Shift seasons and gun your engines

Well, what's this? A cozy little blog....it looks to be abandoned. Maybe I'll sidle in, peer around for a comfy chair, and take a little snooze while no one's home.
Hold on--something's oddly familiar here.....
Great Scott!! This is MY blog!
I feel a bit like Mole stumbling upon his own sweet home after staying with Rat for a good long while. Life has been so full I've barely had time to reflect, much less keep a record.
But here we are, mid-October, at the end of midterm week. Friday night, the beginning of my schoolwork-sabbath. A lull. Big tests: taken; big papers: written; long reading: accomplished. A few tasks upcoming but nothing crushing. For a spell.
In celebration of my Gobs of Free Time, and in backlash against the orderly studies I've undertaken, here are a number of Reports and Reflections presented in as random an order as I can summon:

• Mashed sweet potatoes make a great side dish, and not only for one's diabetic husband.
• Luke and Ben play cooperative Borderlands whenever they get the chance, and have a lot of fun. Only a few years ago these two were barely speaking. Progress and blessing. God is good.
• I'm on the till four days a week now at Einstein Bros. Bagels, and I'm happy. Though there's a certain level of energy I must maintain, that "service presence", I've lost nearly all my fear of people in such encounters.
• The animated Avatar series is excellent, terrific. Highly recommend.
• I wrote a fiction exercise and a full short story for class set in, respectively, St Kilda and the Palouse Falls.
• Finally got my Idaho driver's license this week! Had to take the written test the learners take. Almost failed it.
• Our Latah County Credit Union debit cards have pictures of barns on them.
• Sunday is my fifty-second birthday. Many thanks to my parents.
• Sunday is also the first of four concerts the Palouse Choral Society will give this school year.We are a group of 50-70 people (many 50-70 years old, but there're younger folks too) directed by Prof. Michael Murphy, who also directs choirs here at the University and is just top-notch. I'm excited to get to sing with them. Hard work! This concert is "Music of the British Isles."
• Stumbled on a 13-hour Candy Sale at Roseaur's Market. Oops.
• Luke's bike-broke elbow is healing fast. Whew. More blessings and thanks.
• Mi clase de espanol es muy dificil, pero interesante.
• Every Single Time I pray for needed help I get it. Whether for wakefulness and focus, for relief or comfort, for material needs, insight, patience or strength, it's there.
• Jessamyn is a faithful and patient baby- and puppy-sitter.
• Gobbling cotton candy at the county fair was deeply satisfying, but even more so was the opportunity to play net-the-rubber-duckies at the arcade and win squiddy mitre-hats for Ben and Luke.
• I could say I have learned to survive on short nights, iced caramel mochas, hours of reading and study and longer hours of intense writing, but that wouldn't be quite the truth. Actually...
• I thrive on them. 
• Which is a big surprise, after years of consciously leading a slow-paced life holding lots of time for reflection, playing with my tots, finding open space for the soul and all. I am loving this life, in a way I could never manage as a young student, always afraid I was in over my head.
• This week I set my Sunbox up on my desk and started using it for 20 minutes or so every evening. And the refrigerator now holds my cider mug loaded with cloves and a cinnamon stick which I re-use. I'm wearing the fingerless gloves Roo made me, to type in. Autumn.
• Two weeks ago All Souls Christian Church held an indoor painting party, followed by a first-rate pot roast supper a couple of the sexy church ladies cooked while the rest of us painted. Painting was fun (Sable brown for the trim. I nearly got stuck on top of a ledge I'd just coated) and dinner was sublime.
• Our two cars are on the fritz, so we are getting around in Leon's old truck. This situation does not favor popping down to Newberg for the odd weekend, but I find I'm content.
• I like being so studied-up for an essay exam in Shakespeare that I'm sorry the professor didn't ask more questions, because I'd been looking forward to, say, writing about Feste's character in Twelfth Night and the purpose he serves in the story.
• Last year on campus, we got around on foot nearly all the time. This year we are bikers. It is so so lovely and thrilling to whip home from my Spanish class in under two minutes, downhill all the way from the Admin building on its imposing wooded hill. To heft my backpack indoors only from class to class and never to schlepp it all the way from home. I love my bike basket and I love my bike.
• This is the only reason I do not look forward to the snow.

• Jess and I are going to feast our eyes and rot our brains watching Merlin now, I think.

Time to connect the dots

I am one of the "dappled things" for which the poet Hopkins gives glory to God. Contemplating my freckled arm this morning (yes, I do have that kind of time to waste), I wondered as I have done before, Why this, and not something else? Tan or brown? Yes, genetics, I know, and big deal. But it's the question of one particular soul placed in one unique sheet of skin: this body, from that family, this town and time, I get caught in contemplating. Why did God choose to make me, and you, each one specific mix of shape and hair and gender and nationality? Always on earth I will look through these eyes, and never through yours.

