It was a brief weekend in Rockford, where everything is blooming at the prettiest time of the year--green and lush, but not yet weedy and humid. It was too chilly to be outside much, so I only saw bits in passing, including my very favorite snowball bushes at the corner of the house (actually two corners, but this one is the largest and most show-offy.) I landed back in the glittering city tonight to sullen cats and a chilly apartment where I left one of the living room windows open. The neighborhood is its summer kind of quiet now that the dorms have emptied at the end of the block and the general traffic between them ceased. There will be much less traffic and students in my own building, and shorter waits for elevators. The lobby, which has been under construction for the past month or so is shaping up nicely. While I thought for sure they'd go sort of basic with white, they painted the walls the most lovely dark olive, which of course, is my favorite color for just about everything of late--dresses, paintings, text colors.
Tomorrow it is back to writing work and press work and no doubt longer days since I took today off. I actually don't mind long hours and a lot of work, mostly because it's nice to have those things and be able to set my own pace and not have to leave the house if I don't want to (and I rarely want to, especially as those numbers creep up again..) The shuttle bus to Rockford was full of travelers, about half with no mask to be seen, so I felt a little vulnerable (I've just been wearing my surgical masks and ran out of KN-95s for the supervirulent months when I was commuting daily.) As I eye my dwindling mask supply, I am aware that each time I've ordered more, I've said to myself, just one more pack and it will be over. Because some people like to act like it's over, it will probably never actually be, ya know, over.
Despite saying I was waiting to start my next creative project til the beginning of June, I was antsy to get started last week. This is the female centered-epic I've been thinking about since the beginning of the year. Initially, I thought some dactylic meter might be a hoot, but it was clunky and I abandoned it for longer, free verse lines after a couple gos at it. So maybe it is not an epic fully, but I plan to model my structure and other elements on heroic forms as much as I can. I don't know how long it will be--shorter or book-length but we will see. Many times I start projects intending them to be longer and I find I like them much better more condensed after all. There have been longer sequences that were book-length or almost (honey machine, extinction event) that were trimmed down considerably to trim off excess that didn't need to be there.
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