Time to smell the flowers

One of several unanswered emails in my Inbox right now is from a friend asking if I’ve done something to celebrate the end of the semester at Keene State. The fact that said friend asked this on Tuesday, after I’d submitted grades right before their noon deadline, and I haven’t had a spare moment to answer her email tells you something about the past few days.

After submitting grades at Keene State, I had online discussion board posts to catch up with; after I caught up with discussion board posts, I had neglected errands to run. Today, I drove from Newton to Keene to attend a pair of faculty development meetings; tomorrow, I’ll be helping teach meditation to a gaggle of suburban high school seniors. I haven’t, in the meantime, had a chance to finish last week’s online grading, answer emails from friends, or otherwise celebrate the end of one set of classes while another set continues on. The downside of being a multi-tasking, moonlighting adjunct instructor is that there’s always something going on somewhere: the end of the semester for one school is Just Another Week at another.

The upside of being a multi-tasking, moonlighting adjunct instructor is the steady flow of paychecks a staggered academic schedule assures. As I chatted with various adjunct colleagues at Keene State, several of them mentioned in one way or another the financial pinch of the coming months: a summer without teaching is, for adjunct instructors, a summer without paychecks. By choosing an academic rather than a corporate career, I chose a employment path that allows me more free time in the summer to enjoy the flowering and leafy things that bring that season joy; by choosing to supplement my adjunct income at Keene State with what I can earn elsewhere, I chose a path that occasionally results in conflicting schedules.

Later this summer, I’ll have time to smell the flowers, catch up with email, and celebrate some downtime…eventually. In the meantime, an occasional glimpse of crab-apples, dogwoods, and flowering maples will have to do.

 

Cheating

One of my favorite snippets of musical liner notes comes from Peter Gabriel’s Plays Live CD which, after listing the several concerts at which songs were recorded, duly notes that some sounds were overdubbed at Gabriel’s home studio. “The technical term for this,” the liner notes wryly admit, “is cheating.”

And so I’ll duly note that I did not go to Lilac Sunday at the Arnold Arboretum yesterday; instead, I shot this picture in my backyard in Keene last May, when lilacs last in my dooryard bloomed. I’m sure the lilacs in Keene are currently blooming–and I have photographic proof from Leslee and Sara and others that the lilacs were blooming in Boston yesterday–but I spent the weekend holed away in Newton with my paper piles. Here’s hoping I don’t catch any of my students doing anything that can technically be termed cheating, and I’ll see you after I submit the last of my end-term grades sometime before tomorrow’s noon deadline.

 

So much depends

On Tuesday, the temperature in Keene clawed its way into the 50s; on Wednesday, it cowered in the 30s, and the sometimes-springy, now-rainy weather has been all over the meteorological map ever since. Is it any surprise I’ve been fighting a cold all week, my voice growing raspy and threatening to give out entirely when I’ve lectured, and a persistent cough occasionally interrupting sleep?

So much depends upon a stack of red and green wheel-barrows linked and locked outside the local Wal-Mart, beside the red and yellow lawn-mowers. During a week when spring seemed indecisive–a season when new bicycles line up beside still-necessary stacks of firewood–folks in Keene need a tangible, persisting reminder that spring, green yards, and bountiful gardens will happen, eventually.

And indeed, as I stopped to snap these pictures the other night, a passing man paused to look longingly at the lawn-mowers, their sleek and shiny forms pointing to the promise of dry, warmer days when grass grows and weeds flourish. Even in early April, it doesn’t always feel like spring, but a soul can look upon a wheel-barrow and dream.

 

The end…eventually?

I don’t usually snap photos while driving between Massachusetts and New Hampshire…but who can resist a truck that makes perfectly clear THE END is near? (For the record, I wasn’t tailgating: this is a zoomed and cropped shot.)

I would have thought The End of Winter was near now that a small cluster of snowdrops are blooming in their accustomed spot here in Keene…and yet, the forecast calls for some six inches of snow to drop on southwestern New Hampshire by tomorrow afternoon. Luckily I’m heading back down to Massachusetts, where nothing worse than a little wintry mix–not exactly The End of the World–is forecast for tonight. The End of Winter will arrive even in Keene…eventually.

 

Risen again

Just in time for Easter, yesterday I spotted the first crocuses of spring, blooming along the leaf-littered edge of the same yard where I’d spotted this year’s first snowdrops. What better metaphor of resurrection do you need than the poking of fresh new flowers out of last year’s dead leaves?

This afternoon, J and I tackled our own portion of last year’s dead leaves: one last batch of autumn that an early snowfall had left buried on J’s yard for the winter. Raking last year’s leaves from under one of J’s shrubs, I found snowdrops blooming there, too, completely buried in leaves. What sort of faith–what kind of tenacity–inspires a flower to bloom without ever having seen the light of day?

