Happy Mother's Day!

God Moment

Okay, this is going to be incredibly cheesy. But I'm going to say it.

Yesterday, I was sitting in my office waiting for students to not show up (does anyone ever come to office hours besides grad students?) and all I could think about was how PhD decisions are supposed to come my way this week. And how on Wednesdays, I don't usually get home until after 10 p.m. A letter from Nebraska or OU or FSU could have been sitting there in the mailbox, lonely and cold, for 8 or 9 hours. So I decided to go home between office hours and workshop--something I never do.

I rushed home (standing up Rick, who was planning to come by to talk thesis formatting) and checked the mail...but there was only a letter from the cable company. Nothing special. Nothing worth driving home for.

Needless to say, I was annoyed. Annoyed that I wasted the time and gas driving home when I didn't need to. Annoyed that I had to wait at least another 24 hours before I knew anything. Just annoyed. I've been having some cabin fever/mental exhaustion crankiness lately and the annoyance happens easily.

At any rate, I decided to make the best of it and had pancakes for lunch before heading back to school. I was driving down rt 8 kind of half-there when the traffic slowed down for no obvious reason and the sun came out (it had been cloudy all day). It was around 4:30, so it was pretty low, and I was almost stopped next to the only tree-lined portion of rt 8 between my house and school, and the trees, covered in ice, back-lit with brilliant sunlight, looked amazing. Like something out of a science fiction movie. Like something completely unnatural--except that it was completely natural. I rolled past these trees at 10 mph, and the second I was past them, the traffic sped up, the clouds came back, and it was just another gray, ugly winter afternoon. But for a second, everything slowed down. For a second, I forgot how annoyed and frustrated I was and just thought about something beautiful.

A God Moment.

It's been a long time since I've been to church, since I've considered myself a religious person, but I've never lost my faith in a higher power. Sometimes I don't call it God, but fate or the universe, or something new-agey like that, but it's still the same thing I prayed to when I was sitting in a church or at a youth group retreat. And even though sometimes I forget about it, there are moments when I'm too lost in the day-to-day and whatever It is slows me down, reminds me that there's something bigger.

I was in a great mood last night, and maybe that is why.

*

My mom saw my post on the six word memoir and she sent me one of her own:

New lung.
New life.
New world.

I like hers better than mine.

Count Down

15.5 hours of work until I'm back on summer vacation!

3 weeks til I fly to Arizona!

2 months until fall semester begins...egads!

***

This has been a good poem week. Reworked 2 that have been sitting around not working for a while. I think they're good now, but we'll see how it goes in workshop.

Thesis meeting last night was good. (Thanks Mary!) I can't believe my MFA is almost over, though. This is starting to make me feel very uneasy.

***

July 3 is my mom's 2 year lung-transplant anniversary. She calls it Independence Day. We don't need to talk about how stupid I am for smoking considering this little tid-bit of family history, but you have no idea how amazing it is to see my mom walking around, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry (doesn't sound like an exciting list, but believe me, my mother wasn't herself when she couldn't care for the family). Between say, 96 and 05, my mom got progressively worse until just before the transplant when she was in a wheel chair and using oxygen 24/7. Sometimes I'm still surprised to see her walking without her little air tank strapped to her back. Sometimes I'm just surprised to see her walking. Aaah, science.
Happy Lung Day, Ma.