Spring Break Travels

My spring break is taking on a familiar shape.  I'm headed to my Mom and Dad's house while my spouse stays home to take care of stuff.  I'll be there for a few days and then head back here for doctor's appointments (eye and dermatologist) on Friday.

I'm not leaving until 9.  I don't like driving in the dark in the mountains, and this morning, it's foggy too. May as well stay home until rush hour dies down. It's not an awful rush hour by DC standards or S. Florida standards, but it can get snarled up.

I thought about walking this morning, but my ankle feels really odd--painful, like I shouldn't put too much pressure on it.  So between my painful ankle, the fog, and the time change, I'll likely just take it easy until 9.  Plus I need to finish packing.

As I always do when I travel by car, I'm bringing too much stuff:  my sewing basket, my art supply bag, my laptop, along with normal stuff, like clothes.  My sewing basket may stay in the car, but I'll be happier if I know that I can do some hand stitching if I want to.

Unlike some of our past spring breaks together, we don't have much planned.  We're not traveling, and we won't explore wineries or breweries.  My mom and I will get our hair done, and we'll do some shopping.

But even though it will be a low-key time together, it will be good to be together.  We are none of us getting younger, and it's good to gather while we can.

A Poem for International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day.  I realize that I am luckier than many women throughout the world.  I have part-time work that I can do in the wee, small hours of the morning--or any time and place that I can get an Internet connection.  I have a full-time job that pays me a decent salary with decent benefits.  I am safe at both jobs, and my employers deposit my pay without incident.  I also have a part-time preaching job that feeds my soul in a different way.

I have a lovely house in a relatively safe neighborhood.  I have food in my kitchen and a way to keep it safe until I'm ready to cook it.

I have a bit of time here and there to do the activities that nourish me:  reading and a variety of creative work.  I have time to see friends.  My family members are in good shape.

We are bombarded, day after day, with stories of women who have not been so lucky, reminding us that we still have work to do.

I'm thinking of the multitude of poems that I've written about gender and history and all of those intersections.  Here's a poem that I wrote years ago that says a lot about the life of a certain class of women in modern, capitalistic countries.  It's part of my chapbook, Life in the Holocene Extinction.

The Hollow Women


We are the hollow women,
the ones with carved muscles,
the ones run ragged by calendars
and other apps that promised
us mastery of that cruel slavedriver, time.

We are the hollow women
with faces carved like pumpkins,
shapes that ultimately frighten.

We are the hollow women
who paint our faces the colors
of the desert and march
ourselves to work while dreaming
of mad dashes to freedom.

At night, the ancient ones speak
to us in soft, bodily gurgles
and strange dreams from a different homeland.
We surface from senseless landscapes
to wear our slave clothes
and artificial faces, masks
of every sort. We trudge
to our hollow offices to do our work,
that modern drudgery,
filing papers and shredding documents,
the feminine mystique, the modern housework,
while at home, domestics
from a different culture care
for the children.

Spring Weather and Spring Break and Villanelles

I in the Spring Break corridor of my teaching life, so you would think I would feel less harried.  But I also realize that the weeks after Spring Break bring increased activity on the calendar, with retreats and a wedding in Atlanta.  So here I am, feeling more stressed than I want to be, even as I know I will get it all done.

I remind myself that the stresses I have are the good kind--there's not sickness stress or family crisis stress.  And then I feel a bit fretful about other stresses that might be waiting offstage.

So let me chart some positives from the week that might slip away otherwise:

--I've given my English 102 classes time to write their second essay in class.  I've been happy watching them write and consult the textbook and write some more.  I do realize that they may use AI at some point, but they've done a lot of the work of writing without AI.

--Yesterday we went to a neighbor's house.  We are going to help with their garden while they are away, and in return, we get to use 2 of their raised beds.  It was such a beautiful afternoon, and so wonderful to see all that they have managed to cultivate on a very tiny patch of mountain land.

--We are in that part of spring where I can see the trees waiting for their grand debut, with a few making a quicker entrance.  And the daffodils have fully committed to the idea that we can count on spring having arrived.

--Because it's been warmer, I've been walking before I head down the mountain to school.  I don't always get a long walk, the way I did in the summer.  But I get a half hour walk in, and that's better than I've been doing.

