Reset.


And today, all of a sudden, I'm back in my regular life: a meeting, a lunch, conversations in hallways and in the post office and on village streets, a dinner, a television show, more conversations. Tomorrow I have every intention of noodling around with my books, building up days and weeks and units. Building, that is, this next semester.

Back on out.


And now I have made the relatively short, relatively uncomplicated drive back from one home to the other. (You will be happy to know--if you are among those who care--that I took this picture well before the part of my drive that involves hours of interstate highways.) Aside from run-of-the-mill annoyances and the fact that gas prices jumped 40¢ between 27 December ($1.43) and today ($1.82), it was an absolutely uneventful journey. And once home, I fixed my vacuum cleaner (thanks to a key piece of advice from my engineer father: always check your belts! they might just be rattling around, attached to only one of their two contact points!) and was able to vacuum my living spaces properly for the first time since returning from England--which is to say, without having to use the 4" brush attachment to clean my whole apartment's floors.

Feels like a done day to me.

Errant.


Before the very fine grilled pork tenderloin dinner, and before the giggle-inducing screening of Mamma Mia!, there were the errands, more errands than I've run in this town for years. One of the errands took me to the video store, where it seemed like cruel mockery to photograph the mysterious clamp on the building's exterior (holding it together?), but where this particular hot mess felt like totally fair game.

Nearly two hours of driving the car all over town for envelopes and postage and DVDs and cooking supplies made me glad that I don't do much stop-and-go in my irregularly scheduled life.

To the new year, a greeting.


To the old year, the back of the head.

(So saith the dog, anyhow.)

(And it's a sorrow--albeit a very small one--to me that though I now have a proper (and in fact extraordinary) flash for my camera, I will never be able to use it to shoot the dog, whom it terrifies because of its resemblance to lightning, the only part of thunderstorms that she can still perceive now that she's deaf. Just a test of the flash the night I came home from the Mayhem sent the dog into a fit of trembling that earned me my first serious parental reprimand in a long time.)

Goodbye, year.


It's been a lazy last day of the year, as so many days-after-Mayhem turn out to be. We do our best to stick it out until the new year; most of us, it would seem, are going to make it--and the rest will at least be reawakened in time for goodnight kisses. And I, myself, begin crafting resolutions to re-stoke my quiet and creativity as we turn the calendar yet again.

Happy new year, my friends.

Night before.


Once I had been in Indiana for a little while, I could finally see the edge of the rainstorm in which I'd been driving for hours: it cut a clean diagonal across the sky, and I was heading right toward it, right toward the line where the dark grey clouds gave way to a sunny afternoon. And so what if the sunny part of the afternoon didn't last too long? By the time the clouds were back, I was here, home, with my family and the sore-footed dog.

Chance sightings.


Because the weather turned foul, I didn't leave after all.

First there was this titmouse. And then, when I was taking its picture, a woodpecker got in there for effect. Turns out, also, that I'd forgotten to shift the white balance on my camera--but I don't mind it so much. Sometimes the world looks good in blue.

What carried me through the afternoon.


Originally, I had hoped to be heading to my family by this afternoon, but I revised that plan sometime last week when I realized that there just wasn't any way I could finish this semester's work before Monday dawned. (Leaving Gambier before December 23? Whatever. I could barely manage that feat when I was a student, for goodness' sake.) And then, as it turned out, today was a second day running of near-record-low temperatures--not my favorite kind of day to be driving the Aged Car through (or even near) frozen fields. (Last night and today were so cold that ice crystals formed on and around the inside surface of my bathroom window. I guess that's one way to figure out where you have a draft.) And so I was glad that I'd already decided to stay put until tomorrow.

Because the weather has been so cold, and because my windows are so leaky, I've kept the curtains drawn all day, trying to keep the heat my furnace is struggling so valiantly to produce. Around 2:30 p.m., I started to hear a ruckus outside my living room window. Peeking through the curtains, I was startled to find my bird feeder being ravaged. Squirrels raiding feeders is a big problem wherever there are feeders, so I've been surprised not to have squirrels making the relatively easy climb down from the gutter. But now, it occurs to me, I have a narrative for why the seed just seemed to disappear sometimes, particularly on days when I'd been away at school all through the afternoon...




For the next hour or so, I alternately spied on the squirrel and scared him/her off so that the whole game could start over. This squirrel was totally on to me but never once tsked me. Which is a good thing, since I'm the meal ticket as well as the voyeur.


Now, my grades are in (several days ahead of deadline, I'd like to note) and one of the recommendation letter sets I need to do is done. Which brings me to the brink of being out.

The bottom of the year.


This year, the solstice (my holiday, as you may recall from years past) coincides with the beginning of Hanukkah, and so as I lit my first candles, I said thank you not just for the light's imminent return but also for this neat confluence of dates. In 2006, the solstice was the last day of the eight, so I lit my way there, day by day by day. This year, I will travel twice during these eight days, lighting my way back out of the dark. Tomorrow there will be seven seconds more daylight.

Today, as if to stress how low down and darkened we've gotten, the temperature plunged; the windchill is -17º F ("actual" temperature -2º). That picture? It's of the inside of my car's windshield.

For the second year running, I've missed my blog's birthday. Now we are three!

Gravitational pull.


At 9 a.m., my excellent friends and my excellent poet friend and her son and I piled into a Honda and rolled on out of town. It was a small escape, a freebie day. I came home with new running shoes--and the kinds of big plans that such shoes can bear.

And now I find myself poised on the brink of the shortest day of yet another year.

Box of boxes.


This morning I awoke to hard rain, the flooded walk, the trees still slicked with the night's slow ice.

Final work and good news trickle in, bit by bit.

My UPS man brings me more boxes. "This looks like more than a lot of books," he says. Some boxes are a mystery even to me--they've come here instead of going elsewhere.


Inside one box is a box of forty cardboard building blocks with which I hope my young friend will love--and which she does indeed turn out to, even before the day is over. We build the boxes. I work on teaching her more new words. "Uncool!" when the boxes don't build right. "Stack! Stack!" She loves the ten foot stretch of brown packing paper, too, and we wrap ourselves in it as though it were shot silk, as though we were designers, or designers' dress forms. The brown paper becomes a road, a robe, a wrap, a disguise. She becomes a pillar of paper. Her parents feed me dinner. I stack the cardboard blocks in the hall before I leave for home.

This evening is the first evening when she seems not to understand why I would leave. She presses her face against the glass door. I press my face to the other side. "She's going to her house," I hear her mother say. We all wave until I'm out of sight.