Spring in New England feels a bit like that as you move forward toward a season you can’t completely see: “This,” you tell yourself, “is the direction I remember spring as being.” Earlier tonight, our yard-work done, J and I took a sundown stroll and remarked on all the leaf-bags we saw lined in front of neighbors’ houses: on a mild March weekend, everyone’s been out raking and bagging that last batch of hitherto buried autumn. There’s a good deal of faith–a tremendous amount of tenacity–in that endeavor, too: an unspoken hope that if you uncover the cold, winter-blanched earth, the soon-to-be-spring sun will awaken life from the dead.

 

In-between days

T.S. Eliot said that April is the cruellest month, but in New England at least I’d argue for March. Now in March, Massachusetts ballfields are bare…and muddy. Imagine being a New England kid who’s just itching for the Little League season to start, and all you see in the place of a field of dreams is a field of mud.

As I explained this time last year, “March madness” in New England doesn’t simply refer to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament; it refers to The Big Itch we all feel here in the Northeast as spring is in the air but not yet entirely arrived. This morning, the sun was shining and suburban birds were singing…and the temperature was hovering around freezing. Yes, we can see the ground; yes, the snowdrops and crocuses are poking tentatively out of the earth…but at any moment, we New Englanders know the weather will turn, we’ll get one (or two, or three) more snowfalls, and it will feel like January or February again, not the “spring” announced on our paper calendars.

But, hope springs eternal, especially in spring. In the process of making travel arrangements for the May conference I’d mentioned earlier this week, J and I discovered that the 2008 ALA conference in San Francisco perfectly coincides with the Red Sox road schedule, so we’ll be able to continue last year’s tradition of seeing our hometown boys on the road (this time in Oakland), where we can actually buy face-value tickets rather than paying an exorbitant amount of money to set foot in Fenway Park.

So while Curt Schilling and Kevin Youkilis are blogging in Japan as they continue to train for the Red Sox international season opener against (yes) Oakland, I’m spending the in-between days of March looking forward to May, when the Red Sox once again face Oakland in Oakland, and spring will be here for real.

 

Re-visiting

I’ve spent a good part of yesterday and today–the middle portion of my spring break–tweaking my academic website. I’m presenting a paper at a conference in May, and I’m currently taking some tentative steps toward looking for more secure (i.e. non-adjunct) academic employment, so it’s good to have an “online presence” that actually reflects who I am and what I do.

This means uploading sample syllabi, fleshing out the portion of my website dedicated to scholarly research, and updating both my CV and resume (and yes, I have both: the former goes into detail about research and publications while the latter focuses primarily on teaching). All the stuff I’m tweaking, uploading, and organizing was already online, but when I moved this blog to WordPress, I also moved my website, and I didn’t immediately get around to moving, updating, and organizing these additional documents.

This week’s website-tweaking has also involved a strange sort of re-visiting. One of the things I wanted to re-post on my academic website is an essay I call “The Upshot,” which was the final section of the final chapter of my PhD dissertation. (I also re-posted the abridged and complete versions of my dissertation proposal in case anyone is interested in that.) “The Upshot” tells the story (in an informal and decidedly non-academic tone) of how I began, got stuck on, and ultimately finished my dissertation. In a word, “The Upshot” recounts the long, strange trip from the project’s initial stages to its completion.

In my own teaching, I typically ask students to write a final reflective piece that talks about their writing process, and I often find these informal essays to be the most insightful and enjoyable part of students’ final portfolios. How can you know what you learned until you look back on where you’ve been? In my own case, “The Upshot” is my favorite section of my entire dissertation; not only did I write it when I was (thankfully!) almost done, it’s the portion of the project that feels the most personal to me. The rest of my dissertation is me trying to sound like an academic; “The Upshot” is where I take off that formal guise and talk about what initially inspired me to start the project and what I came to learn from it.

Re-posting “The Upshot” forced me to read it again: it’s been nearly four years since I finished my dissertation and then promptly deposited its massive, still-boxed bulk atop a bookshelf where it’s been gathering dust ever since. The process of finishing a dissertation left me feeling overdosed on academic discourse, so I haven’t wanted to re-visit my own foray into that field. And yet, the paper I’ll be presenting in May is a chapter from my dissertation, so there’s something inside me that is dipping a tentative toe into the familiar (albeit still murky) waters of scholarly prose: presumably the interests that led me to start a dissertation are still a part of me even if I burned out on the actual act of completion.

