Finishing up a Semester at 35,000 Feet

It's 9:09 AM on Friday, December 18 as I write this, on a plane 35,000 feet above Yerevan, Armenia. My body might think it's 11:09 PM on Thursday night, but I've been served lunch once since we took off at noon in Chicago, and another lunch will be served soon. The night/day was short. 

I spent most of the past ten hours grading final projects and exams by students in my Introduction to Poetry and freshman composition classes. Students reflected on what they had learned over the course of the semester; I was moved to read their thoughts about the role of poetry, glad to know that revising their writing made them feel confident. 

A poetry student, responding to one of Mary Oliver's poems about poetry in a question on the final exam, wrote that analyzing poetry teaches that "your way of thinking is not the only way someone might approach the text. You are open to new ways of thinking." Another student, who told me she wants to be an engineer, wrote, "I believe that there is poetry in everything, even if it is not visible on the surface."

One composition student wrote, "I learned how to get my voice to come through my writings and not just be another sentence on the page." He also observed, "I even began to enjoy myself while writing a few of these papers. This is something I wouldn't have guessed before." I wanted to cheer. 

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It is now 3:35 PM on December 31, 2015, in Bombay (Mumbai), India.

I am ending the year in the city of my birth and childhood, among family members in whose faces I can see myself--the color of their skin, the shapes of their smiles, their inability to speak through helpless laughter mirroring mine.  Though this city has been transformed--down the street, a three-story mall houses a multiplex theatre in what used to be a sleepy edge of the city--I am taken back to the seventies as I hear the incessant beeping and honking of traffic and also the cawing and cooing of crows and pigeons. 

Last night, thirty-seven years after I left India for the first time, I reconnected by phone with a favorite teacher: Mrs. Mehta, who taught me history and geography in the fifth and sixth standards (grades). Her voice was familiar even after all these decades. "I learned the most when I was teaching," she said. I told her I have the same experience; I am always learning from my students. And, I thought to myself a little later, I learned about teaching from my many enthusiastic, gifted teachers--and that is why, while flying halfway across the world, the cabin lights dim as other passengers slept or watched movies, I was able to find pleasure in discovering what my students had learned. Every now and then, I would turn to Marilyn and say, quoting from an exam or a paper, "This is why I teach."

A UU Sermon about the Immigrant Experience

Every Thanksgiving, I remember my first one, back in 1984, when I ate my first turkey and watched my first Thanksgiving Parade--on TV, of course.  This year, Marilyn and I drove up to Chicago for the long weekend.  After watching the parade on TV as we sipped our coffee, we went down to State Street to watch the end of the parade just half a block from our hotel.

Last month, I was asked to participate in the service at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Urbana-Champaign, where Marilyn and I are members.  The service was going to be about the immigrant experience, and I was asked to speak about mine.  

This is the mini sermon I gave that day.   Below the text of the sermon is a link to the podcast of the entire service.

The Immigrant Experience – Sermon for October 18, 2015

When I was working on my PhD at Penn State in the nineties, I had a quote by Virginia Woolf pinned to the wall of my cubicle:  “As a woman, I have no country.   As a woman I want no country.  As a woman my country is the whole world.”  Last year, at the Made Fest that is part of the Pygmalion Festival in downtown Champaign, I found a world map—a print of a watercolor—that had these words painted above: “I have left my heart in so many places.”  That print now sits in my study.  These two quotes point to central aspects of my particular immigrant experience: feeling that I didn’t quite belong—for a very long time—and at the same time, making a home wherever I went.  I have a strong sense that parts of me will always be rooted elsewhere, that I began becoming who I am elsewhere—and because of that, I understand the outsider, the person who is new, the person who might not know the rules already.

For you to understand all this, it might help to know me as I introduce myself on my blog—which is titled, not surprisingly, Transplanted on the Prairie, (you are welcome to visit it; I post about once a month): “I am a reader, a writer, a teacher, and an artist. I was born in India, spent my adolescence in Kuwait [when my father took a job there], was educated in the eastern United States, and am at home in the Midwest. I came out as a lesbian soon after I graduated from college and now live with my life partner, Marilyn; we have been together since 1999, [we had a commitment ceremony in this church in 2006], and were able to marry legally in 2014.”  That’s me in a nutshell. 

