More dispatches from exam week.


Here is our fall in temporary preserve.

Last night, not long after I wrote here, I heard a crunching sound outside my living room and feared it was a person stalking about in the dark. I looked out and saw the tell-tale pale light of a deer's ears. When I crept to the porchlight switch and flipped it, then peered back out the window (sorry to have startled them), I saw not one but three--one ambling around the corner, one standing in the woods, one standing in the lawn in front of the woods. Eventually they all ambled into the front yard, pausing under my flaming-sworded friend's bird feeder, stopping around the oak trees near my front door, wandering off toward the parking lot.

These days, we're all wandering around a bit.

Examining.


When I didn't think they would think I was looking, I watched each of my twenty-one students in turn--the tilted profile there, the furrowed brow here, the stretching, the rubbing of a neck, the looking toward the ceiling to see if another textual detail was stuck in one of the tiles. Somehow, they seemed stronger and lovelier than ever before, sitting there in our classroom for the last time. And as I start marking their blue books, I find just how much stronger and lovelier they were than I had any idea, even though I was right there in the room with them. Tell me, I said. Here, they replied. I hope they were able to tell just how much I wanted them to feel confident and do well.

Night fever.


In the past few days, I've spent more time outside at night than perhaps any other time this semester--a strange thing for someone who used to end up walking home from the office every night well after dark. Friday was the coldest, most crystalline night we've had all year; by last night, the temperature was rising again; tonight, the snow is gone once again from the courtyard outside my apartment, and the leaves rustle in the night wind. I'm barely even another half-mile away from where I used to live, and yet somehow that extra distance has meant that weekends--and even some evenings--escape from work, and that I'm more likely to find myself staying in the apartment complex, writing an exam script in my flaming-sworded friend's rocking chair, than to make it all the way to the office, even if that's where I meant to go when I walked out my front door. I will confess that it's a little exhilarating to separate myself a bit more from my workplace--though you can hear from my rhetoric that it's also (apparently) a little scary.

"Do you think I'm about to give them an easy exam?" I asked partway through compiling the passage ID section.

"You're working too hard for this exam to be easy," my flaming-sworded friend replied. Not much later, her excellent husband brought me a piece of warm pie, and then the moon walked me the short way home. Coming back out to take its picture seemed the least I could do to say thank you for its company.

Companions for grading.


Clearly, there will never again be a day when I do not have to grade five essays and ten pre-writing assignments, because every time I complete one assignment, five more spring up in its place and do their best to slay me. Fortunately they often slay me in the best sense (sharp wit, &c.). But today, it was damned helpful to be able to look up from my laptop and be startled by the world beyond my window. (The view here is from my study.) The cardinal was one thing.

The deer was another altogether.

See this one?


Too easy? How about this one?


Yeah, I didn't know that they just lie down in snow, either.


Believe it or not, there was a third deer out there, too, but I only saw its tail flick a couple of times and couldn't get its picture. They do match their woods brilliantly.

And then.


With one final day of hilarity with students I have come to love in a class I have loved teaching, the semester wound itself down. Suddenly it was 3:30, time for everyone to go. I still held back the interested ones so that they could see this gem from my youth.

It's good to be the mastermind sometimes.

Triple take.




That label on the blue book would almost be cruel if imagination weren't exactly what I'm hoping my students will bring along when it's their turn.

[Later, an update: Oh, they already did bring the imagination--as I now know because I've compiled the part of their final exam that I let them write! Simply frabjous.]

Showdown!


I looked across the room yesterday afternoon and saw this amazing sight.

Then, last night, I dreamt that I was caring for a tiny pet mouse that was swaddled in flannel. Even though I often neglected it, it seemed to live on, easy to resuscitate when I remembered to give it its seed food.

Window watching.


I did not take an excursion. Instead, I stayed in my house for a second day in a row: the cold was so sharp, and the house was so warm and light. I almost feel rested up for the week--almost.

One thing that makes leaving a bit difficult these days is the sheer variety of things happening just outside my living room window. My various wild neighbors are, to a one, usually unhappy that I'm around--though they're happy for all the extra food.

Now, when I wake up in the morning, I wake up to the sounds of one of the downy woodpeckers (I have both a male and a female) banging away at the suet cage, and to the sounds of the juncos clustered and peeping on the ground under the window. All afternoon, the nuthatch returned to the window side of the feeder and ransacked its seed tray, throwing the undesirable stuff over his shoulder. It hit the window with a rattle and a ping, then fell to the ground where the tiny birds pursued it. Titmice flew into the corner tree--the tree that yesterday was full of soot-gray juncos, huddling--and from the corner tree they flew to the feeder, to the tree, to the woods. When I walked to the window, they cocked their heads and flared their tufts.

When I grow up, I want a house painted in the colors of titmouse and nuthatch.



Excursion.


Because I have not been outdoors all day, I dream that in the morning I might zip my boots, wrap my scarf tight, start up the car, and make my careful way through the shallow snow, out over the curving highway, out beyond the hoarse stubbled fields and the somnolent windmills, to that quiet site where every building is the same shade of green: darker than a watertower, lighter than a forest, slicked and slapped over house and barn and outbuilding and toolshed and outhouse, over even weathervanes and lightning rods. But I have known people who've gotten stuck out there, who've needed the help of strange strong men to extricate themselves from the world's rapid blanking, the roads' disappearance, the settling into the silence of cold.

Ebb.


Look, I don't get it so much, either: I'm tired, tired enough that I have blown right through my alarm two out of the four mornings I've been back here, tired enough that I woke up with an uncomfortably short amount of time to spare before today was due to commece. I power on through, but as soon as I don't need to be powering on through, I seem to stop short pretty abruptly. It is that time of year, perhaps. But it matters to me that I took to my bed the moment I entered my apartment tonight. It's not despondency. It's just fatigue--a doneness without having finished.

Winter smell.

Something about the smell of radiator heat in the winter makes me feel deeply secure, and so it is that when I awoke this morning, wrapped in red flowered flannel, to the beginnings of a snowfall and the endings of a long, long work project, I felt cozied--even though there was still that work to be done. And even though today was another day when I did not capture anything with my camera--the nuthatches and titmice and juncos and woodpeckers flocking outside my picture window notwithstanding. And even though my flaming-sworded friend sustained a major emotional blow later in the day. Despite everything, that is to say, it was a day of square settledness of the special sort I get when the air inside is dry and heated and the world outside is hissing and swirling in sleet and flurry.

Licensed.

Driving back to central Ohio from southern Indiana, I found myself finding license plates. "DAVE CRY," said one. Not long after I left a rest stop, I saw "BOLD ONE," on a Lexus that was anything but. And then, during a standstill south of the state capital, there was the sleek black car with a plate reading "TITHING." It was that one--since we were in a standstill, after all--that made me reach for my little notebook, made me scrawl before we restarted.