I’m not sorry I haven’t written. Frankly, I’d rather have my life be full of life than of loose pockets of spare time that I attempt to fill with reflection. I have approximately thirty days left to complete the tasks of my undergraduate career, and despite the fact that I rarely get more than five or six hours of sleep and still can barely keep my head above water, I’m thoroughly enjoying myself.
In a month, we’ll see, but for the moment you’ll have to excuse me…I have a life to live.
It’s hard to find a word for how I’m feeling these days. If I were religious, I would say blessed. I could say lucky, but that doesn’t convey an adequate amount of gratitude. Whatever the word, the fact is that life is very good to me and I feel obliged to try to deserve my good fortune. Of the eight graduate schools I 
applied to, three accepted me. Of those three, one offered a generous funding package. That one was my first-choice school all along; funny how things work out.
When something has consumed your life the way applying to grad school has consumed mine over the past half-year, it is extraordinary and strange to find your worries and obsessions suddenly resolved all at once, in the course of a few words on official letterhead, a few emails, and a few phone calls. It is strange to go from not knowing where you will be in six months to knowing (as much as any of us can know the future) where you will be in six years. Strange and wonderful.
And so, even though I have ten thousand things to do every day and a mountain of stressful situations to surmount before graduation in May, I am singing-out-loud-smiling-for-no-reason happy. And since I know it all could have turned out otherwise, I am grateful. I suppose I could say that I am blessed by luck.
I got an email today from Writing.com informing me that my poem “Northland Religion” had received a comment. I had completely forgotten that Writing.com existed, that I had a profile, and the existence of the three items I had posted to that profile. I recognized the tiny, six line poem when I read it:
Make it ten-thousand and one / for that little lake of tears / that baptized me / with reflections of the forest / and of the sun / and of the cloudless dome.
Simple, shabby, tangled
in the language of my struggle to deal with loss of faith, and utterly forgotten, this poem had still reached someone who “really liked” it, a fellow Minnesotan who thanked me for its creation.
Although I’ve never completely given up on poetry, I know very well by now that creative fiction isn’t my realm. Sometimes I feel like I’m betraying my old dreams; I was going to be a novelist and change the world with my ideas and my sparkling prose. Sometimes it feels like settling to devote myself to the study of other people’s genius–“those that can’t do, teach” and all. Yet I lack not only the aptitude but the patience and interest for writing prose, and I am passionate about academic English. And now I find, when the ghost of ambition rattles her chains, that I can quiet her with silvers of approbation like today’s unexpected comment and go on, quite happily, in the less glorious path I am pleased to have chosen.
I love my family for many reasons, one of which is that they get my sense of humor. I had more hearty belly-laughs with them in five days out-of-town for Christmas than I have for probably the entire fall semester (no offense, dear friends…you do make me laugh!). However, it doesn’t take much at all for my family to set me off. There’s really no point in sharing most of the anecdotes, though; you had to be there. However, there was one instance that fellow English nerds might possibly sort-of app
reciate.
After declaring myself willing to go to church as long as they “sang lots of songs and didn’t talk too much about Jesus,” I went to mass twice in one weekend. Now, I’m pretty good at maintaining an appropriately contemplative demeanor at church, but as midnight mass commenced with the “Proclamation of the Birth of Christ” I lost it. I’m not proud of it–it was completely disrespectful how hard I was laughing–but picture this:
An elderly woman in a maroon choir robe stood at the lectern. She was built like a brick, a big, square brick with a marble perched on top, connected with four or five wobbling chins in lieu of any apparent neck. It was Christmas and after all the poor woman couldn’t help her appearance; I would have cut her some slack. Her voice was an extreme iteration of the old-lady quaver…she could have out-warbled Glinda the Good Witch from the Wizard of Oz. Christmas or not, I probably would have rolled my eyes at my dad and made some sort of snide comment on the walk home. But it was what she was quavering out of the large mouth in her gray-curled marble of a head that did it:
Proclamation of the Birth of Christ
Today, the twenty-fifth day of December,
unknown ages from the time when God created the heavens and the earth
and then formed man and woman in his own image,
several thousand years after the flood,
when God made the rainbow shine forth as a sign of the covenant,
twenty-one centuries from the time of Abraham and Sarah,
thirteen centuries after Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt,
eleven hundred years from the time of Ruth and the Judges,
one thousand years from the anointing of David as king;
in the sixty-fifth week according to the prophecy of Daniel,
in the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad,
the seven hundred and fifty-second year from the foundation of the city of Rome,
the forty-second year of the reign of Octavian Augustus,
the whole world being at peace,
Jesus Christ, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father,
desiring to sanctify the world by his most merciful coming,
being conceived by the Holy Spirit,
and nine months having passed since his conception,
was born in Bethlehem of Judea of the Virgin Mary.
