up nort

Sometimes, after a long year, you gotta get on a plane and fly to a place where summer still exists, where the sky is high and blue and the peonies are still blooming and you think a lot about those Minnesota summers you had in 2004 and 2005 and 2006 and 2007 and it's good to sit at a table outside with very old friends and drink beer and be glad, so glad, that you made it.

so far north

I don't know what you did yesterday, but I sat in meetings from 9 in the morning to 5 in the afternoon, so, you know, HEY EVERYBODY WELCOME BACK TO SCHOOL DID YOU MISS IT OR WHAT EVEN THOUGH YOU JUST TAUGHT TWO COURSES, HA HA, SUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMER.

Ahem.

Let's not think about that, shall we? Nor the courses that still need to be planned, with t-minus four days until the semester officially begins; let us not think of the meetings nor the relentless e-mails. Instead, let us think of the last two weeks, in late July and early August, when we threw a battered cardboard box of booze and a cutting board and some suitcases into the back of the car and WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE drove so far north there was no humidity and we actually had to close the windows at night to stay warm. 

And later, we drove even further north, to celebrate with my new in-laws! Who may or may not have the next day backed their car into ours, but ha ha, we are family now. And then, we drove back down home, but not without stopping in Beloit to find the final resting place of Roy, and in between the e-mails and tiny fires, I am wrestling with the essay about dinosaur eggs. It's a good break. I like this essay, I think, but who knows.



Oh, Wisconsin. I know from my year in you that you are not always so beautiful, but, you know, this time you done well.

happy new year, internet

Oh, Internet! Happy 2013 to you. We arrived home on the 30th, and I spent the next two days putting everything (new cutting boards! borrowed harpsichords! sweater trees!) away and making a Goodwill bag and vacuuming the car and enjoying the fact that our little rented Georgia house, despite its awful living room carpet and 1970s kitchen, is clean and uncluttered and ours, all ours.

Then it was New Year's Eve, and we ended up drinking wine on the floor of our friend's house and later we had our very own private dance party to Warren Zevon songs at 2:30 am. Few things are better.

Now it's raining steadily, and the washing machine is humming, and I have Big Plans to knock out one Rook poem a day until the 14th (EDIT: it's the 7th and I think Rook is done! oh, winter break, you are so kind), so I'm going to sign off. Wish me luck, Internet, and I you, and here is a photo of the snow up north on Christmas Day.

Was it cold? Oh, you betcha.

I went to wisconsin for ten days and I all got was this stupid spiral fracture that, as it turns out, will take six to eight weeks to heal

Yesterday I boarded the ferry in Milwaukee and waved goodbye: to the Jeano and the AV and the P; to the farmers market challenge that resulted in potato-sweet corn chowder, panzanella with basil and juicy little tomatoes, and drunken cherry cobbler; to the impromptu cnf essay workshop; to marathon games of Donkey Kong Country; to cookouts and water slides; to beach houses and weekends in Sheboygan; to ugly handmade rabbits that we promptly renamed "Slut Bunny"; to fine, free Miller products and rosewater lemonade; to lazing around town and pizza and generally just acting for a week like tenth graders with driver's licenses and a healthy appetite for red wine.

A big shout-out must go here to the P's fiance. That man has, for the last month, had anywhere from one to three women he is not marrying flopped all over his house. The house he just moved into, with the big kitchen that we sort of commandeered and the living room that I sprawled all over. And he dealt with it with patience and good humor, and he has an arcade machine in his basement that plays basically any game you would ever want to play, even Aladdin for SNES*. He is one of the good guys.




As an added bonus, I came back from Wisconsin with not only a 1968 road map of Michigan and about a bazillion photographs but also a sprained ankle, the result of being dared to "dance a merry jig" on Saturday night. What you need to know about that fun exercise is that in an attempt to make my jig even merrier, I attempted an Irish-dancing-style kick that rolled my ankle totally inward, and then eleven women heard pop! pop! pop! and down I went. What makes this story really awesome is that I managed to totally blow out my ankle without the help of any Firefly or Spotted Cow**, though I have to say that in the minutes immediately following, I could have used a Wild Turkey. Maybe two.

