My Kid Tells Me All I Like on the Internet are Old Person Memes

 Every morning since the first of the year, I have tried to chase the dawn--wake up, sit in the dining room and write while the sun comes up over the Cascades, over the apartment complex two doors down, the bare snowball bush. For a little over four months, Monday through Friday (with a few exceptions), I have written in my little composition book--nothing more than descriptions of the morning, the birds, the small noises in the house. Everyone else is asleep. Or rather now, dawn coming earlier and earlier, all the other humans are asleep. 

I get up, feed the dog and the cats, give them their various medicines, put laundry in the washer, feed and water the chickens, watch the sun come up and write.

When I lived on Grosse Pointe street, my dining room also faced east, over the little reservoir woods. For months at a time, I would wake up, sit with a candle and my journal and write. I started doing this when my anxiety mushroomed, when I felt off center.

So, I decided to start again. It's easier in the deep winter when dawn comes far past 7 AM. It's easier when I have no commute, when I only have to wake J. up an hour before online school. Things will change this fall--he'll likely be back in school, I'll be maybe back.

I miss choir fiercely, but I do not miss work, do not miss endless meetings and the commute and being trapped in my office all day, and internal politics and career administrators. I miss the people, the hallway conversations. But. What I miss is what I miss about teaching: the parts that matter. What has been cemented: so much of it doesn't matter, is designed to simply maintain the System and the upwardly mobile career trajectory of People Who Like To Be Important. But, I love my faculty in the same way I loved my students. I feel fiercely protective, have been thinking a lot of the ways I wasn't supported as a faculty member--etcetera. I cannot do this job forever.

 Now I can walk the dog, run on my lunch break, walk through the neighborhood with J and talk politics and humanism and fashion and the future.

Welcome to academic meeting zoom hell, friends

R. and I get our second vaccination tomorrow; we'll drive down to Salem to the expo center, I'll disassociate long enough to not panic about a needle going into my arm, we'll drive home. One more step toward the future, though it is clear to me that the world we inhabited before is done, over. It'll be almost 80 degrees by the end of this week, mid-April. We haven't had any rain at all, though we are supposedly living in one of the rainiest areas of the continent. Black men continue to be murdered by the State. Asian-Americans continue to be harassed and harmed.  Women continue to be commodities and white women continue to sell our souls to the oppressor in order to have some shred of power. I am the mother of a white boy who has no patience for capitalism and hegemony, who wants to dedicate his life to helping others. I'm reading Gerda Lerner's The Creation of Patriarchy, I'm upping my miles on my run listening to podcasts about patriarchy and religion, running slowly and wearing a knee brace and my face is lined and I am greying at the temples. This year I will turn 44. R. is gearing up for another round of tests to see if his cancer is back or gone or who knows what, as his PSA tells us nothing at all.

I found a photograph in my desk drawer from college: my roommate and once-best-friend, a stranger, and me, somewhere in our senior year. My once-bff is luminous, the strange woman joyful. I am disheveled and smile quietly. Look: here we are in our 44th year, I want to tell her. Look what we've made of things--you can do it. You can do it. You are here.