21 May 2026: After a very early heat wave, a few days of cool rain are setting in. We need the rain, so I am grateful (mostly).
I ran errands most of the morning and got some work done on campus. I was home by a bit after noon.
It's been a quiet since then--getting a bit of work done, talking with Tara (stuff with my mom is...hard), and keeping an eye on Jo (who is having another bad stomach day), and reading for fun. Reading two books at once (soon to be three), which I realize is an unintentional tribute to my dad.
(Jo's okay now...just crashing big time on the couch. I said to her, "I am sorry you aren't feeling great, but it's been nice to be here with you today.")
Today while the group chat with my siblings was a bit lively, the song “I Melt with You” was playing on Pandora.
I realized the first time I really heard that song, I was in the back of my mom’s minivan and we were driving Tara back home from a semester at college in the spring of 1990. I was always so excited to have her back home.
Anyway, I had my little Walkman and played a song for her that I was just swoony over: “Paintings in My Mind” by Tommy Page.** (Ha! It's not a great song, but I was young...)
I can picture her*: putting on the headphones, listening, and telling me it was a great song. Immaculate “Big Sister Energy,” tolerating and even humoring my enthusiasm for the New Kids on the Block-adjacent pop star.
Then she was like, “Let me play one for you…”
Because she was the coolest person I knew, I agreed that it was a great song. (And come on—it is!)
Sometimes I think too much, maybe, about the hard parts of growing up. When I think of my siblings, though, so much is good and filled with love.
*A “painting in my mind,” if you will.
**RIP, Tommy Page. I still think you were swoon-worthy.
19 May 2026: Couldn't help myself and got started with some fall syllabus work, specifically for the YA Lit class. I'm including a couple of new books this time (Robertson's The Barren Grounds and Ursu's Not Quite a Ghost) and dropped some others. I reworked some assignments and gave everything a read-over, tinkering with some language in places.
Felt good to get so much done.
I feel like I am always pushing, pushing, pushing to get ahead as "just in case," I guess. Hamilton's "Non-Stop" always plays in my head when I think about it.
But now I am telling myself to push ahead for those reasons, but also so that maybe I'll have a lot "done" and can actually see how I really feel with nothing pressing to do. I honestly have no idea how that will feel...
Today I met (again) with a financial planner from Thrivent. He asked if I imagined myself working part-time after retirement. I told him that I didn't think so, but I also can't imagine not working.
Is it love for the work or more of that running ahead "just in case"? Both?
18 May 2026: Early in the spring, Randy (who I wrote about here) handed me a slim book. He remembered me saying that "Hanrahan" doesn't appear in a lot of literature. This book, Small Things Like These (by Claire Keegan), he said, had some Hanrahan in it.
I just finished reading it and my goodness: what a book!
I found myself thinking that it's precisely the kind of book my dad would enjoy and that we would enjoy talking about. His favorite short story, after all, was "The Dead."
This book's answer to its central question--what do you do when you must acknowledge an travesty happening almost in plan sight?--is profoundly moral without being simple or naive. Just an absolute jewel.
16 May 2026: After sitting on my bedside table for nearly ten years (!), I am finally digging into Laura Dassow Walls' biography of Thoreau. I am still in the early chapters and really loved this little excerpt about his family's pencil business, something that I have always wanted to know more about:
"Thanks to Henry's improvements, for a time Thoreau pencils were the best in America, sought by artists, engineers, surveyors, architects, carpenters, and writers--everyone who depended on a good pencil. Thoreau's own working method coevolved with the family pencils. Quite literally, Thoreau's writing career rested on the humble pencil, so much a part of him that, when he drew up a list of travel essentials, he forgot to mention a pencil, the same way he forgot to mention air to breathe or water to drink" (40).
Thinking about how lost I feel sometimes when I don't have a pen or pencil on hand...
(Also thinking about setting a goal of moving a certain number of books from that beside table--and the other one--this summer. We'll see. Right now I am working on two.)
Work Cited
Walls, Laura Dassow. Henry David Thoreau: A Life. The U of Chicago P, 2017.
14 May 2026: Walking back from a meeting across campus, I saw a big group of our staff leaving their (very first) Professional Development Day. That alone is pretty darn cool--that the University invested in training our hard-working staff in this way. But what really got me--what made my eyes well up--is how many of them were leaving the the Narcan boxes they were trained to use that day. They also did some CPR training.
13 May 2026: The first big thunderstorm of the spring is rolling through as I write this. Unlike Jo, who is looking disturbed and about to hide under some furniture, I am grateful for it (assuming it doesn't get too severe). We need the rain and only a few hours ago, I finished planting all of my flowers.
As I planted the flowers in the bed by the front porch, I thought about how beautiful they were last year and marveled at how small they start. Now it's cool to sit here and think about the work that the rain will do to help them get there.
(Reminds me of the kind of moments I describe in this post: standing in the yard shoveling snow and trying to imagine summer and then standing there in the summer and trying to imagine winter...)
12 May 2026: Just finished the lawn and am taking a little break before trivia.
It's been a busy day, but kind of casually busy, if that makes any sense; no real stress or rushing. Or rather, when I felt like I needed to be rushing and thus stressed, I realized I didn't need to be doing either.