Stare into freckle constellations long enough and your brain turns spongy. --Wait, it's always like that. How does it even work?

Anyhow, nothing to be done but to leave those kinds of questions spinning in their dizzy circles and go do the dishes. Mend the tear in that vest. Walk to the bank. Find the recipe you'll need for tomorrow's potluck.

Each Wednesday in July our pastor, Evan Wilson, has led a study in Ecclesiastes. We all meet outdoors at the Big Haus, the Wilsons' residence and boarding house, eat a potluck dinner in the shade, then listen as Evan tells us the joys to be had in our futile existence. It's great; I will miss it after we finish up this week.

This weekend there's a Zimbabwean Music & Culture Fest on the U of I grounds, during which I hope to soak up all the free outdoor marimba band playing I can stand, and dance till my feet go into shock.

The rest of the time I plan to loaf as hard as possible. Snooze on the patio chair, read the fun books stacked on my printer, watch Doctor Who. Stash these long sunny sleepy hours in my body's bank against that day when no man can play. (Except frat boys.) The countdown to school ticks on!

Amazing dappled darlin.'

...and the livin' is easy

Morning pushing through our eastern bedroom curtain glows golden. I wake up thankful for everything my eyes light on, for elements in my dreams, now slipping out of memory, and for what awaits in the day to come.

There is no rush. This is a blessing. No jobs or tests requiring me to starch my resolve or fluff up my social skills. No homework due tonight. No need to task my back with moving house.

Free time! How long has it been since Ben and I had so little to do and so much time to do it in? 

Last year, about now in July, I was saying goodbye to the Coffee Cottage kitchen and crew, passing along my baking tools to Hannah the new baker, and my family was entering the last big push to clear out our house and move to Idaho.

(How little we knew about how much we left our friends and family to do, to finish the house so it could be rented!  I cringe to think of it, but at the same time, get a flush of pleasure and pride in everyone who helped. An interesting mix of sensations, let me tell you.)

Then we surged through a year thick with work, learning, writing, reading, rolling in bagels. (As it were.) We survived, thrived even. My brain got sharper while my belly got flabby. Much was accomplished.

And so here we are, in a lull. In the eye of the whirling great adventure. We are happy to sit and watch our new plantings grow in the back forty (that would be square inches), catch up on movie watching and easy books. 

When August 20th arrives, we should be rested and ready for another academic round. Right now, though, my mind is happy drifting like a beach ball in a pool.

We shuttled it all down the sidewalk and here we are.

Welcome to my new home!

Bent on giving our new apartment here at the U of Idaho a grand slant, since it's bigger and all, we have named it Taylor's End. Lavender Flat, our home last year, was uphill from Sweet Avenue. (I chronicled my time there, here: patterfromlavenderflat.blogspot.com) Now we live in the tip of a promontory stretching down from Taylor Avenue, actually just 50 yards away from where we were.

There are a few changes to address with our change of address. :)  We are in a corner spot right on the Serpentine, the driveway winding through our neighborhood. Suddenly from living in a quiet backwater flat overlooking a grassy hill with a playground way down at its base, we are in Kid Central. This community is well-stocked with sprites, most seeming to be eight and under. Now our bikes get knocked over and the contents of their little utility packs strewn onto the grass. The public bench bordering our front lawn is a great launch pad for daring jumpers. Tiny red mites roaming the retaining wall out back draw a fascinated audience.

Official U of I photo, near here. Some day I will get my own pix uploaded.

Then, where Lavender Flat's little backyard patch was planted and perfect, the former tenants here let mare's tail rush have its abundant way. Fortunately it's easy to weed out, though I expect we'll never see the end of it. Ben bought some heather and sedum at the downtown Saturday market, I bought a pumpkin plant on a whim, and we transplanted some of the smaller lavender plants from our old yard into pots. Oh, and moss. I bought Irish moss. Love moss.

Technically these aren't in the ground yet, but I left a little hand trowel lying back there and some loose dirt. Sure enough, yesterday a small urchin whose name, I learned, is Robert, began moving (flinging) the dirt around, so I have every hope that the ground will soon be all prepped and ready for new plantings.

Oh--there's something else about the new blog's name.What's this "Poised" business? I can guarantee there will be plenty of times in the next couple of years at school when I'll feel anything but poised: Crushed, wobbly, and breathless come to mind.

It's less about my emotional state, though, and more about our position. We are at the brink of things. Literally, we're the last flat in this apartment row. Figuratively and professionally, Ben and I are training to launch out into new work, new adventures. Gathering ourselves, studying, trusting, waiting till we are ready.

Oh: my new living room is twice the size of the last one. >happy sigh<