little sampler of cakes, and enjoy where we are, this place we call home.

lately

Lately, it's been summer.

I have been working on something about Roy Chapman Andrews--an essay. It's been a while since I wrote, let alone published, long nonfiction, and there's something about that form rattling me a bit, though I think in a good way. There are many Post-it notes, a couple books pulled from the university libraries up in Athens and Atlanta, and a big piece of butcher's paper taped to my office wall.

I don't know yet what shape the essay will take, but I'll find it eventually. It is a good break from that other to-do list, the one that kind of scares me.

There is summer school, a class on telling stories and another of wide, wide-eyed pre-freshmen. There have been runs out to the beach at Tybee, and up to the beach in Carolina on a much-needed night out of town to see a band, and night spent driving around in search of the sunset. All this is a pitiful substitute for not going on a real vacation this year, but it's helping. So is the rain, which has been coming down steadily for three days and drowning the dill and parsley.

There have been big moves, too--not ours (thank god), but friends in town, and friends out of town. People moving from the south to the north. And a few weeks ago, I packed up my brother and watched him drive west, to San Francisco and a new job at that one company named for a fruit.

And the week before that, we went to the courthouse and made this whole nine-year thing of ours official, and now I am somebody's wife.

It's been oddly busy lately, is what I am saying. But in a good way.

trying, trying again

Well. Hello there. Happy January, how is yours going, mine is just fine! That sentence was an intentional run-on because, as you might know, I actually teach English!

Here is a list of things I have been doing:

1. Getting close! so close! at presses, but missing.
2. Pasting up the nice rejection letters that said presses send back.
3. Trying, trying again, and closing in on those ten thousand hours.

4. Lurking on NYPD officer discussion boards.
5. Polishing up that chapbook of Law & Order poems.
6. Clearing out my browser history of searches like WHAT GETTING SHOT FEELS LIKE and BEST HANDGUN CLEANING TIPS and MEDICAL EXAMINER FAVORITE AUTOPSY TOOLS.
7. Thinking about where to send #5.

8. Getting some work up on the web, and an anthology.
9. Teachin'.
10. Talkin' bout coelacanths in public.

11. Taking a jaunt to Myrtle Beach on the coldest weekend of the year to see some visiting Minnesotans and win Skee-ball at something called The Gay Dolphin arcade.
12. Taking a jaunt to Savannah to see some visiting Wisconsinites and drink beer in the sun in City Market.
13. Taking the dog to the vet to make sure his new chest lump is just a fatty deposit, and not, you know, cancer.
14. Calling the cancer-free dog Cancer Dog because irony, that is a valid way to deal with real feelings.

15. Thinking about what comes next.
16. Enjoying myself, if I may say so myself.

in case the year ends on friday

It is the annual year in photos time! This year, I went with Hipstamatic photos, because I am a douche, but also because I have seen the future, and it is people taking pictures with their cell phones.

To the new year, but first--goodbye to the old one.

we live here now

I do like the beach in October, although when we would go to the one in Michigan, it was much cooler. But never mind, Tybee: you have pirates, and warm water, and a little complex of tiny houses built in the 1920s that lend themselves nicely to fake Polaroid-style pictures.

It's been a good month, much better than this time last year, when the car purchase and settling into the new place and the busting out of pants were happening. October 2011, you are so silly! But now it is October 2012, and today I am baking three cakes for a party here tomorrow night we have titled LIBRAS, GETTIN' OLDER, and our little house will be filled with the people we know here. I'm breaking in our my new (to me) KitchenAid stand mixer. I started reading poems. The B is reading too. Last night a bunch of us drank two-dollar Yuengling tallboys and pulled sixteen Dr. Seuss titles out of our collective heads and crushed the locals at trivia.

We live here now.

just kidding, autumn

Ha ha ha! Remember all that nonsense about sunny days and blue skies and walking in the cotton fields? Yeah. It's been 89 degrees here for four days. According to the NOAA, the relative humidity is 97 percent. Meanwhile, on the Face, everyone up north is chirping about Scotch and tweed and apple orchards and pumpkin spice at Starbucks.

Today I found this leaf, and then I posed with it. My pedicure is gray because it is THE SAME COLOR AS MY SOUL.