--It's also been getting lighter earlier, so this week the sunrise has been an added benefit of an early morning walk.  This week, both sunrises and sunsets have been glorious.  Both of the pictures in this post are of sunrise on Wednesday.

--I got pulled over on Wednesday afternoon.  I have no doubt that I was speeding, but the officer never told me what he clocked me doing.  He gave me a written warning, and I feel lucky.  It's my 3rd written warning.  The first was when I was a student at Newberry College, and the second as I travelled to Mepkin Abbey.  In every case, I was treated kindly, and I do realize how many people are not that lucky.

--I had originally planned to do both sestinas and villanelles in my Advanced Creative Writing class yesterday, but I decided that I was being a bit ambitious.  We did a session on villanelles, which didn't take my students as long as I thought it might.  They probably could have done both sestinas and villanelles.  But I'm not going to worry about it.  It was the Thursday before Spring Break, so only half the class was there.

--I decided to write a villanelle too, and at first, that writing muscle felt so crusty and creaky.  But I quickly got back into the rhyming and repeating groove.

--I want to remember that I'm getting rough drafts written.  I may not always be transforming them into finished drafts, and some of them, like yesterday's villanelle, may not be worth more work.  But I am getting poem composing done more regularly than my finished drafts file will indicate to end of year Kristin.

Generational Milestones

For much of my life, we've been looking for generational milestones, saying, "Is this it?  Is this our Pearl Harbor moment?  The where were you when Kennedy was shot moment?"  Maybe instead of the royal "we," I should speak only for myself.  Is it because I read voraciously as a child?  Is it because I overheard grown ups talking, as bookish children often do?

I knew early on that September 11, 2001 was this kind of milestone, the event that cracks the world into "before" and "after."  Even today, almost 25 years later, I can still recall almost every minute of that day, and I do mean this literally.

This morning I've been listening to various podcasts about Iran.  I am wondering if generations after us will see the 1979 take over of the U.S. Embassy in Iran as a generational marker.  I remember that the television was on in the living room of the house on the Outer Banks where my family was having a week-end get away with another family.  There was a "breaking news" interruption, and my dad moved closer to the T.V.  He recognized the serious nature of events, but I think we all thought it would be settled quickly.

I am thinking about historical regimes, how we see them differently now than their citizens might have seen them.  Of course, it's much more complicated the further back we go.  Citizens of Rome would not have had the kind of daily/hourly news updates that we have now.

I'm not naive--I do realize that the news updates that we get aren't always reliable.  In the days of escalation to the Iraq war, I remember Colin Powell's address to the U.N., and I assumed he was telling the truth.  He might have left out classified information, sure, but of course we could trust the information that we got in that kind of speech.

I do think that people like Colin Powell were telling the truth as they knew it at the time.  We may not see it as true now, with more than 20 years of follow up information.  This time, because I've heard so many different strands of information, some of which seems to contradict each other, I'm less inclined to think I'm hearing the truth.  

What's more accurate probably:  the truth will shift, and right now, no one is sure what is true, with the possible exception of some top level people who have access to some top level classified documents--and even those are subject to interpretation (I'm thinking of satellite data and intelligence reports).

I am looking at the full moon outside of my writing window and reflecting on the fact that the same moon has shown down us throughout all of human history, as we go back and forth, making the same mistakes over and over again, stumbling over milestones that we may not even recognize as milestones until generations later.

Poetry and Current Events

Here we are, day five of the Iran war--or is it year 46, if we date it to the 1979 take-over of the embassy?  Or earlier, given our interactions in that country during the years of the Shaw.  

Yesterday on my way home, I noticed that gas was at $2.99 a gallon, up from $2.49 a gallon in the morning when I left.  On some level, I shouldn't have been surprised.  Long ago, when the Kuwait interaction went from Desert Shield to Desert Storm, I went right to the gas station, but it was much longer before gas prices rose.  That's my memory, although I wasn't commuting at the time, so I might not have been as focused on gas prices.  I was a poor grad student, so I might have noticed.

