Saturday morning. Rainy and gross. The snow has been melting pretty quickly the last couple days in the Upper Peninsula. I'm down to bare pavement and driveway at my house.
Usually, I avoid writing about weather in my blog. I think it reflects an inability to come up with anything interesting to discuss, or that I'm avoiding a subject. I've used both of those tactics in the past. Saint Marty is not a weather blog. I'm not an amateur meteorologist, and, generally, the only time weather preoccupies me is when I have to shovel it.
Today, however, I will be preoccupied with Nature and weather. I'm working on an essay about water that focuses quite a bit on weather, so it's unavoidable. I've been struggling a little with this project because it's writing that was solicited from me, and I'm feeling like a high school student trying to finish a term paper by deadline. It's not something that encourages creativity in me.
In fact, I have three separate writing projects that need to be completed in the next few weeks. The water essay. A Christmas essay. My annual Christmas poem. Plus, I have teaching and grading and all the uncertainty at work. AND I don't know what I'm teaching next semester at the university yet. (That is the life of a contingent professor. Classes based on student enrollment. I will get classes. I know that. I'm just not sure if I'm going to be teaching composition, film, good books, mythology, or a combination of these subjects. It's a little frustrating, considering I've been teaching in the department longer than all but two of the full-timers.)
If I didn't have all these other worries pressing in on my mind, I'd be gold right now. I'd just disappear into my writing study (yes, I'd have a writing study) and pound out these pieces of writing. That is not my life, though. My times to write are smuggled in between one job and the next, carved out of the time before I go to bed, and stolen from grading time/reading time/teaching time/medical officing time. That is how I've lived a majority of my writing life.
When I was in graduate school, working as a teaching assistant, I never really realized how lucky I was to be paid to simply teach, take classes, and write. The hours I had to sit in my office with my journal and pen, plucking poems and stories and essays out of the air. Even then, I felt stressed and rushed. There was never enough time to get everything done. I was always running a race. I wish I had realized then how lucky I was.
In a few years, I'll probably be looking back at these minutes spent blogging and essaying and poeming with nostalgia, as well. That's the way nostalgia works. It makes you feel wistful for moments that weren't necessarily but are now gilded with gold because they are in the past, have been lived. In retrospect, they seem better and happier and easier. They weren't, though. They were filled with sadness and anger and frustration, as well.
I'm not Marcel Proust, nibbling on a cookie that launches me into writing a multi-volume reflection on my life. I'm just a little Upper Peninsula poet, staring out my window, trying to keep my head above water (or snow).
Call me Saint Marty. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sit down and write about the watery part of the world . . .
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