One task facing a transplant like me is learning the rules, the conventions that others have grown up with and have known all their lives.  Though I was fluent in English—it has been my first language since soon after I began school at three and a half—and I was familiar with some American TV shows and had a few American friends in Kuwait, I had lived in India and then attended Indian schools (albeit English-medium Indian schools) in Kuwait.  I had traveled to Europe as a teenager but never to the United States.  So I had a lot to learn when I arrived at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1984. 

            

“Why are you all dressed up?” my new friends asked when I arrived at the cafeteria in a black skirt, one I wore to go shopping back home. 

“I’m not dressed up.” 

“But you are in a skirt!”  I thought back to our orientation-week picnic and realized I had probably been the only one there in a skirt; I felt a little embarrassed.  But I didn’t own shorts, and my new jeans were too hot for August. 

I was fortunate: our college, a women’s college, assigned each freshman a junior Big Sister.  My Big Sis, Donna, had family close by, and both her mom and her eldest sister were alumnae of the college.  Together, that fall, they taught me about Halloween traditions, about Thanksgiving turkeys and parades—I spent that break at Donna's parents’ house—and even about Black Friday.  They taught me to layer to stay warm in the winter, helped me to buy comfortable walking shoes, and invited me to decorate their Christmas tree with them.  Those cultural guides and the human connection they provided eased my entry into this new culture, where the food was strangely bland and where young women were not physically affectionate with each other (the homophobia in the eighties was pronounced though not always spoken).  Without Donna’s family, I might have been much more lonely and definitely disoriented. 

I assimilated into my nearly lily-white college, where there were only six international students my first year (it now has students of many races and the college president is an African American woman). I made a home there which I love deeply and to which I still return.  That place holds my heart—and the people there, my other mentors, now beloved friends, influenced my deep connection.  But I knew all along that those friends did not know, could not know the complexities of the cultures I had inhabited and which had shaped me.  They could not know the delight of soaking in the first monsoon rain after an Indian summer or the taste of a perfect filafil sandwich from a roadside stand in Kuwait.  They did not know the privilege of being a light-skinned, middle-class, Hindu girl in India nor the disdain with which Indians were often looked upon in Kuwait. 

And that’s part of the immigrant experience.  You agree to be a partially-understood minority in order to make a new home which brings other opportunities and riches.

I first came to this church on the Sunday after September 11, 2001.   Coming here that morning is one of the best decisions I ever made.  Here, as the congregants—some of you—went up to light candles one after the other and spoke at this podium, I felt comforted.  I had received my green card just a few months before—I finally had permanence—but suddenly, the world had gone mad and South Asian immigrants were among those being targeted after the attacks of that Tuesday morning.  Marilyn’s brothers had called from Springfield, checking to see if I was okay.  At first, naively, I didn’t understand why they would even ask.  What did I have to do with the attacks?  But soon it became clear they had reason to be concerned.  In Connecticut, someone yelled at my brother outside his neighborhood Dunkin Donuts, telling him to return to his own country; my brother was months from becoming a U. S. citizen.  Marilyn asked, reluctantly, that I not wear my salwaar kameezes for a while.  In Western clothes, I am not immediately recognized as South Asian; she thought I’d be safer.  Here at the UU though, the people who spoke seemed to find the backlash disturbing, and they seemed to understand that “other lands have sunlight, too, and clover, and skies are everywhere as blue as mine."  (I always cry when I sing those lines).  Though the whole world feels like my country, I needed a home, and I found this church home, where I could rest my heart and stay a while.  

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The podcast of the Oct. 18 service at the UU can be found here.

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I post this with gratitude for the life of Rev. Dr. John R. Tisdale,  Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Cedar Crest College, dear friend, witty conversationalist, beloved husband, father, and grandfather.  Dec. 10, 1932-Nov. 28, 2015.

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The parade as it neared the television cameras--a reminder that all is not as it appears on television.
(This was close to our hotel, so it's no wonder we could hear the music even up on the seventeenth floor, though we could see only a tiny sliver of it go by--if we craned our necks and rested our heads on the window pane so that we could see the street below.)

