frost

So, some housekeeping... what's happened this week?

I got a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful new acoustic guitar today with an enormous bellyful of sound that makes me burst with ecstasy on strumming it.

My muscles-and-bones A&P class was happily interrupted this morning for 3 hours by another birth (our teachers are pretty much all midwives, and yes, they are on call most of the time). Think (late afternoon): diagrams on the overhead projector explaining the Sliding Filament Theory of muscle contraction, interspersed with anecdotes about today's newborn, the precipitous labour, and his mother's platelet count. (The latter had been cause for concern throughout the pregnancy, apparently, but all concern evaporated when mother did not, in fact, haemorrhage after the birth. All is well in the World of Being Born.)

After class, I took a quick car-trip to High View Farm in the neighbouring town of Harrison with K to pick up some more eggs and raw organic milk. We drove home as the sun was throwing off a shock of gold-orange-pink streaks behind the forested hills of North Bridgton. Then, the other K took me to see a free movie (she works at the Magic Lantern) -- the first film I've seen in a cinema in the US. It was a dramatically un-different experience from seeing a film in a cinema in South Africa.

On Tuesday night, I found a seat on a flight to Johannesburg just before Christmas that I can actually afford. I booked it.

The frost has set in this evening, and I have discovered that Maine's early autumn weather is as cold as the Highveld mid-winter back home.

I got an absurd email from my Mom today, full of conspiracy theories and platitudes and prattle. But she has knitted me a beautiful purple scarf and that makes me feel so guilty about constantly judging her.

My Papa is in Berlin and I keep finding myself unable to call him because I'm in class and the time-zones get all conflated and I lose my chance. It frustrates me to be disconnected from him.

...

I am properly single again, cut loose, pained, angry, nostalgic, resignatory, drifting. And now incommunicado (of my own requesting).

I have the first real headache I've ever had in my life. And it hurts like a motherfucker.

I have renewed my belief in the healing power of friendship.


(Who am I again? Anybody care to remind me what my name is?)