I’d initially illustrated “The Upshot” with a handful of photos I’d taken during a lonely trip to San Francisco I’d taken in the summer of 2003, approximately six months before I finished my dissertation and almost exactly a year before my then-husband and I separated. As the ironies of the Universe would have it, that conference I’ll be attending in May will take me back to San Francisco. All roads, it seems, lead me back to the same themes, the same places, and the same images, the process of pilgrimage being an out-going trip that always seems to circle back to self and home.

Needless to say, I am not in California’s Marin County this week: today’s pictures are the same ones featured in the very essay I’m talking about.

 

Keep on truckin’

In another sign of spring’s imminent arrival, tonight I went to the post office around 7:00, and it was still light out. Of course, this is a direct result of this weekend’s time change: an artificial more than natural way to spring forward. But considering that during the dark days of November and December, it was dark when I left home to teach classes at 8:00am and dark when I returned from campus at 6:00pm, seeing the sun past dinner time is a milestone only other New Englanders like Theriomorph and Leslee can fully appreciate.

Now that it’s March, we take our signs of spring whenever and however we can find them. According to the academic calendar, this so-called “Spring Semester” began in January, when things here in New England were anything but springy. And yet now that the semester has reached its halfway point, I arrived back in Keene this afternoon to find my driveway mostly free from the ice and hard-packed snow that has covered it for the past month or so, after several snowfalls and day-long doses of wintry mix had left it treacherously (and seemingly perpetually) slick.

It will be weeks (if not a month or more) before I see my yard again, as it’s still covered with a foot or so of snow, and the nights in New Hampshire are still freezing and sometimes snowy. But next week is Spring Break at Keene State, and this year the timing seems apt. We’re not yet out of the winter woods–we’ll probably see at least one more snowstorm before spring arrives For Real–but we’ve definitely turned a corner toward Almost Over. When you know spring is lurking not too long in the distant future, it’s that much easier to keep on truckin’ through the remaining days between “in like a lion” and “out like a lamb.”

Don’t be fooled: I shot today’s pictures in Newton, where the ground is bare and things like frost-blasted grass and weather-worn planters have emerged from the snow cover. Who knows what I’ll find in my yard here in Keene once the spring thaw that’s already happened in the Boston suburbs makes its way up to southwest New Hampshire.

 

Spring forward

Here’s a telling gauge of how Massachusetts compares to New Hampshire in terms of seasonal progress. Whereas I traditionally see the first snowdrops in Keene in late March, I spotted Newton’s first snowdrops on March 3rd this year, about three weeks before they’ll bloom in New Hampshire. While Newton and other Boston suburbs have already changed their clocks to Spring Standard Time, Keene and the rest of southwest New Hampshire are still on Snowfall Saving Time.

 

Surreal

It seems I’ve been thinking about upside-down tree reflections ever since Leslee blogged one recently. Or maybe I still have this picture of Waban’s festive holiday tree reflected in snow-melt still in mind. Or maybe I can blame the “Search” box at the bottom of my blog side-bar, for when I typed in “surreal,” this post was at the top of the search results.

Whatever the reason, the above picture of pine trees reflected in the half-frozen surface of Goose Pond in December, 2006 is what I’m posting for today’s Photo Friday theme, Surreal. It’s always odd to see an inverse version of ordinary objects, a simple pond or puddle de-familiarizing the same old sights. In December of 2006, Goose Pond was on the edge of a several-month deep freeze; now in March of 2008, New England is coming out of all that. Yesterday in Keene, a noontime walk revealed the family of snow-folk I’d blogged last week is now giving up the snow-ghost. Eaves were dripping snow-melt, and sidewalks that had never been shoveled were topped with a slushy soup of thawing ice and hard-packed snow.

The fact that last week’s snow is quickly melting is in no way surreal: snow falls and subsequently melts every year in New England. What’s surreal is the climatic (and often climactic) contrast I’ve experienced in my weekly “commute” between Keene and Newton. Yesterday in Keene the weather was mild and sunny, joggers ran in shorts, sidewalks were often impassable with slippery slush and shoe-topping puddles of snow-melt, and several feet of snow remained in yards and other shaded, un-shoveled spots. Today in Newton, there’s virtually no snow anywhere: the last of it melted yesterday, revealing grass, last year’s remaining leaves, and mud, mud, mud. Simply by driving the 80-some miles from southwest New Hampshire to the suburbs of Boston, it seems I’ve entered an entirely different climate, one where I can wear shoes rather than boots and can stroll down a sidewalk without watching my slippery step.

This time of year in Keene, you see, you don’t have to head to Goose Pond to take in the surreal sight of something reflected upside down in water. All you have to do is look at the sidewalk in front of you when you try to ford your way across Main Street.