Walking on a street parallel to the parade route, we saw this float being deflated--an inadequate metaphor, but a metaphor nonetheless, for the realities of life in Chicago for so many black citizens, the realities not published in the tourist brochures: shootings by police, delayed investigations, justice deferred.

After the parade, we took a long walk in the rain.  I have crossed the Michigan Avenue bridge over the Chicago River many times.  The downtown of this Midwestern city feels like a home away from home.  

On Friday, Marilyn and I spent the afternoon at the Art Institute of Chicago.  On each visit, I like to visit the third floor of the Modern Wing, where I spend time with the Kandinskys.  You can see us in the reflection as we look out on Millenium Park.

Sindhi Children and the 1947 Partition of India

My notebook, pen, and voice recorder on my parents' bed in Bombay in 2012.  I had been sitting across from my Aunt Koshi, my father's younger sister, and asking her about the Partition.  It was probably the longest conversation we had ever had--though interrupted and added to by relatives coming in and out of the room--and one I enjoyed very much.

Our childhoods remain with us, coloring our experiences as adults, affecting how we make sense of the world.  The older I get, the more I realize how much of my past I keep with me, how vivid my seventh birthday is, how clear the memory of a high-school field trip in Kuwait.  My memories include emotions and physical sensations.  As I have entered middle age and this awareness about my past has grown stronger, I have realized that my parents, thirty-one years older than I, also have their childhoods inside them--an obvious conclusion but one that is also startling. 

In recent years, I have been talking with my parents and their siblings about a crucial turning point in their lives, the move from Karachi to Bombay after the Partition of India in 1947, when they were still children. During these conversations, I have been listening, through these adults' memories, to the experiences of those children.

Last month, my short essay, How to Interview Your Mother About Her Lost Childhood was published in Bluestem magazine.  The link above will take you to the essay and to an audio recording of my reading of the essay.*

Before that issue of the magazine was released, I showed my mother the essay, nervous about her response.  "It's all the truth.  It's short and sweet," she said.  And then she added, "You write really well.  You should write a book."  I thought of the essay and laughed.  After you read it, you'll see why.

*The essay is also available here.

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Below are some photos Marilyn and I took in 2012 in the Sion Sindhi Colony, the location of the first permanent homes in which my parents lived in Bombay.  They happened to live two doors from each other.  When I returned there, after a gap of many years, I was struck by how narrow the lanes were.  The homes on that lane now are sturdier and fancier than the ones my parents' families built in the late forties.

The house with the bicycle in front of it is on the spot where my mother's family's house was.  It was a much simpler, one-story structure with a small loft that held a bed.

The house in the left foreground and in the photo below is on the spot where my father's family home stood.

A view of the lane looking out towards the street.  

That's me in 2012  in the lane where my parents' spent their teen years (though the lane looked much different then): Block 8 of the Sion Sindhi Colony.

Another view of the lane, looking towards the railway tracks at the end, just beyond the wall.

This alley runs perpendicular to the lane.  My paternal grandparents moved to Block 16 of the Sion Sindhi Colony, and my brother and I walked countless times down this alley from the house of our Nani, our maternal grandmother, in Block 8 to the house of our Dadi, our paternal grandmother, whom everyone in our family called Ama.

This is the Sita Sindhu Bhawan, a community center for Sindhis in Bombay.  In 2012, I visited during a gathering, and I was touched that several elderly Sindhis there were willing to share with me their stories of the Partition.  Being surrounded by Sindhis reminded me of my childhood, when on the weekends, visiting my grandparents in the Sion Sindhi Colony, I would hear the sounds of Sindhi being spoken, see the Sindhi script on the newspaper on my grandmother's bed,  and smell the aroma of Sindhi food cooking.  I lived in a multi-ethnic neighborhood, where for most of my childhood ours was the only Sindhi family. So the weekends were the only time I had this experience of being immersed in Sindhi culture.

