some color please!

The drive into work: sky the perfect shade of blue with little puffy clouds. This is the blue I want on my wedding day. Little dandelions in the fields, not a nuisance but little gems, reflections of sunlight. Some have translated to wispy seedlings, at the ready for flight and quick infiltration.

The drive home: lilacs. Too far into yards for me to stop on the way home, plans to stop each morning (always running late). Pictures, more color, soon. The drive home and there are now no clouds in the sky. My auto-focus confused, nothing to focus on but wide swaths of blue.


Flavors at home: we have not gone on a real grocery trip in months. Truly. Months. Our refrigerator is refilled by a jug of milk from our quick trip for deodorant, razors, and typing paper. Frozen lunches are replenished, but fruits, fresh vegetables, were not as often. This took a quick whip around the store, ten minutes, in and out. Sometimes oranges, apples, bananas. So now I am whittling away the things we've been waiting on, leftovers of other projects. I made little sandwiches--table water crackers, peanut butter, and jam. Last night it was strawberry. This afternoon, raspberry. Thick jam with pieces of fruit and little seeds sticking between my teeth, lumps of it falling onto my fingers.


Grown up things: plans to go downtown to the county office, to get my marriage license and my passport. I always feel a little more grown up when I do something like this by myself. Getting a Minnesota license, getting Minnesota plates for my car, opening a joint account with my fiance, buying a house. I was mystified by putting the electric bill in my name and now--a marriage license. One small step to making it become more real, just on the cusp of our three months away date.

Saturday: deciding on invitations. I hope we can leave the studio with a final choice. I'd like to manage to get them out by the two month mark, and I'd like to have K's mother do the calligraphy to address them. She has such beautiful formal handwriting. These invitations will be worth framing, what with the custom letterpress and the calligraphy by hand.


K comes home tonight. I feel like the time he has been gone has flown by, has crept by. I feel like it's been nothing but mornings and stumbling and just-remembering I am supposed to feed the dogs before I go, trudging through the work day, trying to keep my head up as I grow more weary of this job that won't have me, knowing it will all slide into memory in now less than a month, and getting home, reading in bed for stretches of time, waking up slick and sweaty after a nap I should not have taken but loved and needed anyway. K will come home to a house not miraculously cleaned but to a house that misses him and wants to snuggle up at night.


The bleeding heart (I sometimes call it our "burning bush") is still blooming, only now the tips of these hearts are peeling open, revealing a soft white underbelly. Little brides on their wedding day.


The heat now makes us all slick, our black dog yearning to come indoors, begging at the screen window, which is now shamefully ripped in places. But this is spring, the green that I had been yearning for, the trees now catching up with the rest. I want to roll around in it, giddy, and forget that tomorrow I have to go back to work yet again.

It feels like that now--Work. A Job. Something to fill into the blanks at the passport office. Occupation: Teacher. Emotion: Fairly Miserable. I'm not rolling around in unhappiness, but the combination of spring and anxious students and the tired march through the school year and being cut and the anticipation of all the glories of summer and hopes of one-day-MFA programs... well, it's enough to make me want to resist getting up as the alarm blares at 4:45. (To think, rarely had I gotten up as the sun rose; instead, it was a bedtime when I first met K that deliciously irresponsible summer eight years ago.)

No word from the Local High School, but I am not worried yet. Emily suggested I brazenly call and ask when they are scheduling interviews, but I am fearful of that. Not brave enough, not always. I think this job is too perfect. I am fearful that I won't get it; I am fearful that I will. I'm afraid that I care too much. Where was the breezy me of just weeks ago, carefree and thrilled at the idea of not knowing what would happen next year? That old anxiety I had thought staved off is rising up again, tightening my chest, making my breath come quick and untidy.


And yet here I am, looking at these pretty things, these little objects that hold true in my heart, make my blood zing around, electrifying all that is good, denouncing all that is worrisome. I flex my pretend muscles and call out, "I shall overcome!" Overcome what, I do not know.

Daunting, though: the end of the school year, the yawning open job search, Emily's wedding, the theatre class, my poetry class, my wedding, my honeymoon, etc. And on. Each a huge task, each I have to approach with my full attention, and each drawing me away in distraction. "Pick me, pick me! Lavish attention on me!" All hungry little flower-mouths, all happy little events, surprises and celebrations, and items worthy of their own summer dedicated to this one thing. But life has a way of rushing up at you all at once. All you can do is open those arms as wide as you can, laugh, and take it all in.