Since Spring began I've been watching the tree next to my porch. I chose a single bud, one bud in from the tip of the branch, close enough to reach out and touch, and have been paying attention to how it's been changing. First, it was a red cluster, a little wound ball, and then the cluster began to peel away from itself and the red tips of leaves began to appear. The tips started to separate, turn green, and grew out into the beginning of singular leaves. I lost track of the bud for a week or so and yesterday looked for it, but it was no longer where I thought it should be. Its branch had moved lower by a foot and a half, the weight of the branch's leaves bending it closer to the ground. Of course, this must be the same for every thin branch, sagging from the weight of its leaves. I'd never noticed this before, that the shape of a tree in Winter is different then in Spring. The trees in winter stand straighter and more erect, and we can see through their branches and wish for warmer weather and imagine what it will be like when it finally comes. And it has come, but in my mind the image of a tree is still the one made from cold air and contraction, inward and stiff. I can no longer see the shape of the tree, its parts, but instead see its color.

Across the street in big sloped yard of the victorian on the hill yellow daffodils are coming up. The tree next to my porch is starting to grow its leaves. Yesterday in this same tree I witnessed a cardinal, a woodpecker, a flock of little brown birds, and a bluish grackle like bird all hanging out and twittering at each other. Spring feels so good after such a long winter and last week, after passing through a number of deadlines, has brought the end of the semester. Three more weeks + a week of finishing up papers/projects/grades/evaluations for classes and soon it will be summer. Did I mention that it feels good? Yesterday I presented at my first conference, a paper connecting David Hume, Buddhsim, and making a case for the pedagogical functions of "expressive" discourse. I ran out of time and didn't actually get all the way through what I wanted to say but it was a good experience. Next time I'll make sure to time my dramatic reading of academic prose more carefully. On Friday I finished a midterm for the empirical class and on Wednesday wrote a response to the Rosi Braidotti's The Posthuman and now all I have left to do for Post Modern Rhetoric is write one more page and an end paper that doesn't need to be researched, as it's more of a response/synthesis paper of all the books that we've been reading. All this to say, the semester's end is in sight. 

This week I have to read student drafts for their Discourse Community reports which under such a short deadline (10 papers in 24 hours to be ready for Tuesday conferences) is kind of stressful but all the hard work and hurdles of the semester have for the most part, been traversed. The other day I was meeting with one of my students at the OEPP, a graduate student in the material sciences, and out of our conversation, uncovering problem words and sounds, and collecting them into a sentence, we arrived at the following: "We can imagine the image of a very ugly diamond in our minds for months." Sometimes longer. A couple weeks ago when the leaf buds in the tree next to my porch were beginning to appear, I touched the one closest and wondered if that little bud would remember, if it would grow more or less, faster or quicker, and I looked at it today and it seems to show no difference but my eyes are big and if there has been a change its too small to be seen.

Summer is going to be busy but pleasant. For starters, Indiana summer is nice and this apartment, with its light and doors and air coming through is good place to work. I'm flying out to Portland as soon as the semester ends to visit Aric and his family, and then flying to New York to see my brother and his family, along with my New York friends that I haven't seen for three or four years. When I get back I'll have about a month to work on writing, a new project born out of the reading I did last month, putting together a manuscript and with my remaining time hopefully writing out the dregs of the fall, of trauma revisited one last time, extending my memory to the page and letting the page do its archival work. Writing stories like I'm putting away winter clothes, and maybe I'll need them again or just move back to California. Work wise I'm tutoring at the OEPP, the perfect summer job in that I don't have to teach but meet one-on-one with students. No grades to drag on the horizons of conversation. But the main event is studying for prelims, the big test that I need to pass so that I can get started on my dissertation, and those come at the beginning of August and stretch towards the middle. All this I'm excited about, and I'm also on a softball team. Carter, #5. Got a glove the other day and this afternoon I'm going to go play catch. Yah.

Once when I was eleven I told my dad that I was "bored." It was a Sunday afternoon. He was laying on his bed watching This Old House and on Sundays us kids would head back to Madison for the school week. He would drive us to the parking lot of Club 18, a biker bar located outside of Mt. Horeb, the halfway point between Mineral Point and Madison, and we'd find my mom waiting for us in her grey Buick Skylark. Every week it was the same, leave for Mineral point on Friday and come back to Madison on Sunday. Bored was the best word I could find, that I would go to school for a week and then come back to the farm for the weekend and it all seemed the same and nothing seemed to change. And even now its hard to pin down exactly what was bothering me, but it was more an existential pain of being without purpose, a fear that regardless of where I was or who I was with this odd, empty feeling would always be there. And I walked into the room and said, "I'm so bored," and started crying and couldn't help it, and I layed down next to him and he held me a while, and later we all got in the car and drove back to Madison.

I've told this story before. I wrote it down in the blog about seven years ago. I write it again today because today is one of those days where I'm feeling that odd, existential sadness. Maybe this is Spring, when the cold turns to warm rain and all day it's been grey. Low pressure weather systems carrying invisible change. Spring time is sleepy time, some of the Chinese students I've been working with keep saying, that we need more sleep and feel more tired when Spring comes. I think this is true. But I've also been thinking about the last couple months, about not writing and taking a break from telling stories, that since my dad died, and the initial waves of grief and shock and weirdness have passed, I've been oddly happy. Not happy like whee, this is fun! happy, but happy like free. Like wow, I can't believe it's over. Happy like relieved, that my dad and everyone can finally move on. And it seems like a space long occupied has been freed up. Like an old sofa that I'd spend years sitting on has been taken away, and there's an empty spot, an outline and a few dust balls where it used to be.

One night, three or four days after he died, I was going through the pictures I keep in an old shoe box, looking for pictures of him for the memorial service that my sister and brother and I were planning. I pulled out the pictures of him that I had and set them in a pile. Along the way I couldn't help but notice all the pictures of myself, my twenty year old self in Japan, my twenty-three year old self in Seattle, my twenty-five year old self in Providence, my twenty-eight year old self in California, my thirty-one year old self still in California; and thought about how for my entire adult life it's felt like some sad secret I've had to carry around. That because it was difficult to explain, that he was both alive and dead at the same time, I simultaneously had a right to grief and no reason to grieve. Jan told me, in a conversation a few days after his death, that he wished I didn't feel like it was secret, that I felt like I could talk to other people about it, and did on occasion. But I never talked about it with my family. And I kept waiting for him to die, and kept waiting to have those conversations about him and his absence, about growing up and missing him. I am thirty-five years old.

To put it another way, now that his death and all this has finally surfaced, and seemingly, at least in these initial months, now that we all can move on, I'm wondering how to do so when my entire adult architecture, especially in terms of writing, has been built around the idea there is something wrong. It could not have been any other way that they way its been, but if I'm not running for my life then why am I running? If there is no longer a darkness to skirt around, then what will be the mystery? If I am free to say what I need to say then how can I be lonely? There is a river and then there is the river's bed. Something like that. Today I came home and said to no one in particular, "I'm so bored." and I sat down and cried. And I don't know why. But I feel better now. And I miss you.