The Big Questions

            Last week, when Marilyn and I were spending a couple of days in Saugatuck-Douglas-- gay-friendly, art-filled towns on the shore of Lake Michigan--I swam in the lake just before sunset.  If you have seen Lake Michigan, you know it looks like the sea, vast and stretching to the horizon.  As I swam away from the shore, all I could see before me were the sun and the shimmering golden line that was its reflection in the otherwise silver-blue water.  I felt like I was on the edge of the world.  Of course I knew that I could turn around and see Marilyn on the beach, could swim, even walk back, the water was that shallow.  But as I swam away from shore, I felt the vastness.

            In the face of such vastness, of being on what feels like the edge, I found myself asking the big questions: How did all this get here?  What is beyond the sky?  How will this world end?  Will it end?  Where do we go when we end, when we die?  I am an agnostic, so I do not turn to religious scripture for answers.  Instead, I am drawn to scientific theories.. 

            Marilyn and I had been dwelling on some of those questions just a few days before as we watched the PBS NOVA special about the mission to fly by Pluto.  Every now and then, we would turn to each other and laugh in delight and disbelief: How far is Pluto?  How long did they take to figure out how to get this mission to work?  With Marilyn, I can share a sense of awe and confusion and excitement about the universe. 

            I felt a similar sense of awe at the lake, even though I knew Chicago was on the other side.  As the sun moved closer to the horizon, suddenly waves started to hit the shore in quick succession.  Until then, there had been hardly any waves at all. 

            “It’s got to be the sun!” I said to Marilyn.  “The moon causes tides.  The sun is so much bigger.  The setting sun is causing the waves!”  We decided we’d ask someone who’d know, maybe our late friend Amy’s husband, who is an astronomer. 

            As we packed up our towels and folded our beach chairs, Marilyn said, “Look!  She looks just like Amy!  Even the dress. Amy would wear that dress to the beach.”

            I looked over to where a slender, white woman with long brown hair just a shade darker than Amy’s was leaning down to talk to a brown boy of about nine (Amy’s daughter’s age, I couldn’t help thinking).  The woman was wearing a navy blue dress that ended above her knees, and her sunglasses rested on the top of her head, holding back her hair.  It was Amy! 

It couldn’t be, of course.  I had seen Amy’s body at the funeral home last spring, kissed the top of her head as I said goodbye.  I stared and then forced myself to look away. 

            When I looked again as we walked by, she had straightened up; she wasn’t as tall as Amy.  I caught a glimpse of her face.  Her features were darker than Amy’s.  But then she turned away and leaned down towards her son, and the illusion reasserted itself.  Tears pricked my eyes as we walked along the beach. 

            “The colors keep changing, don’t they?”  It was the man I assumed was her husband, a dark-skinned man who made me think of Amy’s handsome husband.  He was smiling at me and gesturing to the sky aglow in pink and blue and lavender. 

            “Yes.  They’re beautiful,” I replied, hoping he couldn’t hear the tears in my voice. 

            As Marilyn and I headed to the stairs that would take us up and away from Douglas Beach, I kept looking back, wanting to see Amy once again.  

Eulogy For a Best Friend

Crocuses in our front garden in late March

Seven months ago, I wrote on this blog, “I have faith spring will come again—and I hope it brings only what we are able to bear.”  I had no idea then that just as the first crocus opened, glowing a translucent purple in the sunlight, the phone would ring, and I would learn yet again how much loss we are able to bear.

On March 23, 2015, my beloved friend of twenty-four years, Amy Winans, died.  I have written and said those words so many times now—Amy died—but each time, I feel a small shock. 

This is the (only-slightly-edited) eulogy I delivered on March 28 at the memorial service for her at the Unitarian Church of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, much of it written during sleepless hours that week:

Amy and I became friends in the beginning of 1991 at Penn State.  Our mutual friend Andrea introduced us so we could help each other study for our PhD candidacy exam.  Amy helped me with American lit, and I helped her with British.  At our first meeting, one evening in the Kern Graduate Commons, where the food service was closed for the night, I noticed Amy picked at the Chinese take-out she had brought with her.  “She is clearly more interested in the conversation,” I thought; I was hungry, and the Chinese food looked good to me.  I had a similar thought more than two decades later, as we sat across another table, this time in St. Louis, where Amy was a presenter at 4Cs, the major, annual, college composition conference.  As I ate my share of the vegetarian platter we had ordered at the Ethiopian restaurant, I had to remind her to eat. 