The ankle swelled up like a big fat grapefruit, and I sort of hobbled around for the next few days until I could get on the ferry*** and back into my health care network. And then, this morning, I headed over to the urgent care center. I have sprained my ankle at least twice before in my life, so I knew that the fact that my foot looked like a big uggo pregnant lady's was to be expected, but something toward the front of the foot didn't feel right. And when the X-ray tech took a few shots and came back into the room, she was pushing a wheelchair. Even though I had hopped myself into the room.

That means I broke something, huh, I said.

I can't tell you anything, she said. I'm just the tech. But the wheelchair told me everything I suspected, and sure enough, then there was a flurry of talk of spiral fractures and displaced bones and then I was taken down the road to a podiatrist, who asked if I wanted the cast to be white or pink, and now I am facing down the next six to eight weeks with a left foot encased in fiberglass from the toes to the mid-calf.

Good thing I shaved my legs this morning.

So looks like walking or running or scrubbing the baseboards of the apartment with a small brush are out of the question for a few weeks. And I have to learn how to bathe myself with a sponge tied to a stick--good practice, I guess, because since I can't work out, I will also be gaining about eight hundred pounds here in my couch-ass groove. But the upside is that at least this happened after the trips to the beach but four weeks before school starts, and that the B is here to help me, and I can read and write and Photoshop and lesson plan right here on the couch. Also I feel like a character in the Baby-Sitters Club, maybe Kristy, and I will have to learn some important life lessons about ceding control and letting things get dusty and asking people for help. Bring me a collie baseball cap, and maybe a turtleneck.

On the way home, with my foot radiating a million degrees and the crutches in the backseat, the B looked over at me. I hope you learned something important, he said. Mainly that you are not a very good Irish dancer.


*not that I, like, played this or anything, and not that I enjoyed it even more than I did during the summer of 1993
**really, no animals played any part, though it would have been nice if a flock of bluebirds had helped me splint the injury a la Snow White
***but I was fast-tracked to the front of the line, and got to board ahead of everyone else, or at least third, behind two dying men in wheelchairs SO TAKE THAT

goodbye, wisconsin

Goodbye, goodbye. Goodbye to walking around the zoo and the botanical gardens and up and down State Street; to waking up in a bed that you do not have to flip back up into the wall; to sweet tea vodka with lemon verbena simple syrup and first bloom; to running around town and down to the river and up through the woods behind campus; to a whole week of reading whatever suited my fancy; to camping out with iced chai and this laptop and new lesson plans; to our friends living in their space-age magnetic house; to adventures with blackberries; to the albino beaver downtown; to single bananas and sassy cow milk; to the stupid older couple who played "Repeater" during most of Adventureland; to bad television marathons; to fish fries and Leine's with lemon. Goodbye to my bicycle. And goodbye to spring.

But hello to the case of three-buck Chuck in the trunk of my car; hello to sending out the ms. to blurbers; to the summer seminar course; to the new umbrella on my patio. Hello to the downstairs apartment and moving the B to Michigan. Hello to new poems and light suntans and basil sprouts. Hello to infusing vodka and salads with berries and long shadows on the lawn at eight-thirty and madras. Hello to Larry Brown, to Flannery O'Connor, Ray Carver, Tim Gautreaux. Hello to planters of herbs. Hello to summer.

closer to thirty

This morning I have decent coffee (keeping a Bodum and beans in my suitcase is one of the better investments I made this year), a card left for me on the nightstand that plays "Who Let the Dogs Out" (it also wishes me a happy 21st birthday), and The Supremes. I have been listening to an awful lot of The Supremes lately.

It's drizzling here, but I don't mind rain when it comes at the end of April, when there are enough buds to turn bright green against the wet trunks. Outside the window, the near-leaves are chartreuse. According to Wikipedia (F+!), they are the color Web chartreuse, which is exactly 50% green and 50% yellow. Real-life chartreuse is more yellow.

This is most I have ever typed the word chartreuse.

I realized yesterday that this almost-bloom is exactly what I expect from my birthday, because since the age of seven I have celebrated my birthday in the north--New Jersey, New York, Minnesota, Wisconsin. But if I lived further south, like I'm always yapping about, this would be February or March weather. Late April would be nearly hot. The leaves would have already unfurled. They'd be deepening their green. The tulips would have wilted. I would miss this weather.

