The Year Is Slowing Down...But I'm Not!

It’s a warm, hazy day, one that straddles the cusp going into late August. Outside, the air is humid; the trees sway gently in an almost too-lazy-to bother breeze. The leaves on these trees are, for the most part, still lush and green and abundant. But like a weirdo playing Where’s Waldo, I keep my eyes peeled for the rarity: a yellowing leaf here, a rusty one there. Every now and then, one falls to the ground.

"The Poplars 1914" -T.C. Steele

We’ve still got another month before summer officially ends, but in my brain, which has been craving fall since our blink-and-you’ll-miss-it spring, summer officially came to an end yesterday.

Today the fall semester of college classes at IU begins, and once more, I am a college instructor.

Currently, I am sitting in the university library, listening to the ping and chime of the elevator and the chatter of students already hard at work (I’m impressed; it’s literally the first day of class); I’m killing time before I meet up with my fantastically British co-instructor. We’re going to grab a quick coffee and rev each other up (which will probably mean I work myself into an anxious tizzy while she gives me some side-eye and humors me with very calm advice) before our fall class starts.

I enjoy teaching, even though it’s a hell of a lot of work, and students can sometimes be harsh and unkind. And good lord, I am still very new to this. But my grandparents, along with from too many hours spent reading the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder, kind of instilled in me the need to do better, do more, improve, don’t quit. So here I am, once more. And now that I am in the library, surrounded by young people studying, immersing themselves in information and knowledge, I am glad I’m here.

The days are long, but the years are short. My Mondays in particular will be brutal this fall; I’ve got a lot keeping me busy. And while the minutes and hours of the next few months may drag, but the days and months themselves will fly by, and very soon I will find myself sitting at this very desk, and instead of looking out at some lush, verdant trees, I’ll be seeing bare branches, gray skies, perhaps even snow falling. The days are long, but the years are short. I’ll be exhausted, no doubt, and grateful for a slowing-down in pace, but probably reluctant, too, to relinquish this part of my life.

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It’s later; our first class is over. There are nine, plus myself and my co-instructor; we are a small group, enough to cluster around the long conference table. It feels more intimate and democratic than last semester, and I find myself looking forward to the months ahead, despite the hard work that lies in store for me. “I like keeping busy,” I tell people. “That way I don't have the time to make poor life choices."

The rain that was threatening earlier is still dithering, still trying to decide if it wants to do more than spit itself down at random intervals. I’m grateful for the clouds; it helps keep the heat at bay, and I can pretend, just a little, that fall is on it’s way.

When does fall start for you? Of course, there’s the autumnal equinox, at which point fall technically begins. But there’s that moment when fall appears for each of us individually, in our own heads and imaginations. For one of my friends, fall begins with the first football game of the season. For another friend, it’s when the air finally turns chilly. For retail establishments, I suppose it’s whenever they haul out their seasonally-appropriate merch. For myself, it’s when school starts, when the kids trot back to school. Perhaps it’s because I dislike summer so much, I will mentally end it as soon as I can, seize upon whatever will terminate that wretched season.

There’s another way that I can tell that fall is here, or at least fast approaching--something that I noticed, even during my season-starved childhood in Florida and exile in California. In early September, the light changes. The sunlight may still be warm, but something about its quality changes. It’s more gentle, and the slant of it is different, particularly in the afternoon and evening. It becomes benevolent, even a bit calming, and seems to say, “The year is slowing down. So should you.”

Not sure that that’s an option for me, but doesn’t mean that I won’t lift my face up and soak up that lovely autumnal glow, once it starts. In the meantime, I reckon I can go to a local retail establishment and pretend it’s fall there. (Spoiler alert: I may have already done so.)

...Ready for it

Today, I've been a bit confused.

The calendar says it's Halloween. So too do the dishes of candy and chocolates, scattered about work, and all of the wee buggers, trotting about in their various costumes. But when I step outside, what I think is, "MERRY CHRISTMAS!"

As much as I love this place, I can't deny the fact that most of my life has been spent in warm climates. 19 years in Florida, most Halloweens being gross and humid. 9 years in California, most Halloweens being toasty and "oh it's a dry heat" and still feeling like hell. So when I step outside on Halloween morn, and see that my windshield is coated in a layer of ice, and realize that my long wool coat might not be enough to withstand the morning's chill...I'm a little con-fuddled. My body, my personal history, they tell me it's Christmas, even though my life now tells me, "Happy Halloweenie!"

(It's also worth mentioning that we are forecasted to get a wintry mix of precipitation late tonight. YAAAAAAAAAS.)