Most of our friendship was long distance, especially after I moved to Champaign, Illinois, in 1997 to join the English faculty at Parkland College.  But we stayed in touch always, and we found ways to share our experiences in real time.  When the TV show ER was in its heyday, we would get on the phone during the long commercial break halfway through the episode and compare notes.  When she was on the job market the fall after I moved to the Midwest, we consulted by phone about what she should wear to job interviews at the huge, annual MLA convention. 

Mostly, though, we wrote.  Emails with Amy’s signature cheers, “Go team!” (this woman who did not watch sports) and “You can do it!” got me through my dissertation and many other challenges.  She was also the most devoted cheerleader of my creative endeavors, sending me beautiful paper to use in my art and mailing me books about art and writing.  Less than a week before she died, she forwarded me an announcement about a workshop I might want to check out. 

One of Amy's multi-part letters.  She often wrote over
a few days, sometimes on flights, at the airport,
at her daughter's swim lesson.  The sight of her
handwriting brought me comfort.

I always scanned my inbox for Amy’s emails first, and her handwriting in our mailbox was one of my greatest joys and comforts—and constants.  We exchanged hundreds of letters.  She joked that some future graduate student could write about our letters for her dissertation.  Here are some of Amy's letters to me, mailed in South Africa, Raleigh, Seattle, Puerto Rico, and, of course, Harrisburg.  One was mailed to me when I was in India.

To Amy, I wrote like I wrote to no one else: journal-like letters.  The night after I heard she had died, I couldn’t sleep.  So I did what I often did when I couldn’t sleep:  I wrote to Amy.  Here is that letter.  I wrote it on purple stationery.  Amy said I was the greatest supporter of her passion for purple.  I take pride in that position.  I am reading from a copy; I left the original with her this morning.

Champaign, IL. Wed. March 25, 2015.  5 AM

Amy dear,

I cannot sleep, so what else to do but write another middle-of-the-night letter to you?  This is the first morning I will wake up—if I sleep—knowing you will not write me another letter.  I cannot say “you will not be here” because you will always be here, with me.  After twenty-four years of friendship, you are a part of me.  Nothing I say, especially in my heartbroken state, seems enough.  You believed in my best self, Amy, and you helped me to believe in it, too.  You were my constant: your handwriting appearing in my mailbox nearly every week—until the depression struck you—your love in the hardest and happiest of times; your keen, editorial eye on my writing; your itineraries in my inbox, always making sure I could reach you.  How will I reach you now, my friend?  To whom will I write in the middle of a crazy day to be reassured I will survive this profession we love and which wears us down?  For whom will I buy purple?  Whom will I write at 4 AM and trust to understand?  Who else can read my 4 AM handwriting?

There is a large Amy-shaped hole in the world now, and I will have to learn how to live in that world, a world I couldn’t imagine before but have to inhabit now. 

Somehow, all of us, but especially Tony and Aurelia, will have to learn to live without your presence and to remind ourselves of the love with which you showered us.

I miss you my friend.  I always will.

Love, Umeeta

Now I would like to read you a poem that makes me think of Amy and her passing: “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard” by Kay Ryan.  [Here is a link: Kay Ryan's "Things Shouldn't Be So Hard" ]

Amy left deep tracks in so many lives, on so many of our hearts.  Things shouldn’t be so hard.

Amy's crocuses were blooming the week she died.

I’ll end with Amy’s words, words from one of the wisest people I have ever known.  The first quote is from an email she wrote on the evening of Thursday, September 2, 2010. I was struggling with a new course and recovering from two car accidents in which I had been rear-ended while at red lights and left with pain in my right shoulder.  Her words put things in perspective:  Remember how Oliver has that poem that begins “you don’t have to be good”? Maybe as you think about your Lit class…  “you don’t have to be perfect” and remember it all. and get to it all…You get to be human—honest!  

