The pictures are getting old. Don’t you think, O Reader, O Disappointed Visitor of this blog, that the pictures are getting old?
And yet. And yet I have Nothing For You. Nothing.
It’s not like I’ve tried. I’ve hardly been on the internet in days and days and days. Tonight, for the first time in weeks, I logged on to my e-mail account only to find long-neglected missives so preposterously outdated that they only merited deleting. I haven’t checked my Facebook account in ages. And my blog. Well. We know what has become of that.
I have (as ever?) potential posts. I have something that started percolating just at the first of the year, and now it’s already the 17th. What will become of it, do you suppose?
I think of things to write. Everett unravelled an hilarious story about playing with a friend on the way home from school the other day, and I thought it might make a good post. I also thought he might hate my posting it. So there’s that.
But the Real Truth is that I’ve lost my muse again. I don’t know where she went. Did I submit her with my thesis? Or did I lose her while writing it? Maybe she grew disgusted with the pages and pages of explicatory prose and high-tailed it out the breakfast room window (muses can fly, you know). Maybe she finds me Boring.
I think I find myself a bit boring these days. Everything is So Practical of late. Grading, lesson plans, necessary lines of communication. I get most creative of late with a thank-you note, and that isn’t saying very much.
I miss writing. I do. Or maybe (and this has been my thought today) I miss missing writing. That’s not a little frightening.
Still, I am liberated now. Free of the weight of the thesis and class preparation (okay– with the exception of the ones I am teaching). Certainly the creativity will return, yes? This is not a permanent state, is it? I won’t be here in this static contentment forever?
We did have a bit of excitement today: a two-hour delay before the start of school due to ice. Just ice, no snow, but a serious hazard on our unsalted roads nonetheless. By the time we went to school, it was a cold rain on a grey day, and drops of water hung suspended on the bare branches like jewels.
I found myself thinking of Pittsburgh and the muted jangle of the chains on the wheels of the snow plows as they went slowly past our house in the early morning. Their tail-lights cast the mounded snow in red. When I turned on the light outside our back door, the snow flakes fell like weighted feathers and covered the deck and the trees and the yard that disappeared from view in the dark. Later, when the snow was melting, the mounds of snow remained on the roadside and on the edges of parking lots. It was invariably ugly: speckled with grey and peaked in black, it looked like an advertisement for everything wrong with winter.
I was surprised, remembering that, to find that I miss those heaps of snow and everything that comes before it, and everything after.
Maybe my muse went to Pittsburgh.
