This time last year

November has been so busy, I’ve only just now read my monthly letter to myself. Every month, I have a calendar reminder to write a letter to my next year’s self–a habit I started when I turned 50–and then I read a letter from the previous year on the first of each month.

I wrote last November’s letter on the 24th, which suggests last November was as busy as this one. My letter focused on mundane details: I was one of the few faculty on campus still teaching in a mask, J and I had Thanksgiving dinner at home as COVID wastewater levels had begun to creep up, but in previous weeks we had eaten lunch indoors at our favorite restaurants.

This time last year, we had recently put Luigi the cat to sleep, after having euthanized Nina the cat the previous month. This time last year, I remarked in my letter how huge the house felt with “only” six cats; this time this year, the house is even larger, with only four remaining cats after the deaths of Frankie last winter and George this summer.

This is what makes writing a monthly letter to yourself so particularly poignant. The tragedies of last year have already started to fade: This Year’s Self is no longer mourning the exact same things as Last Year’s Self. But Last Year’s Self lived in blithe ignorance of heartbreaks to come: she had no idea what the future year would bring, just as I can’t imagine now what November 2024 will look like.

 

The month of aftermaths

On yesterday’s morning dog-walk, I snapped a photo of a house with an autumnal garland that perfectly matched the bronze blanket of oak leaves carpeting their yard. On this morning’s dog-walk, the garland was still in place, but a crew of landscapers with leaf blowers was clearing the carpet away. Party’s over.

Yesterday one of my studio students noted with amazement that October was ending, and November is like the morning after. I’ve been thinking about this offhand comment ever since, as we enter the month of aftermaths.

October is the height of Fall in New England, when tourists take advantage of the three-day Indigenous People’s Day weekend to peep peak foliage. In November, the foliage has ripened from festive red and gold to a more somber shade of brown. October culminates in the merry excess of Halloween, with its focus on candy and mischief and fancy dress. November starts with the Day of the Dead and ends with Thanksgiving, a holiday that presumably focuses on gratitude but feels more like an underappreciated interlude before Christmas.

November, in other words, is a middling month: a bridge toward a winter many of us don’t yet feel ready for. Ready or not, here almost-winter comes.

 

Cicada song

This morning I heard the first cicada of the season. Today was another hot, cloudless day, with a hint of haze. This morning I wrote outside on the patio, in the shade, while listening to passing traffic, a bebop catbird improvising, and the omnipresent hum of air conditioners.

A single cicada sang then stopped, as if warming its voice. Cicada song is the soundtrack of summer, something I associate with the height of August head, but of course it always starts sooner than I expect. Cicada song is the insect world’s annual reminder that it’s later than I think.

 

A series of seconds

My Comp I students are starting to write their final “Theory of Writing” project, and to prepare I’ve asked them to read novelist Zadie Smith talking about the craft of writing. In her essay, Smith describes something she calls OPD, or Obsessive Perspective Disorder, which she faces whenever she starts a new novel and has to figure out what perspective to tell the story from.

Since my students aren’t writing novels, I’ve asked them to consider any writing obsessions they might have: do they always write about family or food or work or sports? I obsessively write about time: how much I have, how much I need, how quickly it’s passing, or what I plan or want to do with it. Some people crave money or drugs or food or sex: what I want, always, is more time.

As a writer, I’m obsessed with what I call Time Travel, where I compare what I’m doing today, this week, this month, or this year with what I did at the same time back then. Yesterday, for example, I shot a photo of bloodroot, just as I did almost exactly one year ago; the year before that, we had April snow flurries. My blog, handwritten journal, photo archive, and social media posts all allow me to look back and compare Now and Then. The passage of time–like sand through the hourglass–fascinates me in an almost hypnotic way.

As I age, I realize I’ve always been an Old Soul. Young people tend to see time as an infinite resource, but I’ve never fallen for that trap. I’ve always known that time is short; I’ve always known our lives are wending their inevitable way toward death. For me, writing is like creating a personal time capsule: I tell myself that someday in the future, I’ll want to look back on the person I was today. Recording is a way of remembering, and remembering is how we briefly hold onto a series of seconds as they silently slip away.

 

Zen and now

Last week, I posted a photo of a little Zen garden shrouding a funky old house in our neighborhood. Today when I walked Roxy down this same street, I saw that they’d cleared all the trees in this garden, leaving only a lone Japanese maple.

 

Already

It’s already November, past the midpoint of a season that still feels new. Already the maples have lost their leaves and the oaks their acorns. Already autumn is rounding toward its end, and the light like the year has begun to wane.

 

A careening car

I taught my last Fall semester class on Thursday night, and I collect my first batch of student portfolios on Tuesday. This means I have this weekend to buy and wrap Christmas gifts, write and mail holiday cards, and otherwise tend to all the household tasks that have accumulated over the final weeks of the semester.

Every year, I have grand intentions of starting this holiday prep over Thanksgiving, and every year, I’m too buried in paper-grading. Whereas spring semester has spring break in the middle, fall semester is a schedule nightmare. Thanksgiving falls at one of the busiest times of the semester, and after Thanksgiving, it’s a mad rush toward the end of the term.