This has been a very pleasant week so far--some good runs, even if the SRITS kill me every time, and some ambitious seminar-type plans for the class that starts next week, and driving the back roads of southern 'Scansin with the B, and flip-flops, even though it is a teensy bit too cool for them. I bought some ambitious madras shorts yesterday. When it clears up this afternoon, we'll drive up to Madison and walk around the lake.

The dog keeps going back to bed this morning--every time I go to look for him, he is curled up on the pillows, his nose tucked under his tail stub.

Yesterday I spent some hours downloading photos from an-about-to-expire photo account. Looking through the pictures--we took so many pictures--I realized how little we all looked. Something in our faces was softer. But I like the way we look now better. Still, it was strange to think that our first martini party was four years ago. Or is it--then I think that I have been mailing out copies of the ms. and talking about moving into the apartment downstairs and measuring the distance from Kalamazoo. Then four years seems about right.

I think the year ahead will be a good one. Here's to that.

boom-down dead

This morning the B and I headed out of his small town to the small town down the road. The mission was breakfast. We knew of a place a few miles away that seemed like a good bet for a breakfast--a place that, from the outside, looked very much like the Wagon Wheel in Kato town, where you could lay a nice solid foundation of grease in your post-beers-in-the-garage-until-4-a.m.-stomach for all of three dollars, or the Blue Benn Diner, where I, for one short summer, spent every morning I could afford face-planted in buckwheat-blueberry pancakes and fake sausage.

The Eat-Mor delivered--yes, my omelet hung over the edge of the plate; yes, it was cooked on a flattop a few feet from where the B and I sat on faded red stools; yes, there were all of sixteen places to sit at the counter, worn smooth at the edges where countless elbows had been propped; yes, the owner's wife brought me bad coffee; yes, there was an illustrated dictionary, copyright 1972, and a single hunting magazine offered up as reading material.

A lot has been said about small-town places like this, and a lot about the joys of eating local and slices of Americana and stepping back into the old days, blah blah blah. I know it's nothing new to marvel at the experience that is sitting at a lunch counter in a tiny diner right off the river and listening to the locals talk about the recent weather (rainy), the current president (can't believe he won't just issue rebates for everyone--talk about stimulating the economy, heck, give me sixty thousand dollars and I can stimulate the economy), the burgers coming off the grill (fresh-shaped this morning; any that don't sell before 1 p.m. go into chili for the next day).

But you know, it's still pretty cool that these sort of places exist--that they haven't been done in entirely by Perkins and IHOPs. And if they are in Wisconsin, in small-town Wisconsin, the conversation is delivered in an accent that is oddly nasal and vowel-centric. It's not the Minnesota accent, and depending on your location in the state, it can vary--suffice it to say that it is delightfully Midwestern. And it is entirely enjoyable to sit back and let the conversation swirl around you while you wait for your ham-and-cheese omelet to be up.



The old guy next to us, wearing a WWII cap, wanted to talk about everything--his wife, dead seven years, who used to collect owl trinkets and filled their trailer with "all that owl crap," deer ticks, Lyme disease, how long horses live, turkey hunting up nort, do I know anyone who collects owl stuff, especially owl salt-and-pepper shakers? But then the conversation turned to dead people, and in particular the guy who had suffered a heart attack just last week. And fell off the same stool the B happened to be occupying.

"He was here a week from Thursday," said the owner, flipping the American fries once and replacing the grill press. "He came in and said he wasn't feeling well. Then he came back on Saturday to eat and boom-down! He fell off the stool."

The old guy looked at the B. "And he was a big guy--taller than you, even." The B and I both looked behind us. There was approximately three feet between the stools and the front wall. It was hard to imagine a six-foot-three guy wedged in there, having a heart attack. It was harder to imagine how the EMTs would get in there and treat a guy wedged in there, having a heart attack.

"Two ambulances came," said the owner. "And there were cops, too. Sixteen rescue people in here and not letting anyone leave."

"Hoo," said the old guy.

