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.
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.
