the gallop

Quiet, but not farmhouse quiet. Condo quiet. I’ve been up since... what, three? It’s getting close to that hour again. I am looking around at empty cases and half packed closets. Quiet. I feel the quiet of a spring evening at a place that I once thought of as home.

I wake up always now at two or three. I arrange things in my head: what must be done, how I must proceed. Sometimes I return to sleep, sometimes I do not.

You think that it’s just a move. No, at my age, it’s never just a move. My move reverberates. On my children. On my parents, too. I need to make changes on documents that are difficult to change, and that are not mine to change.

And, even as I am moving to Ed’s place, it’s not that I am doing this in any conventional manner. I am reinventing many wheels and I have at once a partner and a puzzled child next to me in the process of doing this.

All that and the semester too.

The day is brilliant. Cool, maybe that, but sunny and brilliant. For the first time this year, students settle in with their minutes of time. Golden time.





I don’t pause. I’m in a hurry. Back to back classes followed by a long stream of students (I have office hours today). By five, I am completely spent.

But I want to take some fragile things over to the farmhouse. I catch the bus home, I pick up lamps and such and I drive over to the farmette.

The same sense of urgency – to get it done! – is not felt by my future landlord. For Ed, life moves at a gentle pace. You cannot hurry a day. My dismay now at finding counters piled high with clutter that should have been removed days, no, months ago is not shared by a person who will get to it all. Eventually.

I gallop, Ed strolls.

I have a dinner meeting back in Madison in a few minutes and I know already I am going to be late. And still I need to wipe down surfaces before the crew comes to varnish the downstairs floors tomorrow.

I am dismayed at how much dust there is still. Construction blows into the air a hellish amount of grime. It’s like a mud bath everyday, but without the cleansing aspects to it.

I think about how different life will be once I move to the farmette next week. (And I can do so, for sure! All the essentials are now in place!)





Sometimes I think that I am amply prepared for it. Other times I think – well now, this is going to be interesting.