Day One – Residency

Today is the first day of the residency at AU, and my children and husband have left the house for the in-laws. I have a feeling of hovering, waiting for “it” all to happen. There were plans to go to church this morning, but I think with the check-in and meetings, orientations, etc. I can’t. We met the faculty for dinner last night at The Cabin (Fabulous!), which was excellent – I am even more thrilled about this coming two weeks and the year to follow. The people are awesome. I think our students are going to be thrilled with the new hires. I am.

Tex has fleas. Ew. He has been an outdoor dog the last few months because we were tired of yelling at him all the time to stop begging from the kids, and he also has this habit of needing to go outside at 6:00 a.m. regardless of the day. He initiates this need by scratching relentlessly on whatever door is in his way to said outside. This had to stop – especially because the scratching seemed to have a direct coorelation with the time our children woke up. Bye bye, Texy! Outside you go! With this comes consequences – mostly for him – we occasionally forget to feed him in the morning; he now has fleas; and, my favorite, he gets the leash tangled around my newly planted holly bushes, yanking them out of the ground. It will be a miracle if they survive.

One of my favorite things about the residency is being in the presence of this hoard of writers who are not afraid to talk about writing as if it is the most important topic on earth. This is good fun. What I always come to realize, however, is that I do not fit the writer-mold: I am not left-wing vegan organic activist; I am not a professor with months of time to do research (though if anyone would like to grant me this time, I’d be happy to take it); I do not snub the midwest lack of big city culture. Here I am, small town girl, generally appreciative and easy going. How did I land here??

At any rate, these two weeks will be challenging, envigorating, and exciting. AND, I still have hoards of submissions pending all over the place, which is fun. I made the SHORT LIST at Relief: Quarterly Christian Expression – the first time I’ve received such an email. Hurrah!

Driftwood

I have been wanting to get back into the habit of “blogging”, or what used to be called journaling and before that diarying, for some time – and this seems like a good time to start back up. I have known for about a week that we are pregnant with #3, which seems unbelievable. THREE KIDS. I am of course thrilled and excited, but the husband is less-than-so, since he is still the primary care giver in the relationship.

I had the hardest time coming up with a clever name for my new distraction from everything else I should be doing, but thanks to a recent poem, I found myself a title. “Driftwood” came about from an old poem I wrote when BW and I started dating and went river walking. This is funny now because my husband is not exactly nature-boy. The things you’ll do to win a girl’s heart, I tell you what. At any rate, the old poem was… bad. But I love renovation, and renovating old poems is much like renovating houses – you find one characteristic you love and you build on it, tearing everything else away. So, “Driftwood” came about as a piece about marriage making two people holy rather than happy, though it could be about any type of long term relationship – with God, with people, with pets, I don’t know 😉

Here ’tis –

Driftwood

Not unlike two pieces of driftwood from up river,
we spin in the current and undertow of the falls.
The rocks, slick under our sandals render each step
cautious, the familiar made unfamiliar
by lichened sandstone loosened, unpredictable,
transient beneath our feet.

The water makes us softer; we are blending,
being refined, losing sharper edges, your limbs
and mine twist together, threaten to destroy each other.
How do I not break you, our throes violent, sudden, severe?
I could snap in half, take part of you with me.

When we’re finally spit out, the knotted whorl left over
will be bare, our two indistinguishable, polished, holy.