"They shocked him twice here and once on the way to the hospital," said the owner. I briefly reconsidered the giant plate of eggs and cheese I'd ordered. "Now he's in intensive care."

"Nooo," said the old guy. "They said he died. Yesterday." He jerked a thumb at the street behind us. It was unclear as to what either the they or the yesterday was in reference to.

"No, he's not dead. Not unless he died yesterday," the owner said. "He was alive yesterday."

"See for yourself," said the old guy. "They said he died."

The owner set down his spatula. "I'm going to call," he said. He disappeared behind two swinging doors at the end of the counter.

The old guy looked at us. "Craig died too," he said. "He was cutting somebody's hair and then--phbbttt!" He made a farting noise. "Dropped dead."

"Huh," said the B.

The owner reappeared. "Well, either he died or he's been transferred to Madison," he said. "'Cause I called Fort and they said they don't have a patient by his name."

"Dead," said the old guy.

"If he was in transit," the owner said, coming back to the grill at our end of the counter, "they'd have said in transit." He flipped our breakfast onto waiting white plates. "Who had the omelet?" I said I did.

We dug in and chewed for a while. The old guy and the owner chatted amongst themselves.

Then the owner's wife, who had been listening down at the other end of the counter during Is-he-dead-or-isn't-he exchange and had disappeared, came triumphantly through the swinging doors. "He," she said loudly, "IS NOT DEAD." Everyone turned to look at her.

"I called Barb at the paper," she said. "No calls in this morning."

"Well," said the old guy.

"Well," said the owner. He plated two bacon cheeseburgers for the guys down by the register.

"Well," I said. The matter had been settled--the woman in charge of the obits had no record, so the guy wasn't dead. Not yet, anyway.

The old guy got up. "I'm going," he announced. "See you tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," said the owner. His wife brought us a box for our leftovers. We paid and left. I held the screen door so it wouldn't slam.

"That was ... awesome," I said. The B nodded, and we drove down the street, back in the direction of Whitewater and the stack of papers waiting for him. I looked out the window. We passed Craig's Barber Shop. In the glass door was a white sign: Craig's Barber shop is closed. Thank you for your patronage.

dear state of wisconsin, please stop calling. we're just going two different places right now, you know? and I mean, this is for the best. really.

Here's a fun fact: if you leave the state of Wisconsin--say, you move there and work there for a little while, but then you're offered a job in Michigan, so you move away on a hot day in July--you get to spend fifteen minutes answering a series of questions on Wisconsin tax form 1NPR.

There are at least ten, and they ask you, among other things, when you moved to Wisconsin, what date you left Wisconsin, why you left Wisconsin, if you sought residency in other state, if yes, which state, if you ever came back after to vote, if you came back to attend school, if you came back to hunt or get a hunting license, if you came back to fish or get a fishing license, what sort of work you did in Wisconsin, what sort of work you left Wisconsin for, and then, finally, why. Almost pleadingly. It's a little like breaking up with someone and then running into them at the grocery store a month later, when they, let's be honest, look like hell and they're pushing a cart filled with root beer and frozen Red Barons. Wisconsin hasn't shaved. You suspect it's taken up smoking again. You try to duck behind the bananas, but Wisconsin spots you, and it wants to talk for a little bit. It just needs to know: what could it have done differently?

As a bonus, though, these questions, will give you and your community accountant volunteer, a nice man named Erich with a German accent, something to laugh about. You will be grateful for the relief, because what with the freelancing and the moving and the rentals and the reciprocal state laws, your taxes have taken over an hour already, and the room is filling with crabby people who only get crabbier when the community volunteers point out that it will be difficult to help them with their taxes seeing as they have not brought any W2s or forms of identification with them. Hoooo, said Erich at one point. You are complicated. But I think Wisconsin is more so!

The real kicker is that before the Wisconsin onslaught started, I had spent a rather pleasant, if windy, afternoon curled up on the floor reading Michael Perry and feeling somewhat nostaglic for cheese curds. Oh, the irony.



