snapshot from a year ago: some things different, some the same

Culling files on my computer, I found this abandoned post from last May.

Every few minutes I get up to restart the clothes dryer or answer the phone, to restart the music and try to figure out who turned it off? I’m the only one home—it must’ve been me. Where did the coffee go? I must’ve finished it earlier.

I’d like to be slightly unconscious because I am writing but in truth I am fussing, futzing, worrying, fretting over this thing and that thing. It seems like a month since I’ve started a new story, too busy revising my thesis to consider much else with my writing time. And the writing time shrinks in this month of May, full of school events and little league evenings and a precious few beach days, a few walks to keep me from becoming stiff, a few trips, blessed ones.

In July I will read a portion of my thesis aloud, on the day of my graduation, and I’ve known for six months what I will wear (a perfect dress, waiting in my closet), where I will stand, what I will read. The afternoon will be hot and rainy, as all August days in Santa Fe’s monsoon season. I was thinking yesterday, how I entered this masters program shaking and feeling certain I didn’t belong with these amazing writers. I was thinking how I leave shaking in a different way, knowing I belong but now I will need to live up to this masters program, to live up to the hope others invest in me.

And of course I am also shaking because I’d hoped to teach part-time at the college level, and the nearby colleges are eliminating adjunct professors just now, trimming budgets. I will need to work, but how? What?

I can’t worry because my thesis needs a little polish, and I have five more books to read, and kids will be home from school in two weeks. I must worry because we need a bigger place to live.

Meanwhile I found an ad on Craigslist: a woman is seeking a yarn-spinner to make two pounds of fiber into yarn. Two pounds of fiber fills two grocery bags, and might be enough fiber for a sweater. The fiber is dog fur, and several web-based companies offer to process “chiengora” dog fur at $10 per ounce—I might be able to do it for less, I can’t say yet. If processed at $10 per ounce, or $160 per pound… what grief brings a pet owner to this level of commitment?

I miss my mother. It’s her birthday next week and I miss her hard and furiously.


Funny, the teaching job worked out like a charm. The thesis was fine, as such things go. I've since edited half of those pages, cutting one essay by a third, and adding to another by a third, so those 100 pages offered good work-in-progress. And the dog yarn? I've spun two batches of it, and I hope to spin some more soon. The woman knit fur-mittens and felted them in my washer, thick firm mittens with a gorgeous tan haze like mohair.