falling asleep on the sofa reading

Reading voraciously, turning the side of my thumb and pinky newspaper-black, wanting to re-enter the world of the novel. Finding myself plotting out days, roughly, until the end of the semester for one new class, a second well on the way. Meeting new people, getting names muddled, finding out the quirks of the system. (One: discovering part of our duties is serving at a co-curricular event, not being paid like the ticket takers of Old High School. Learning to sprint subtly to get the choir concert and not prom.) Hall duty for a never-a-hall monitor. Putting up the first waxy posters that are yours.

And the rain comes in, turning over the sludge at the end of the street, revealing new things about the summer we just lived. Watching sunflowers open and bend, corn close to ready. Hope for the maple tree, as the Husband asks to cut it down; its leaves have been brown for a while now. Unsteady home ownership, making these big choices on our own. A push-pull attempt at evening the ground. He's already talking about apple trees; I'm trying to find a way to save it.

Neighbors are now neighbors twice over now: the man with the rock star name lives half a block away and I look into his classroom window, see the soft glow of television news on above his head. I tell the story of my teaching in front of a man whose brother sold us this house, a man who lives a half a block away in another direction, around the corner, whose blond children make their way past our dog-laden fence to the playground.

My school mentor calls it a fishbowl, this community. Each beer a cautious choice, each shopping trip on display. It will take some getting used to, these changes, but it is near-impossible for me to be late now, only six minutes away. Eight, door to door.

And I'm getting that sense of hibernation, all over the blog world. The comments are coming much slower, friends are proclaiming a need to reflect and quiet on their own blogs, and I can feel myself remembering, "Oh, yeah, put up that picture of the day before you fall back asleep." I find my poetry notebook untouched since the honeymoon, which makes me so sad, but there is no energy left. A need to cocoon myself, like this summer, to put it all into one focus: once camping is done, it is a wedding, then a theatre class, and my own poetry class, a trip to North Carolina and a wedding, then a honeymoon, and a new school year. So many bursts of light this summer, so much wonder. And now, I am finding the air turning cooler, the light fading sooner--all something welcome, as I find myself falling into a pattern again. Now the little classes, the printmaking one I signed up for in the late winter, the bookbinding one I'd like to take this fall--they are extras. Little bonuses, rewards for making it through another week.