Back then, my brain was focused on the war.  I wrote poems about people in war zones, a poem that contrasted me washing dishes in solitude to someone trying to keep body and soul together in a bomb shelter.  They weren't good poems, but I mention it because decades later, I'm able to move throughout the day without my brain returning to the drum beat of war.

That's not to say that I've ignored the issue, just that I've gotten more skilled at compartmentalizing it all.  

Part of me also assumes that people in charge have information that I don't.  This Washington Post article by Jim Geraghty argues that most presidents become war hawks as they see top secret briefings during their tenure, and that makes sense to me.  This New York Times article by Brett Stephens makes a case for military action against Iran.

This is not to say that I'm just fine with these military actions.  I'm always wary, because I've had a lifetime of hearing leaders tell us that we can do a limited intervention, and these things almost always spiral out of control and have all sorts of unintended consequences.  I can read, and I know that throughout history, military actions almost always spiral out of control and have all sorts of unintended consequences.

I've been thinking about my undergraduate days, when my favorite Literature professor told us that poems that engaged specific current events were never any good.  I argued fiercely with her; I thought that poetry needed to be involved in the real world.  I still believe that, although right now, I'm not producing any poems, of any quality, that are about this war.  Similarly, I haven't written poems about Gaza or Ukraine (maybe obliquely?) or any other hot spot.

Some part of me thinks that 500 years from now, if humans survive, people will look at us and marvel that we started these wars and refused to focus on the climate disasters bearing down on us--and I have written about that historic event from a variety of angles.

But like so many humans through history, I continue moving through my day, feeling powerless, even if I knew what I thought should happen, and I don't.  I continue moving through my days, feeling fortunate to be far away from the theatre of war and feeling guilty about my good fortune.  I move throughout my days, documenting regular people approaches to current events, even if I'm not writing poems about those current events.

Eclipses and Other Portents

Later this morning, we'll go vote in the primary.  We don't live in Texas, so our primary isn't as interesting.  But it may have an impact on the Senate race in November.  

We'd vote regardless.  In North Carolina, we're registered as independents which means we can vote in either the Democratic primary or the Republican primary, but not both.  Two years ago, I voted in the Republican primary because I wanted Nikki Haley to win.  Today I'm voting in the Democratic primary because I want Roy Cooper, our former governor, to be the candidate in November. 

If we had voted early, we'd have done it at the public library.  Today we'll go to the local Lutheran church, the one where I go on Wednesdays to quilt when I'm not teaching.  I'm glad that the polling place is easy for me, even as I wonder how it came to be the polling place.  My younger self would have done some talking about separation of church and state.  My older self is happy to see church buildings used for the good of the community.

This morning's post will be shorter than usual, not because I'm headed off to vote, but because I'm going on an early morning walk.  I could wait; it's the one weekday where I don't need to be on the road to Spartanburg before 7:30.  But there's an eclipse happening, and although it's cloudy, I'll go out, just on the off chance that the clouds clear.

The moon will look red, and ancient people would have seen the blood moon as a portent.  With a war in the Middle East, we have no shortage of portents.  Still I will vote, and I will look at the sky, and I will hope to be amazed in a good way, not a horror-filled way.

No AWP For Me

Various social platforms (primarily Facebook for me) have begun to fill with writers posting their AWP schedules.  My grad school friend and I briefly thought about going.  After all, it's in Baltimore, within driving distance, which it rarely is.  We both have family in the area, although we would have stayed in the conference hotel.

I decided early that I couldn't do it this year.  Some years, AWP is the same year as spring break, when I'm working at places that have a spring break, and that confluence makes the whole thing easier.  Some years, AWP is nowhere near spring break, and that, too, makes the whole thing easier.

This year, AWP is right before my spring break in a March that is very busy even before adding a big conference.  So I decided not to go.

Some years I feel like I'm missing out, and now, it's been so many years since I attended that if I could get there, it might not feel like a repeat of past years in terms of what I learn/hear.  And now, I'm teaching a lot of creative writing courses, which has not been the case in the past.

Next year, I might see if I can get some travel money from Spartanburg Methodist College.  But this year, I'm glad not to be travelling this week.  The rest of March will have plenty of travel, lots of family reconnecting, and a quilt retreat near the end.  That's almost more than I can handle, so I'm glad not to be adding AWP on top of it all.