more of the same; waiting for spring

Today: more of the same. Still that brown-edged ice piles that once was winter snow. I am disappointed that we never truly had a snow storm, nothing that felt like freedom, like me leaping in piles with my sneakers. Nothing that kept anyone home for a day, bundled in blankets, shoveling the sidewalk in shifts. And now we're nearing mid-March, and I'm afraid this winter, it just won't happen. We maintained snow from just before the holidays, no bare ground, but we weren't walloped like Wisconsin, our baleful neighbor.

Currently reading: Fanny by Erica Jong. I read Fear of Flying too late, without guidance to appreciate it, and passed it along short thereafter. Groundbreaking then, it wasn't surprising to me, this Women's Studies minor, this girl who loved her GLBT Lit classes, this girl whose favorite poet is the visceral Sharon Olds. But I can appreciate what she's trying to do, can admire the rollicking adventure of her heroine. I can also brace myself as she capitalizes all the nouns in some kind of farce of 18th century Literature, though when she gets to listing, my eyes start to swim a bit.

Currently dreaming: A few nights ago, I dreamed I had my heart removed during surgery. I could get up, walk around, with an empty chest cavity, and though I felt woozy, I knew I had some time before it needed to be replaced. I was in some kind of gray skyscraper, and my principal and my mother were to help me back from the lobby to the operating room, but there was some distraction, and a low level panic began to rise up, flush my cheeks.

My spring soundtrack: Regina Spektor. I don't know why, but last spring, just as the snow melted, just as the world became nubby trees and bulbs pushing up through loam, I would listen to her CD over and over again, hopeful for the future. I also think so much about good educational memories: high school English classes, workshopping in college, that first semester at the U of MN and how good it was and how free I felt, independent of that safe apparatus that is family and childhood friends. There's something about her songs that reminds me of reading. I wish I could explain, but I think of those summer reading lists, of thick Russian novels, of reading belly down in the grass, of the sun shining on the page.