Sad Wisconsin. Don't worry, bud, you're going to bounce back real soon. It's gonna get warm. I bet that sexy neighbor of yours will come out to mow her lawn or wash her car. Maybe she'll be wearing that pink bikini you like so much. Give it time, man. Just ... give it time.

spring break, done sprung

It wasn't necessarily warm, but there were some blue skies and no blizzards, which is enough for me.

Also: a little bit of reading, a lot of work-from-the-couch-or-from-the-coffeeshop days, dynamite Greek and Mexican food, long walks in the field with the dog, the Great Guitar Adventure that stretched from St. Paul to Madison, used-book shopping, great sweating glasses of Pimm's and ginger ale, much sleeping in, Coraline, driving in the car and working through a bunch of new music, beer with lemon, new pants, and familiar Wisconsin landscapes.

I know another snow will come, that I can't tuck the ice scrapers and brushes into the trunk just yet. I'm glad to have had a week to refresh and rest and sleep--the luxurious type, where you wake up three times and still find reason to turn back over, or the one that calls you back to bed in the middle of the day, with a belly full of coconut pancakes and hollandaise--but still I feel the pull of spring.

Already my office hours for the next three weeks are booked solid, one conference after another after another, and sheaves of white pages are waiting for red pen. We have six weeks to go: six weeks of the big essays and to work through short stories and then the portfolio blitz of finals week. And after that I have two weeks to sit out back on the deck and plan the summer class. Syllabi on my birthday.

But I can feel the itch starting in the back of my teeth: I want to be writing poems. There is so much I haven't read staring at me from the bookshelves. I want to be sitting in a faded green canvas chair. I want the smell of char wafting up from the grill downstairs. I want to be running with bare arms--good runs, the ones where the miles tick by and you look up to find that you're downtown already, heading into the last hill. I want to be stuffing poems into white envelopes. I want something small and green growing on my windowsill, pushing toward first warm light.

mauston mouse

up north

and the shower tastes like something drug up from deep underground, the steam of something mineral.

Up north and your father takes the long way to show me the hard woods, flashes of white birch, his best hay field. Up north we watch the Packers, then the Vikes.

Up north the snow is up to our knees and we lose the dog once, twice, three times. Up north and the snow keeps falling.

Up north the house is decorated with wooden nutcrackers, your mother’s collection stacked deep on every table. You say My brother was the nutcracker in the school play. I laugh, imagining the one I know now. Then I realize you meant the other one.

Up north in Oulu—turn right off Route 2 at the boulder painted like a Finnish flag—we watch the glassblower breathe a blue fish. The heat is orange on our faces but our legs freeze at our boots.

Up north there is Lutheran coffee and not nearly enough wine. Up north we snowshoe and learn the unsteady rock and sway of sailboats.

Up north and I am not so good at snowshoeing.

Up north we get into a bottle of blueberry mead, pull off fleece in the dark. Blue-spark these cold still nights.

three feet outside ...

... and sixteen inside

nice to see you again too, wisconsin

1. The day after I arrived, it was nearly forty degrees. Then, the next day, it dropped to four.


2. Driving in to the B's, I passed the following sign on a back country road:

The Elegant Puss--DELUXE Cat Boarding

that was wisconsin, that was yesterday's news

Half-full moon out tonight, but I don't know if it's waxing or waning. Monday, you bastard, you feel like a Sunday.

Bon Iver on the record player. Tomato soup for dinner tonight, made from the last pale fruits from sailorsausage's plants. The stem to one broke off in my hand and I smelled it for a good minute, inhaling deeply and saying farewell to summer.

The leaves are red along the highway: Welcome to Michigan. Great Lakes, great times.



I spent a lot of this morning sitting in Chicago rush hour traffic. At one point I passed Six Flags and checked out an inflatable gorilla climbing a tower. I wanted it to be a real gorilla.

On the stereo: new Ben Folds, new Ani. My old artists all have new songs.

We were up and out the door by five-forty-five this morning. I drove US 12 in the dark for an hour before first light over the barns.



Last night I dreamt of Ron Howard. Before that? Culver's for dinner. We have them in Michigan, just like we did in Minnesota, but I only want to eat there when it's Wisconsin.



