thoughts

Friday mornings Ed goes off. Call it a work day. Tech meetings, business meetings – compressed into this one day at the place of his business venture.

Soon Fridays will be, for me, no different from any other days. Classes end this coming week and my trips to campus thereafter will trickle down to few and far between. I took a pay cut and stopped working summers last year and it was the best decision I ever made. After exam grading, the summer months are my own.

But today still blends with my class days and my thoughts glide back and forth between work, non work, and all things in between.

When I wrote my first post on Ocean, now more than eight years ago, my then husband asked me to consider not writing about, for example, him. Not an uncommon request. People don’t like being described by others. The writers often get it wrong, even as, arguably, they are not writing about another, they are writing, in a roundabout way, about themselves.

When I was in the thick of my divorce, many Ocean readers did not even know I was going through a divorce. That couldn’t happen in the more modern incarnation of Ocean. I no longer avoid the difficult topics, even as I don’t tend to dwell on them.

I tell myself someday I will dwell on them, putting the perspective I often find missing when people recount drama in their lives. Someday. When I learn to trust my own instincts as to what is right for Ocean.

But, for now, the “take charge” impulse that always, always pushes me forward has me in the garden today and I attack the raspberry patch with zest. I don’t want order, I don’t want neatness, I just want to clip and remove spent growth because it’s too ghostly in there among twigs that no longer want to sustain life.

In the morning, at least there are rays of sun.

In the afternoon, skies are gray.

I huddle indoors with my computer and think about how you can never avoid the twists and turns in life and then I stop thinking about it all and turn my attention to thoughts of summer and ferns unfurling, etc etc.