Now Playing: Bach, Sonata for flute in E Major, "Adagio ma non tanto."

Clover has taken to carrying my boots and Scott's house slippers around the house. The process is somewhat disturbing: one at first hears the thunk-thunk-thunk as she hauls them up the basement stairs and then her baby-like whining as she proceeds through the kitchen, across the dining room, and up the next flight of stairs. I'm always startled until I remember that our cat is neurotic.

This evening I cooked grits for the first time, unbeknownst to me. I was trolling the cupboard for something to eat, and I found a packet of what looked like couscous. Into boiling water it went, and when it started to congeal in a most un-couscous-like fashion, I was somewhat chagrined. They weren't bad with salt and pepper, actually. Scott is out this evening, so he didn't have the opportunity to laugh at my lack of culinary discernment.

The semester so far progresses fairly well. I'm trying to learn to remember that every opportunity I have is a gift of God's grace. By opportunity I don't mean merely opportunities to "minister" but each class session I teach, each line of Beowulf I translate, each colleague's poem I comment on. Someday maybe this will take away some of the pressure of perfectionism. At least that's my hope.

Now Playing: Indiana vs. Wisconsin basketball game on Scott's computer.

Enough said.

This evening is one for quotation, it seems. Here's from Flannery O'Connor's essay "A Memoir of Mary Ann":

"The creative action of the Christian's life is to prepare his death in Christ. It is a continuous action in which this world's goods are utilized to the fullest, both positive gifts and... 'passive diminishments.'"

Now Playing: Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 in F Major, Allegro.

A poem on this Wednesday evening by Kimberly Johnson from her book A Metaphorical God.

Easter, Looking Westward

1.

The stars! the stars have fled the sky!—

Scratch that—the stars have skyed the flood, the sea

glimmering in pale beneath a starless black…

2.

No, scratch that too. I’m all exotic

metaphor, inkhorn snarls, never content

with the unelaborated thing;

always the forced apotheosis,

every least sparrow a visible sign,

strong-arming water to wine. So tenderly

I love this world’s profane loveliness,

its small, scarce loveliness, like a puritan

I batter magnitude out of homespun.

3.

Faithless my zeal, for the puritan’s faith

imputes us all with a roughhouse grace, most

lovely in our brokenness, bruised and bent

to glory. Scratch that—to sufficiency.

Start again: The stars are black with storms

blown shoreward; the dinoflagellates

smacked on the shoals leak light from shattered cells;

they phosphoresce the breakers in their roister.

Let me sing, then, the beauty of creatures

microscopic, who make the vastness gleam

in smithereens.

4.

                        See: starlike, after all.

Now Playing: Bach, Mass in B minor, "Credo/Chorus: Credo in unum Deum."

The new year began with roadtrips for us: New Year's day found us driving from Oklahoma to Texas to visit cousins; two days later, we were driving across east Texas and Louisiana to New Orleans for the American Historical Association conference; less than forty-eight hours after that, we had begun the trek from New Orleans back to Bloomington.

Since Scott had to attend a lunch at the conference, we didn't leave New Orleans til nearly half two in the afternoon, and as a result it was nearly four o'clock Sunday morning when we pulled into our own driveway. We shared the driving. Through Louisiana and Mississippi, we encountered some fairly heavy rain, which cleared up near Birmingham, Alabama. We stopped for Wendy's and fuel in Tuscaloosa and then proceeded north into Tennessee and Kentucky. I was astonished by how much of the South is blanketed in pine trees. All afternoon and into the evening we seemed to be driving through endless pine forests, speckled with magnolias at the fringes along the roads, or, in the swamps in Louisiana, dotted with pockets of cypress and willow. Pine, pine, pine, pine. It wasn't until near Nashville that I suddenly noticed that pine trees had given way to deciduous forest--still thick, but bare.

My one regret from the drive was that so much of it happened in the dark. This meant that we were only barely able to appreciate the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. Every so often, as we crested a particularly high curve or raced into a particularly steep valley, I would exclaim, "Wow, I wish it were daylight!" Sometimes, when cities made the sky glow, we could vaguely see the silhouettes of the immense hills rearing one after another, magnificent. The darkness also made the drive between Columbus and Bloomington rather like a horror film: Scott had to putter along the narrow winding road because every so often deer would suddenly materialize in the ditches or on the roadway itself. They would gaze blankly at the car and saunter away or just stand, staring.

Since we've been home, the semester has started. On Monday I taught--my classroom is in one of the older dorms this semester, when having classrooms in dorms was just becoming popular, it seems--and today I went to workshop for the first time this term. Scott has been assiduously reading for his exams so far. Blanche, calm as ever, rotates between our desks; she likes to sleep curled up by our computers under our desk lights.