Today is the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh.
I was shaking silently by “Ruth and the Judges” and at the word “Olympiad” I turned my audible snort into a cough and buried my fingernails in my wrist as an attempt to master my ill-timed hilarity. Unfortunately, the proclamation was only half done. At “nine months having passed since his conception,” with deep red welts in my wrist, I gave up, hid my face behind my hymnal, and laughed long, hard, and (thank goodness) silently.
It was over. I took some deep breaths, composed my face, and bowed my head meekly. And then I started to think, like I do, about diagramming sentences, specifically, the 180 word sentence of the proclamation (which, as you no doubt noticed, contains only two sentences). The core of the sentence, which took approximately three minutes for the venerable chorister to warble, is “Jesus Christ was born” (which is essentially covered in the title…). Having so recently exercised my laughing muscles, the thought of this sentence diagram was enough to send my face back into my hymnal during the entirely un-comical first reading. Oops.
Had the wrathful arm of God chosen to smite me for my sacrilegious amusement, I might have re-considered my non-thesim (although, come to think of it, it would probably have been too late). As it was, I hope the brick-and-marble nightingale didn’t notice anything amiss and that I didn’t seriously compromise the spiritual experience of those around me. As for me, I had more fun at church than I have since…ever, probably.
Earlier today Anne and I were discussing how glad we were to be Minnesotans because Minnesotans are “chill.” That is, we as a whole are not overly 
concerned with appearances the way people from some regions *cougheastcoastcough* tend to be. We’re humble, earthy, wholesome folk…to some extent, anyway.
Well, this evening I thought of another reason I’m glad to be Minnesotan: the ability to enjoy winter. Enjoying winter is not at all synonymous with enjoying cold. Anyone who has seen me curled up against the heater with a sweater and a heavy blanket knows that I passionately hate being cold. Luckily, because I was born and raised in this frosty clime, I’m well aware of how to evade the shivers and enjoy the season.
I took a walk this evening in the sparkling dark. I wasn’t wearing my glasses (they make your face cold, doncha know?) so the Christmas lights were large, fuzzy blurs of color and light against the lumpish black silhouettes of houses. With several layers under my coat, dry wool socks in my boots, and a chunky hat, scarf, and mittens, the only skin that could feel the cold was my face from the eyes down to the lips. Those few inches were seared with enough burning chill to remind me I was alive, but the rest of me was toasty and content. It was quiet for a Friday night–two cars and a rattling flagpole were the only intrusions upon my silence. I wandered through the snow when the sidewalks trailed off into nothingness (as is their habit in Morris). Eventually I found my way home, purged of the lethargy and excess of the day by the crackling chill and voluntary solitude.
And if I weren’t from Minnesota, either I would have been too afraid to brave the winter climate at all, or I would have dressed foolishly and been distracted by discomfort throughout the entire walk. Bummer for you, you Virginians and Floridians, Texans and New Mexicans. You don’t know what you’re missing.
I have two homes now, one in Woodbury with my parents and one in my Morris apartment with Anne. It gets a little semantically confusing as I instincti
vely refer to both of them as “home,” but I figure it’s a small price to pay for reaching a state of being that, four years ago, I considered impossible. The reason Morris is home to me now is not because I have spent almost four years here–time is immaterial. Home is where you live with family, and I do that both in Woodbury and in Morris.
Most people have biological family, you know, the people who are obligated to love you. My biological family is (in my opinion) pretty much the best ever, and I’ve always known I was lucky in that department. But acquired family is luck on an entirely separate level. These people are beyond friends–they truly are family–yet they aren’t obligated to love you; they love you by choice. I think some people go through life largely without these people, and if I were the sort of person who used the word blessed, I would say I am truly blessed to have several in my life. Just like family, I know they won’t leave me when times get tough, and just like family, where they are is home.
When I was a miserable freshman four Decembers ago, I decorated my half of the dorm room with tinsel and snowflakes and red bows and had never felt so far away from Christmas and from home. Today I baked cookies and sang songs and took pictures in front of the Christmas tree with Anne in one of my two fabulous homes. I’m a rags to riches story, I guess…the lonliest girl in the world to the luckiest in four quick twists of a big, blue-green ball.
PocketGarden 