Sunday: the B's reading. It went beautifully. Everything on the square glowed faintly in the rain, and the cars driving by hissed. The bookstore was warm. We came from a bar where we had Bailey's and hot chocolate. We had brunch, woke up to rain.



Saturday was a night of beer sipped from tiny, fancy stemware. I learned how to play quarters. We joined the packs of red and white at the Echo Tap--drunk alum, football players, pitchers of beer. Cilantro and beef. It was a bright afternoon: herds of fans headed to Camp Randall. You could smell the lake at the end of Jess and Mike's street, two blocks north. Driving in from the country, the barns were sharp against the brilliant Midwest blue sky. Before that: coffee and pigs in a blanket.



Friday: to bed early. I shopped. I read a play. I didn't check my e-mail. I bought jeans. We ate Mexican food for lunch. Around us, undergrads were gearing up for another fall Friday: pony kegs, football games, parents in tow for family weekend.



The dog and I walked in the woods Friday morning and watched the leaves fall. Last time we went through those woods we were driven out by mosquitoes. Not this time.



I got in late, fell asleep mid-sentence. I've missed that bed.

There is nothing like driving to Chicago at night: up up on the skyway, the city in the distance. The lights to one office building spelled out GO SOX. There was traffic downtown. There always is. I rolled down the windows and truck drivers and cabbies waved at the dog and his ears.

It felt good to hit the road on Thursday night: coffee, new music, handwritten directions. Aim the car into the sunset.

I don't know why I want to tell this story backwards, but I'm going to.

year ago today

One year ago today I was starting the marketing job. I was spending the entire day indoors, sitting in a windowless conference room with our accounting woman, going through every single last page in a 3'' white binder filled with pages.

I signed non compete contracts, non fraternization clauses, proprietary information clauses. She lured me outside under the premise of showing me where to park and then smoked several off-brand cigarettes and I stood next to her in my pencil skirt and did not smoke any cigarettes, off-brand or otherwise. The office building housed the marketing firm on the third floor, and radiation and oncology services on the fourth and fifth floors, and I watched--as I would every day I worked there--a steady parade of frail, white-haired men and women walk so slowly toward the bank of elevators. Some were wearing head scarves. Some had to be wheeled in chairs.

For lunch I went to Chipotle and tried not to think of all the TA lunches I had in the Minnesota Chipotle, and then I returned to the office that smelled of paper and overheated electronic devices, and I continued to sign forms and pretend I knew anything about CRM. When it was all over, I sat in my new cube and looked through the paper clips and pennies gathering dust in my new drawers and tried not to throw up.

Today I am headed off for hours of orientation. On a campus that is lush and green and about to be filled with students.

Thank god for the last 365 days.

dear madison

Dear Madison, Wisconsin:

Thanks for this year.

Thanks for not killing me, even when I thought I might die. Thanks for showing me that I can in fact survive outside of academia, and thanks for also showing me that it is, however, where I want to be.

Thanks for your four lakes and for your (okay, New Glarus's) Spotted Cow. Thanks for curry and for dynamite tamales. Thanks for Quann Park and the Prairie Moraine Trail. Thanks for fresh frozen custard and for hot-from-the-fryer cheese curds at the Paradise. Thanks for Frugal Muse bookstore, even if it is hidden in a very, very ugly strip mall.

Thanks for people-watching on State Street and thanks for The Great Dane's beer, even if the B is not crazy about it.

Thanks for Jess and Nicole and Jill and Becky and Mike and Jeff and everyone else who I met here who cleared off a space on their couch and drank wine with me. Thanks for these people, who listened when I needed to talk about the marketing firm and who showed me where to find, among other things, the aforementioned curds and curry, and who went along on dog walks, and who never turned down the offer of a beer.

Thanks for my Wisconsin driver's license photo, in which I look like I eat children for breakfast. I'm pretty glad to replace it next month.

Thanks for giving me an office, where I spent most of the winter weekends holed up and preparing submissions. Thanks for giving me the best possible news--twice in two months. Thanks for freelance work, and yes, thanks for the marketing gig, if only for showing me what I do not want to do with the rest of my life.

Thanks for my own in-unit washer and dryer and dishwasher, two things I am going to miss sorely.

