Windchimes

calm or clam

Friday night, and I'm feeling mellow. Don't even mind that I can't seem to find my paper and ink journal. I still have this one, after all.

So why was I looking for my paper and ink journal in the first place? One and a half glasses of white zinfandel and I can't remember. I've found the local jazz/R&B station and I refuse to panic about anything tonight. I'll experience some mild panic tomorrow, and it will intensify as the days pass, culminating, in all probability, in a full-scale catatonic state the night before each paper's due date. I've mentally moved the due dates up, so, hopefully, that won't be such a problem this time. Deadlines. Dead-lines.

Oh yeah. I think I was going to write something about stopping short in front of one of the pictures I have hanging on the hallway wall. It's a picture of my parents, taken before Mom died. My sisters and I went through her clothes a few weeks after, each of us picking what we wanted and stuffing bags upon bags full to give to local clothing charities. The blouse she's wearing in that picture made me stop short. I was wearing the same blouse that morning.

Lately, I can't seem to pick up a pen to write anything besides school papers without going back to that grief, and it makes for mawkish poetry, at least when I try working with it. I think maybe that blouse has to go. Or not.

This weekend is summaries. Nothing is due next week, and two of my Monday classes have been canceled. The Thanksgiving break starts on Wednesday, so I've only got three classes next week. I won't even have much reading to get done by a certain time.

Of course, I feel a certain pressure to start clearing up the clutter I've let accumulate during the semester. It's almost time to deck the halls, and the decking can't proceed without the de-cluttering. We'll have to make the annual trek to a Christmas tree farm to fight over which from the rows of trees should grace the front window of our living room on Friday, and decorating will take all day. I cannot talk the girls out of this tradition, and I cannot talk them into waiting a little later--like, say, after the semester is done. No, Christmas will almost be here by then. So we will go cut down a tree on Friday so it can shed its needles into my floor vents for an entire month before I remove the tree from my living room, then I can spend the rest of the semester break vacuuming pine needles.

At least I have one less paper to write as of today. As of last night, actually. The history paper has been written and turned in. The rest of them have to be done within the next three weeks. I might not be back here until then, unless I just feel a burning desire to document something utterly irrelevant to all the other things I have to write about again.

J.H. Larrew
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