Fuck you, fake autumn.

it's about time, autumn

This is what fall looks like in the southeast: mums and pumpkins appear at the market, you can open the windows and hear the college football game being played three miles down the road, and the cotton comes out. The leaves don't change--much. And the highs are still in the seventies. But drive the bypass around town, or take a quick drive out to the fields, and there are little white puffs down the long rows of what used to be nondescript green bushes. Around Thanksgiving, the farmers will harvest the cotton, and they'll stack up huge white bales in the fields, and bits will blow off and collect in the grass on the side of the road. It's the closest this part of Georgia gets to snow.

(In the next few weeks, some of my eight-o'clock students will come to class wearing Northfaces and complaining about how cold it is and I will try not to laugh.)

Today, we opened the house up, maybe for real this time. The sky is so very vast and blue. The breeze feels like an actual, refreshing breeze, not the warm and sticky dying breath of a huge water buffalo. The last peaches and tomatoes and corn have straggled to the little market downtown. The first days of actual, humidity-less fall down here are like spring up north: there's that one day in March when the temp hits fifty, and everyone rolls down their windows, and the college students climb out of their second-story windows and drink beer on the roof. There's a collective sigh of relief And even though this summer felt as if it lasted forever, this is generally just how I feel every September. Up north, or out on the plains of Minnesota, or down here, it's the same every year: I can't wait for the start of the next season, and rotate the sheets on the bed, and open the windows to the sounds of the little city we currently call home.

but now summer is over

Hello. I am back, for real this time. We got in at three in the morning on Monday, and when I checked my school e-mail the next morning, there were eight million e-mails and little fires awaiting me. Yesterday we sat in departmental meetings for about six hours, and I am steadily checking my way down a legal-pad list that keeps sprouting little hydra heads and OH MY GOD WHERE DID SUMMER EVEN GO.

Oh, remember early May? Remember when the plants out back were tiny, orderly seedlings, and the months stretched ahead of me and there were five thousand fewer miles on the car's odometer? Remember when I headed up north the first time, bisecting the fat middle of Pennsylvania, and drove up state route 15 as a single-file parade of Mennonites walked with picnic baskets to the river? I cannot complain.  This has been a great summer. I got to see nearly every single person in my life, and I drove all around the great lakes, and spent time at three cabins and met a bunch of dogs. I rode a bicycle around Toronto*, and fell in love with IPA all over again, and taught some energetic and motivated students, and wore the same six camp shirts and pair of shorts every single week.

And then, last week, I took another up nort road trip. Only this one the B came along with me, and we went up to the city where we used to live and said hello to our old neighborhood, and then we went up and over the bridge and ate pasties, and then we wound down to Ann Arbor and toasted my cousin and his new wife and may or not have participated in a flash dance mob to a One Direction song but SPOILER ALERT WE TOTES DID.

But now summer is over, and in the next week, as I write eight million job application letters and field eight million online course snafus and want to push a freshly sharpened pencil deep into my eye, I will think about the blue of the lakes instead, and the mornings that were cold enough for flannel blankets, and the sound of a single loon late at night.

Here is one last slideshow, then.


 *which I keep bringing up because the last time I rode a bicycle, I drove it into a tree and ripped all the skin off my hands and knees and bent my bike tire, then limped into my junior literature seminar and pretended everything was fine until the professor asked me if I wouldn't like to go to the restroom and wash all the blood off my legs, and after that I got all scared to ride and walked the rest of the year, and then my bike got stolen five years later even though I hadn't ridden it, the end! So it was nice to be on a bike and not afraid even when all the traffic aimed directly for me!

the sound of rain is welcome

 
Not five minutes ago, the sky opened up. The dogs--one ours, one that we have on what is essentially perma-loan for the summer, since his owners just had a baby--hid under the desk. We were supposed to go for our five o'clock walk. Instead, I opened up the back door, even though the air is still on, because right now, the sound of rain is welcome.