What I've noticed is that October tends to be a pretty busy time for me--even without the job and two side-hustles I've got going on right now. I'd love to say that I read a dozen books and cooked some amazing meals and crafted some lovely creations and so on, but that's just not the case. I do my work--buying media (we are at the end of the spending cycle), teaching my class, doing a bit of caregiving for my former boss. I socialize with my aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Indiana and their son, and a few other friends. I pursue some fall adventures, like watching scary movies and frolicking in a picked-over orchard. I scold the cats and watch "The West Wing" and think about simpler presidencies, and I try to enjoy the fall as it creeps in.

I attend an utterly magical play with my D'uncle, and remember the line, "It's supposed to hurt...that's how you know it meant something."

I laugh with my friends, and try to focus on the day at hand, and not look back too much on past Octobers, or worry too much about Octobers ahead. I love the thought of homes, cozy and welcoming in the darkening nights; I turn my collar up and face the cold. Some folks believe that Halloween is the witch's New Year, and while I haven't been witchy-poo enough in a long time to adhere to that, a very big part of me hopes that this Halloween is a new year, and that the various shit--physical sickness, political insanity, personal betrayals and disappointments--that have sprung up since last October are now drawing to their close. We will see.

But I gotta admit...I'm ready for it.

And just like that, a month has passed. And what a month it has been--filled with all of the things that I've missed about Indiana. The food, the people, the weather, the land. The strangest thing is allowing myself to adjust to the fact that I don't need to get everything done in a certain amount of time. Always before, I was vacationing here, and had to cram in this event, that sightseeing, those friends in a limited period of time, and if I didn't get a chance, well, I'd have to wait for the next time.

Now, of course, there is no end point (other than death, but let's not focus too much on that just now), because I am never ever ever moving away from Indiana again, so there's more time--all the time, actually--to see and do and experience and taste and explore. Of course, I thought that before, when I lived here for grad school, and put off many things, to my detriment. So it's a tricky balance, permitting myself to do things at my leisure, and yet not putting them off. And it's made all the trickier by working 5 days a week, and still trying to get settled in. Turns out moving cross-country is no mean feat.

Not a day goes by that I don't pause and remind myself that I am so frickin blessed to be here. I keep waiting for the reality to settle in (perhaps it will with my first paycheck), keep waiting for the blues, for loneliness, for regret. But so far, there is none. None at all. There's only me, and this day here in Hoosierville, and my determination to enjoy every minute, hour, day, week, month, and year of it. I will live and die here, and I want to make sure that there's a lot of life in the living part of it.

No more wishing I was somewhere else, doing something else, with someone else.

Just me, here, now.

Third Time's The Charm...

"But she wasn't back where she'd started; she'd simply arrived where she'd left off, this time smarter and stronger and maybe even stripped of illusions." -Kate Bollick


The First Time of Significance...

The fall I was 14, my paternal grandmother--a dotty old woman we called Lady Sue, I don't even know why--called me up, all excited because she had gotten a good deal on an airplane ticket and wanted to fly me up to see her and her husband, my Grandpa Fritz. (Again, not sure why we called him that. They were a couple of odd ducks to be sure; to this day my sisters and I recall an incident concerning them and a fight over ketchup and peas, and no one remembers the outcome, but we sure as heck remember the fight).

So I flew up to Indianapolis in October 1994 and visited my grandparents, and their son, my uncle, picked me up and drove me down to Bloomington. It was a great place to live, he told me. He raved about what a young, vibrant feel the place had, what with it being a university town and all. I was 14; to me, college was ages away and only promised troubling things like...College Algebra. The only other things about Bloomington that stood out to me were the grey, chilly weather and the piles of dead leaves; accustomed as I was to the balmy climes of Florida, this was a novelty to me, and I begged my uncle to let me rake his lawn.

The Second Time of Significance...

The late summer of 2004, when I was 24, I arrived in Bloomington, chased out of Florida by a hurricane. I was excited to live somewhere brand-new and completely different, and for the first six weeks of my time there, I was completely starry-eyed, enchanted with the old buildings and houses, the swarms of young people, the amazing variety of foods, the different trees and climate...Of course, the feeling didn't last; grad school and real life and yes, winter and the feeling of being trapped in a small town all overwhelmed me, and while I still loved it, the novelty wore off.

The Third Time of Significance...

Now. Right Now. Spring of 2016, almost 10 years since I moved away from Bloomington, I am back. Yesterday, when driving through the downtown area to meet up with friends for lunch, that old sense of wonder tugged at me a little. Bloomington is a bit magical--"a town forever young", I once read it described as--but I am not forever young. I am not 14 or 24. I'm almost 36, about to be divorced, basically circling back around to the beginning and trying to pick up a different thread of my life story. It's almost like, when I was young, I'd read the "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels in reverse,  carefully following which storylines and choices took me to the best outcome. Only I'm doing it now, living my life in reverse a little.

