Mondays are slow days, as are Fridays. Most days in the mid-week, I have a scheduled batch of hours writing for House Digest in the late afternoon into evening, so other projects get put at the front of the day, but on these days, I lay in bed late and move slowly into my writing projects, today, the very last proof of a lesson devoted to Hester Prynne. Then a draft on another children's book category for the antiques site. I will probably finish early then start working on chapbooks I've already started printing a I do other things and reading manuscripts.
Today, it happened, and early in the month at that, the day in August when you wake up and the light precludes fall. I remember this, particularly from childhood and teen years, in those weeks right before the semester starts. When you'd probably already gone on the yearly expedition for Trapper Keepers and new notebooks and secured the clothes from lay-a-way at K-Mart or soon would. The excitement in the air when you'd go pick your school ID, the coming year filled with so much promise and wide open space. You'd probably be over it by October, but for a few weeks, that new school year glistened.
That day in August has come later or earlier in the month depending on weather. This year, we've been blessed with cooler temps the past week, so as I noted the light this morning at around 7am, I also burrowed further under the covers and went back to sleep in the coolness. I keep realizing with a start again that this is maybe the first year in my entire life that I am divorced from the academic calendar since I was 5 years old and was trotted off to kindegarten. I always wondered how time moved for folks in non-education and non-academic fields and I guess will be finding out. If you do not measure in terms, how else do you measure? In months? in quarters? in years? So weird...(cues Rent song in my head.) But yes, from grade school to junior high, from high school to college to grad school at DePaul. Then starting at the elementary school, then Columbia (doubly when I was also getting my MFA), and every fall has been marked by the same rhythms and routines. The same starts and launches.
I suppose I will find my own fall routines and benchmarks. Reading manuscripts for dgp, for example. Or embarking on new writing projects (I have one slightly underway for attention after I finish draft 1 of the Persephone poems, and another making tiny clicks in the gears of my brain.) Releasing Automagic will take some fall, more serious energy as soon as September hits. So maybe it isn't that different after all....