It's been a surprising few days. I have been trying my best to be normal but feel, for various reasons, out of sorts. The summer classes ended without any tears or blood, and I bid farewell to students I hope to see back on campus in the fall and maybe even in my classes this coming spring. Then we went up to the city, to see this guy, and we drank beer and ate cold pasta salad outside and stayed the night in a fancy hotel. I have been getting around to the mundane tasks that summer permits--dutifully compiling a list of serial numbers for our renters' insurance, and reading all those books I ordered as my birthday present to myself, and sweeping the floor, and being rejected from every single magazine, fellowship and job I've ever applied for, HA HA HA, and even futzing with a poem that might be three poems. But it turns out that all I really want to do is sit in the armchair by the window, as it pours, and have the sky go gray for a few days and let me watch eight hundred old episodes of The Office and eat barbeque kettle chips.

Over the weekend, we had brunch with my brother. When we walked outside, it was 90 degrees at 9 am, and he sighed. It's official, he said. I'm fucking sick of summer. 

Maybe that's it. (Okay, that and the being rejected from every single magazine, fellowship and job I've ever applied for, HA HA HA, STILL HILARIOUS, UNIVERSE.) The heat hasn't been brutally oppressive, except for the day that it hit 108. We were driving back from the beach, and we stopped on the way to do the South of the Border thing, and it felt as if we were standing in a wet, hot oven. Compared to that day, I suppose, these days have been fine.

But it is summer, and the South, and sitting outside is not exactly pleasant. I'm not ready to go back to school--I just ended classes on Thursday--but I am ready for something a little different. Which sounds indulgent, I know, since this summer was also the one of the Great Upnort Road Trip. But this is what happens every summer. The novelty wears off, I get tired of looking at my legs in shorts, and the idea of snow and early sunset seems novel. It's come early this year, but then again, it's been eighty degrees here since March, so I guess I shouldn't feel too bad.

Here's what we're going to do, then. We are going to have a snow day party. We will draw the blinds and turn the ac down to 61 degrees. We will put on jeans and hooded sweatshirts. We will line up the movies and television shows that have been knocking around the Netflix queue, and we will make big batches of carbohydrates--chili with cornbread, butternut squash ravioli, cheesecake brownies--and pour big glasses of porter and dusky red wine. We will stake our claims on the various sections of the couch. We will pretend that it is February, and to go outside will be to die in snowdrifts, and we will sit inside like fat happy bears who woke up a few months early.

See you there. Don't forget to bring a blanket, because it's going to be chilly.

after the hurricane rains cease

Oh! Little blog!

I have not forsaken you, even though blogging is so 2006, ha ha ha. But I have returned from my great whirlwind tour of the Great Lakes, and I have dived into summer school--early morning summer school, with its bushy-tailed just-out-of-high-school students and their surprising and lovely enthusiasm. And I have no complaints. How can I? Tomorrow I leave to join the family at the beach. Then I'll be back, for three weeks of school, and with actual things, maybe, to say and not just an update of my itinerary.

I had a moment last month. I had just left town and was driving up state route 301, right where Georgia turns into South Carolina. The first forty minutes of my drive had been like Southern Bingo: here is a flock of turkey vultures picking at the carcass of an armadillo, here is a woman selling watermelons from the back of a truck, here is a brown dog with dusty teats standing next to the highway, here is Spanish moss and a wide river. They were all things I've come to love and expect from the landscape here. I remembered suddenly that the last time I'd been on that stretch of highway, I was leading our Budget truck into town. We didn't have a place lined up. We had a Craiglist contact and the relief of slipping out of the pee house's lease thirty-six hours earlier. It was hot and we were tired. I don't think I can tell you properly how nice it was to be driving a new car, nearly a year later, all settled in.

I'll be back soon. In the meantime: here's a picture I took, last night, of the big Southern sky and what it looks like after the hurricane rains cease. And here's a band that I saw one night in Toronto, and I loved, and now you should like them too.

to-do, weekend: a retrospective list

Friday
--Teach class of fourteen. Mark ten absent.
--Come home, debate taking nap.
--Dog walk.
--Invite friends over to back patio, dubbed "tiki lounge" by awesome neighbors.
--Beer run.
--Tiki lounge time.
--Take post-tiki-lounge self-portrait. 