 I don't have many dreams and hopes beyond what has driven me over the past year--stay alive, get divorced, protect yourself, get out. Now that all of that has been accomplished... I'm not thinking too much about anything else other than "being successful at my new job" and "being worthy of this new third time..." I don't really know what comes next. But I've been given a chance, and this time, I hope I get it right.

A long time ago, I heard a silly superstition...something along the lines of "Be mindful of what you do in the New Year, for you will do it all year."

Well. If that's the case, then, judging by this picture below, taken on January 1, 2016, I will spend the whole year hiding my hangover, but being surrounded by trusted, beloved friends and adopted family. I will spend it looking fabulous, smiling past the pain and looking out with eyes filled with optimism. I will spend it unaware of the magic of change which hovers about me, but open to it nonetheless. 

Because that's what I did this New Year's Day, and now, two months later, everything is different. Everything has changed. I look at this picture of me--recently come out of perhaps the saddest Christmas of my life, desperate to leave 2015 behind, yet completely unaware of when or even if my circumstances would change any time soon, and I marvel at how we never know how things can shift so utterly, so quickly. 

Only two months ago have passed since this picture was taken. How is that even possible?

What will my life be like two months from now?

Signs of the Times

It was so hard, not to see signs wherever I looked. Silly ones, mostly like--

The strange feeling of peace I got the morning I got the invitation to interview in Indiana.

That my divorce case file begins with the letters "IND."

That the night before my interview, my "nephew" Wesley hugged my legs and said "I want to keep you here forever!"

That the evening following my interview, I wandered into a downtown boutique and heard the music of Capercaille playing on the store's sound system--Capercaille, a rather obscure musical band that I had never before heard of before moving to Indiana.

That the next morning (a day or so after Groundhogs Day), I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, and came across this gem:

I couldn't let myself hope too much, but oh--that picture was uncanny.

And prescient, as it turns out...because I received a phone call this last Friday, with a job offer.

I'm going home. And golly, I hope this time, it's for good.

The Shadow Recedes

Blearily, I stumbled out of bed--washed my face, brushed my teeth, ironed my hair, donned my outfit, painted my face, took my pills, fed my cats, grabbed my things, locked the door. Outside my home, it wasn't QUITE daytime yet--the sun was shining, and casting a golden-pinkish-orange light over Mt. San Jacinto. The shadow of the mountain had not yet crept over the land. It was 50 degrees out that morning, and no doubt all over the desert, people were sitting on their patios, sipping their coffee, and marveling at the magic of living life in Southern California in January.

Not me.

This was just two days ago. As I drove to work at an ungodly hour--the Goon Festival required brutal work this week--Mt. San Jacinto glowing rosily at me for a good part of the time--I thought of bleak winter mornings back home, in Indiana. It was about 3 degrees that morning, back home.

I thought of how days and weeks and months and years slipped by, as I sat at the reference desk and watched patrons browse the new books, and helped them find their information, and watched ten years of my life slip past, as the Library (my true home in California) changed subtly while I passively sat by. Sure, I changed too, took on new tasks and cheerfully evolved--although my position and salary didn't, past a certain point. But there's no denying the fact that a lot of years chugged along while I sat in the same spot, both literally and metaphorically. Time was still chugging along, actually. How many more days am I going to have to watch the sun rise here? I pondered, more than a little grumpily. How many more Goon Festivals will I have to staff?

I thought of the countless dreams I have had, through the years, of returning home. Of course, Dream Home is weirdly different and surreal--sometimes an amalgamation of Real Home and many other life memories--and sometimes just plain NOT real, but still, hauntingly, mournfully familiar.

And then I thought, randomly, about how suddenly things can change. How you can chug along, quietly, trying to make the changes happen. And they won't happen, perhaps--until, unexpectedly, they DO, and then everything changes. And it happens that suddenly, and swiftly, and subtlely.

All of these thoughts, I had as I drove to work on Tuesday morning. And realizing that the change would happen, sometime, somehow, some way, brought me a little bit of peace, finally.

Later that morning, I got a phone call from a potential employer.

Going through the Library tonight, checking the doors and locks and preparing to close the same as I have done hundreds of times over the past eight years, it occurred to me that it feels a little like the end is close–closer than I think. Or maybe I am just gently, slowly detaching. Kind of like that X-Files episode, where Scully was caught between life and death, and deciding if she wanted to cut the rope from the people who loved her, and drift away to whatever came next, or be reeled back into shore. 

I don’t know when the end will come, when I will leave the Library and California, and this life that I have grown accustomed to, but I want to be emotionally ready when that happens. 

(And no, this is not a post about suicide. Don’t worry, folks, it’s a post about moving home.)