Every year, December arrives too early and passes in a blur. A month ago, one of my first-year students said she couldn’t believe how quickly the semester had flown by, and she asked whether all four years of college would fly as quickly. All I could do in response was smile and chuckle. My students are young and are only now learning how fast the days, semesters, and years can pass. When they’re my age, they’ll realize that time is a careening car that does nothing but accelerate.

 

Waning days

Classes at Framingham State start the Wednesday after Labor Day, so I have just under two weeks of summer left. During that time, I’ll cram in all the semester prep I’d intended to do over the past two months: just like my students, I invariably leave everything until the last minute.

The prelude to back-to-school conveniently coincides with my favorite part of summer: late August, when the sun is starting to lean low toward the horizon. The days are still warm, but the nights have a touch of chill, and both the cicadas and crickets are amping up their summer songs, squeezing as singing as they can into waning days.

In June and July, summer seems as endless as the days are long. In late August, however, you’re reminded that time is slippery and the summer short, and that makes every day that much sweeter.

 

No timeline

I keep two collections of random thoughts. First, I have my handwritten journal pages: on mornings when I’m not teaching, I try to write four longhand pages in a Moleskine notebook over my morning cup of tea, and on teaching days, I try to use time between classes to write four pages in one of the slim, softback notebooks I keep in my teaching bag.

In addition, I have an assortment of typewritten documents I write and store on my Google Drive: each of them dated, and some of them titled. The entries with titles usually end up on my blog, but the entries without titles usually get abandoned or forgotten: pages where I’m basically talking to myself, rehearsing the usual complaints and quibbles.

On an excellent day, I’ll write in both places: I’ll spend a half hour or so on my handwritten pages, then I’ll spend another half hour transcribing any ideas or insights that emerged there. On a good day, I have time to write only in my journal, and on bad days, I don’t write anywhere at all. But even though I don’t manage to write every single day, I still produce a lot of odds and ends. I post some of this random writing on my blog, but much of it lives a quiet, forgotten existence in closed notebooks and forgotten Google Drive folders.

Sometimes when I have time to write but little to say, I’ll open a random notebook or Google Doc, just to see what was on my mind weeks, months, or even years ago. It’s as if my life were a book, and I open to a random page.

Recently, for example, I re-read a Google Doc titled “No timeline” that I wrote in September, 2015:

Last week, I was at Angell for Groucho’s oncology check-up, a ritual we’ve reenacted every month since he was diagnosed with small cell lymphoma over two years ago. As I was leaving our appointment and walking toward the reception desk to check out, I heard a sound from the dog waiting area that stopped me cold: a high pitched squealing whine that sounded so much like Reggie, I had to stop and collect myself.

It’s been over three years since Reggie died, but that doesn’t matter: when I heard a dog that whined like him, the intervening years evaporated and I had to stop myself from rushing into the dog waiting are just to make sure Reggie hadn’t come back to find me. This is, of course, a crazy thought, but a grieving heart knows no logic.

Groucho died in November, 2015, so the monthly oncology appointment I describe in these paragraphs would have been one of his last. But I had no way of knowing that at the time, of course. In September, 2015, Groucho was alive but reaching the end of even the most positive prognosis: chemotherapy for cats with lymphoma works really well until it doesn’t.

In September, 2015, Groucho was alive and it was Reggie I was mourning, even though he’d been dead more than three years. Rereading that entry brings it all back: the still-raw sting of lingering loss, and the too-familiar ache of anticipatory grieving.

Last year, Bunny the cat died; this year, we’re worried about Rocco. This week, J took Rocco for his first oncology appointment after his recent diagnosis with the same kind of cancer that claimed Groucho: deja vu all over again.

There is no timeline for grief: that’s what I never got around to saying back in 2015. They say time heals all wounds, but that assumes time moves in a straight line rather than circling like a dog before sleep. Just when you think you’ve grown past expecting your dead dog to be underfoot at every step–a phenomenon J calls “phantom dog”–you hear a stranger’s pet at the vet who sounds so eerily familiar, you wonder if grief is the only thing on earth that doesn’t die. Just when you’ve almost forgotten one cat dead to cancer, another gets diagnosed with the same disease, history echoing and repeating, this year not much different from then.

 

Spring into summer

I submitted the last of my Spring semester grades on Monday but have spent the rest of the week in various faculty meetings and workshops: a flurry of academic obligations before everyone’s thoughts turn to summer. Every year, I feel like spring secretly slips into summer while I have my nose buried in a pile of student papers: one minute, the trees are bare; the next, they’ve leafed into green.

I think of peonies as summer flowers: the one in our backyard waits until June to bloom. But the peonies at Mount Auburn Cemetery are already blooming while the late-leafing oaks ease into green. For the past few weeks, our backyard trees have been alive with warbler songs, a morning medley that goes twitter, buzz, and sneeze. At Mount Auburn this afternoon, a half dozen tom turkeys puffed and strutted for a lone female, and a placid red-tailed hawk preened in a tree, politely ignoring the inquisitive human below.