Thanks for being near enough to GB and MSP that I could make frequent visits, and be visited frequently. That helped enormously.

Thanks for the live music: Bon Iver, Josh Ritter, the Hold Steady, the Weakerthans, Against Me!, Sage Francis. Thanks for showing me that when it feels like everything is going wrong, sometimes you just need to stand near the pit at a show and listen to music so loud it's impossible to think of anything else.

Thanks for the accent, which is charming.

Thank you, thank you. I don't think I'll be back, save a couple of visits, and of course I'll visit the nearby Whitewater. But this is probably the end of the road for us, Madison. I don't think you need me, anyway; you've got enough to keep you busy and a wave of new freshmen headed your way. But thank you for--what else?--the memories.



peace,
steena

the best feeling

Today some of the same old shit went down at work, and I took a deep breath and looked at the green outside the window and the traffic glinting silvery on the Beltline like I always do. Like I have for ten and a half months. Except I didn't think One day I'll leave this place. Instead, I thought: In three weeks I'm out of here. And then I went home, and the B handed me a sweating Corona with a lime and I drank it right there on the couch and listened to Joe Purdy and waited for the rain to fall.

Three weeks until the beach. Until my last day. Three weeks left in a cube and then--a month to do all the Madison things I've wanted to do, all the things I want to do to say goodbye. Ice cream and lakes and fresh herbs, lemon beers and swims and reading side-by-side and long dog walks at the park and so much curry. Then packing, then a move. Then fresh legal pads and new pencils, new syllabi and textbooks, a new town to explore and students walking by--some to be mine. My own office. And its window.

Three weeks. Jesus.

outside the living room window: bloom

april, you goofy bastard, you've brought us zombies and outdoor fucking

We've been here for nine months. If I had been pregnant with this move, this month it would be born. And then I'd have a baby named Madison, and wouldn't that be clever, because I have never heard of a baby named Madison.

Oh, wait. Yes I have.

I have a feeling that this winter killed a lot of people I know, and I hope that everyone's feeling a little bit better about things now that they can drive around with the windows down and sit outside without wearing two or three layers of pants. We were winter zombies, and now we're staggering around smelling daffodils and maybe feeling a little less brain-eat-y. Come to think of it, this is how I feel pretty much every winter, which is why April always comes as such a relief. It's such a friendly time to go out and walk the streets, too--everyone's so relieved to be out of their houses, and the farmers market is back up on the square, and you wake up pissed at the birds outside of your window, then realize you really can't be mad, because they are not a drunken snowplow driver ramming into the trash cans.

Also, the plus side to the windows being open again is that we always get to catch the latest episode of Ghetto TV. Last week a girl accused her fella of cheating on her, and then he threw all her stuff out the window while shouting that this was why she couldn't get a man, because she was jealous as shit. Can't wait to see what's on this week.

I don't know if this spring and summer will bring the change I still would like them to bring. But so far, this month has brought good news, and more good news. It's brought friends and family my way. It brought sun and so much poetry and nights sitting on couches drinking wheat beers and feeling like my old self, only better.

It also reminds me so much of my second semester in Minnesota: juggling full-time work and school and feeling so very engaged by everything. I remember writing then that it felt as if everything was a subject of great debate, but in the most positive way, that nearly everything that happened was something that I chewed on and puzzled over and pondered. I remember wiping down tables and having to stop and scribble a line on a bev nap. That was a time that everything felt right, that it was as it should be, and I feel the twinges of that now. Things still feel overwhelming, but in a good way, like I don't have the time to read and write and do all that I want to, and it's that subtle pressure that propels me through the days, wanting to do more and more with the time I do have. Even without caffeine, there's a faint humming behind my eyes.

There was a point this weekend when "Left and Leaving" came on the iPod while we were talking, and I paused, because for the last twelve months, that song had made me cry almost instantly. Within seconds. But it didn't on Friday night, and it's not now. So instead, I leave you on a fifty-degree Sunday with some Jonathan Coulton (Liz!). I have some editing to do, and a car to wash and bleu cheese burgers and sweet potatoes to prep, and then a date to watch "Wristcutters" with a guy I have a thing for.

Happy week, and happy April.