Saturday
--Sleep in.
--Watch two hours' HGTV while the B snoozes. Make Lowe's mental list.
--Hit up university-sponsored arts fest.
--Discover arts fest is really for children.
--Pet random dogs.
--Buy decoupaged triceratops at vendor booth. Tell artist: Yeah, I spray-paint dinosaurs, so this is sort of a love connection.
--Head out to neighboring county in search of pick-your-own strawberries.
--En route, almost drive off road when friend innocuously says, My parents, who live up near DC now, have this great grocery store near them ... Wegman's? 
--Shout WEGMANS? YES. WEGMANS. MY GOD, HOW HAVE WE NOT TALKED ABOUT THIS YET? IT IS THE GREATEST STORE IN THE WORLD.  

--Calm down about the Wegmans thing
--Pick own strawberries.
--Invent "ha-HA" catchphrase, to be employed when trying to out-pick friends' berry efforts.
--Pizza and afternoon beer in town.
--See current student in sequined bikini top at nearby table.
--Debate reminding student that essay is due Monday morning.
--Order beer instead.
--Introduction to mix-your-own-shit-in frozen yogurt place.
--Lose shit, pile on the mini caramel cups.

Sunday 
--Wake up early, the better to beat Lowe's crowds.
--Buy soil, containers, flat of Mexican heather, replacement oregano and dill plants.
--Backyard mess time.

--Spill potting soil on feet.
--Make big container #1: rosemary.
--Make big container #2: basil.
--Make big container #3: parsley, oregano, dill, AKA The Others.
--Lowe's run number two: need more containers.
--Transfer heather to containers.
--Ask heather not to die.
--Wash patio, dog, feet.
--Make strawberry jam.
--Make tomato sauce.
--Admire containers.
--Ask container plants not to die during upcoming North Road Trip, AKA Build Your Own Writing Residency 2012.
--Mourn coming Monday and collection of ninety-six process explanation essays, but cheer three weeks left in semester.

* 


Man, I can't tell if this list is really awesome or super-sad. Let's ... let's say awesome.

for the remainder of the semester, your professor will be holding office hours in the hammock under the live oak

I was pretty grumbly yesterday. Part of it is the last few weeks of the semester doldrums: to be honest, I'm sort of tired of this thing, the structure of these days, and I'm looking forward to the six weeks in May-June that I won't be teaching or even in this state. Part of it is coming back from the reading I did last week, up north, where the students laughed at my jokes and lined up to get their books signed. Part of it is that I liked this town better when Jean was visiting it.

And part of it is because I am a dog, longing to be on the other side of the screen door, whatever form it takes.

So I blew off my office hours and went for a walk on campus.

This the first magnolia--southern magnolia magnolia, not the saucer magnolias that, confused, bloomed and browned over two days in January--I've seen in bloom. The petals are huge. I'll get to that.

I think there was a renegade chalk art project in progress yesterday--the other sign I encountered read You look nice today!!--but this one seemed more honest. Freshman-in-college me would have found this very profound, and not a little untrue.

One of the magnolias had dropped a petal, and I carried it around for a while, just so people would know I am a poet.

But seriously. It was huge.

With my feet for context. I wear a size nine. This petal was half my foot, or a size five.

When I got tired of carrying it around, I set it free in the pond. POET.

I don't know if the students bring the hammocks with them, or if there's just a little number of free-use hammocks, but I want one. WANT. ONE. If I had a hammock, all my office hours would be conducted from it. The students would be encouraged to bring me icy drinks--non-alcoholic, of course. I may be holding this conference from a hammock, but I am a fucking professional.

spring

Seriously, how southern is this photo. There are azaleas, and eight hundred pine cones, and the grass can't grow in the patches of white sand.

After I took this photo, I picked up all the pine cones. Our yard is huge, and oddly shaped, and my job is to go around and remove sticks and pine cones and cypress branches and dog poop so that the B can mow. I dragged a tarp around behind me, and tossed the pine cones onto it, and when it got too full, I would drag the tarp to the curb and dump them out. It took three hours and six trips. There are a lot of pine cones.

It probably didn't help that the dog pictured above would retrieve every other pine cone that I threw on the tarp. For a dog that hates to take walks, or fetch sticks, his sporting instincts emerge at the oddest times.

"no"

This is why I love barbeque places.