Looking forward

Right now Providence is experiencing a mixture of rain and snow. In Massachusetts, where I teach, we're supposed to get up to 14 inches of snow tomorrow (yes, seriously). (And yes, April starts tomorrow.) Spring seems such a long time away.

But inside my little apartment, it's bright and cozy. Bread dough, shaped into two neat loaves, is rising in the oven. Pasta cooks on the stove for tomorrow's lunch. Later, J will come over for dinner, and we'll snuggle under blankets and watch old TV shows. And my two iris bulbs have pushed up through the soil in their pots, set to their internal rhythms, blithely unaware that the weather has decided to delay the coming of spring.

I'm looking forward to April.

Take a letter

A few days ago I was feeling especially low when I got home from school. But when I opened my mailbox, I found a letter!

This one was from my good friend N. He's currently in Armenia, finishing up his second year in the Peace Corps, and we've been sending transatlantic letters to each other since he started. Even though we can email pretty easily (and text, too), we save the letters for longer, more drawn-out thoughts and stories. Lately we've been swapping horror stories about teaching.

There's something about letters that email just can't touch. Maybe it's the anticipation--you have to wait longer to receive a reply, and the longer you wait the more exciting it is when you finally hold it in your hands. I've heard that what makes it special is that someone took the time to sit down and write to you, instead of dashing off an email. I guess that's part of it. For me, it's also the way letters force me to sit down and write, to collect my thoughts and focus consciously on what the other person said. It makes me feel more present.

I do wish we sent more letters. There's nothing like holding a slim, tissue-thin envelope in your hands when you get home from work. And those red and blue stripes make it even more fun.

Reading

I have this habit--maybe you do, too--of starting a book, getting about a third of the way into it, and putting it down for a day.

And picking up another book, and getting about a third of the way into it, or halfway through, and putting it down.

And so on, and so on, until I have four or five books scattered around the house waiting to be picked up again.

Usually they span a range of genres, to fit every reading mood. So right now, I'm making the most headway in David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet for book club, because we meet every week and read a book every two weeks, so most of the time I feel like I should be reading that.* (The pace alone is pretty exhausting.) But half the time I'd rather be rereading the Betsy-Tacy series, or finishing the memoir a friend lent me, or planning future vacations like Alice Steinbach's.

I like to think it's the product of an excitable brain. There are so many things to think about and read about, like Welsh rarebit parties and tracking Jane Austen and surviving graduate school while expecting a baby with Down's syndrome and the Dutch trading agreement with Japan...but really, maybe it's a sign that I can't commit.

For whatever reason, though, it works. Dipping into one book here, another book there is almost like sitting down with a new friend every afternoon. It's such a comfort.


*Book guilt is a whole different story. Do you ever feel guilty about prioritizing one book over another? Even when they're both just for fun? It plagues me...