Voted this morning. Planted a little redbud tree sapling tree a neighbor was giving away. Went to the dentist. Went to Walmart to get (more) mulch and some odds and ends. Wandered through Sunny Meadows on my annual annual-buying trip. Came home and kept working on the spring clean-up and prep work I started yesterday. Listened to a New Yorker Fiction Podcast story while I did the latter--a kind of tradition. (Yard work--fall or spring clean-ups--and Christmas light hanging/taking down=New Yorker Fiction Podcast episodes. A little tradition that I quite enjoy as it makes the tedious work more pleasant.) Then mowed the lawn.
Tomorrow I'll see about getting the flowers in the ground and porch pots. Need to spread the weed and feed, too. I've got a couple of work obligations, but will do my best to stay unstressed/unrushed.
It's almost like these little yard rituals--a yearly necessity--need to be done before I can settle into whatever summer break rhythm will emerge.
11 May 2026: Always a strange time of the year--these early days after a semester ends. I am trying to push through some lingering projects and some spring yardwork...and then figure out the daily routine.
My summer to-do list (work-wise) isn't that big, so it's kind of hard to imagine what the days will look like. Until I do, I feel a bit uneasy and unmoored, but I am trying to embrace the possibilities.
(Finding myself entertained by the unintentional double-meaning of this post's title...)
10 May 2026: Just a bit ago, coming in from my walk--a walk filled with Big Thoughts--I finally read a piece my friend sent me that she cut out of the New York Times. By Melissa Kirsch, it commemorates thirty years of "National Poetry Month" (which is April, so yeah...took me a while to get to it).
Kirsh, like me, is drawn to springtime poems, especially those about April, a month of boomeranging weather contrasts here in the Northeast. She writes, "The internal work is much the same, sitting quietly, paying close attention to the weather inside, you can observe the hope that blows in with the fear, the lightness and heaviness that seem to be competing." Just a really lovely little essay.
9 May 2026: Another good and busy day--two graduation ceremonies, lots of time with folks I am fond of between the ceremonies and then after, then pizza and a movie with Carrie and Rachel (we watched Sentimental Value--very good!).
8 May 2026: Two graduation rehearsals this morning, then back home to do some cleaning in preparation for the Sigma Tau Delta end-of-the-year get-together, then back to campus for the Education pinning ceremony, then back home for the get-together...
It's something to be tired before graduation day, but I'll take it. All good and fun things!
6 May 2026: Henry David Thoreau, among the writers who changed my life, died 164 years ago today. It says something, I know, about my state these days that I find thinking about his dying makes me emotional. Apparently, among his last words were "Now comes good sailing," which is an idea almost too beautiful to think about.
He's been on my mind these past few days, both for this post's title--the final line of Walden--and for an earlier passage in the book, where he talks about "contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity." Two seemingly different vibes in those lines, but put them together and you have a pretty good sense of what he's up to in Walden.
I am grateful that his words come to me when I need them.
5 May 2026: Here are some utterly banal but true statements, based on my recent and current experience and, with some liberty, the experience of my siblings:
It is a kind of torture to be far from a parent who is dying. Much of it is also somehow easier than being closer.
So, too, is it a kind of torture to be close to a parent who is dying. Parts of it are also somehow easier than being far away.
(The folks on the ground have the greater burden, I know. It's not even close.)
4 May 2026: I spent a big portion of today in meetings with my colleagues talking about teaching and writing. It was interesting, affirming, energizing, and just all-around wonderful. Best job in the world.
3 May 2026: Well, this story lifted me out of some Sunday evening blues...
"The next day, veterinarians soaked Elmer in more oil and gave him multiple baths until most of the glue was gone. He gently headbutted shelter employees’ legs in the following days, seeming to ask for more massages. 'He honestly feels like every day is spa day,' said Cassie Davidson, a spokeswoman for the Humane Society of North Texas."
When I got to the part about his foster mom getting to keep him, I cried. (Of course I did.)
2 May 2026: Just finished the second season of School Spirits, not bad considering what I posted a last Friday. But sure enough, with some of my regular TV shows going on hiatus and work slowing down just enough, I got to enjoy every episode and can cross this one off my "to be watched" list.
1 May 2026: The new month kind of snuck up on me, but it is, indeed May 1. On my walk this afternoon, I realized it's been five months since my dad died.
For the most part, I think I am handling this grief pretty well. It is still so hard and sad. I still find myself thinking, "I should tell him that" or "Dad would like this..." and then remember that he's gone, well...more times than I could have imagined. But I think all of that is pretty normal.
The other stuff that's come rushing in since he died--Brandon's death, worrying about Vogel, my cousin's death, my mom's illness, so much work stress, and everything our government is up to--it's overwhelming.
Maybe there's a gift in a quiet moment like this one, just thinking about him.
So...it's been five months. There's been good stuff, too. And we're still here. And it's May, maybe my favorite month?
The lilac bush behind Knutti is in bloom. I snapped some sprigs to bring home. As I write this, they are filling the first floor with their fragrance. Another gift of May and everything that Spring represents.