I’ll close with a quote from an email Amy wrote in the early morning of January 29, 2014; I had been asked to write a chapter for a book, a chapter I was not sure I wanted to write, and Amy was helping me to decide how to respond.  She wrote: Feel free to give a call if you want to talk about the decision regarding writing.  My main suggestions at the moment:

1—what would be the most self-compassionate thing you could do?

2—set aside the shoulds (just read this in a letter from my very dear friend…) and follow #1.

Marilyn bought me these pansies to pot in Amy's memory.  On the Monday after the memorial service, we potted them  in what we have always called "the Amy pot," a teal, ceramic pot Amy brought for us in 2004 and in which, every year, I plant annuals that make me think of Amy.  Those pansies are still going, even in June, so I have bought two pots in periwinkle blue, a color Amy loved, and have planted summer flowers in those.  We will now have three Amy pots.  But how strange it is to plant flowers in memory of Amy instead of reading about her gardens in letters from her.

Flowers from Amy's memorial.  At the church, we surrounded them with photos of her and with academic journals in which her articles had been published.  Marilyn and I brought the flowers home with us and set them on our dining table.  In the top right corner of this photo is the candle Marilyn and I bought in Taos last summer.  We lit it every evening for Amy for weeks, until it burned down.  Each night, as I blew it out, I said good night to my dear friend.  I hope she is at peace now.  

I flew back to Pennsylvania in April for a weekend memorial service at Susquehanna University, where Amy was a beloved member of the English faculty.  While Amy's other best friend, Judy, drove, I took photos, imagining Amy making this drive hundreds of times.  I had never been to her campus before because it was an hour from her house--and I thought I could visit it another time--so on this visit, I took it all in: her department, her office, the view from her window as she sat in her chair.  

As I sat in Amy and Tony's living room on the second Sunday in April, I came across a pack of cards that belonged to Amy.  Each card had a different flower on it.  That the flower for friendship was purple, Amy's favorite color, seemed just right. 

I painted this "yarn bowl" for Amy at the end of February (I didn't include a photo of this bowl in my February post because it was a surprise for Amy, and she read my blog).  She knitted, too.  She received the bowl the week before she died, and she mentioned it in her last emails to me.  The bowl combines her favorite color, purple, and mine, blue.  It has our initials on the bottom.

Peonies

Short-lived, extravagant, astonishing, peonies fill our kitchen with their fragrance.  As I sit at the counter, writing, I hear their petals fall.

A Split Second of Spring

I took this video on my walk today: one second of a windy morning at the end of April.

This is a still photo of the same tree, in case the video does not cooperate.

The Urge to Make Things

One of the yarn bowls I painted two evenings ago.  It will look very different once it is fired next week.

Two evenings ago, as the snow swirled outside the large windows of the Illini Union Bookstore, I listened enthralled to a reading by Andre Dubus III.  He urged the writers in the audience to write, that writing was the point, that being published was nice, but that we have to write in the face of the inevitable rejection letters.  He described writing his novel House of Sand and Fog in twenty-minute segments while sitting in his car before he went in to teach at one of several jobs he was juggling at the time.  

After the book became a bestseller, he worked  on building his family home. At his reading at the bookstore, he spoke of framing his daughter's bedroom.   His agent asked him if he couldn't now pay someone else to do that, couldn't he get back to writing?  He was writing, he told his agent, but he also wanted to build his daughter's bedroom, that it was like tucking her into her blanket at night.  

Dubus was describing making things.  He built his novel a piece at a time, and later, he built his family home.  They were both acts of creation.  

When I left the reading, I headed over to the Pottery Place, where I painted yarn bowls with a dozen other knitters.  Yarn bowls are ingenious containers that keep yarn from rolling away under the coffee table while one is knitting.  I had never painted pottery before, but my nephews have painted gifts for me.  As I chose colors and brushes and came up with a design, I felt like a child, playful and ready to experiment.  As I painted, I got lost in the process.  The blank surface of the bowl was like my blank computer screen or a blank page in my journal: an invitation to create something that had never existed before.  

I left the Pottery Place just as it closed, accompanied by another knitter, someone I had met for the first time that evening.  We talked about how remarkable it was that in this world of mass production, we had just painted bowls that were almost certainly unlike any others in the world, and how that was like the knitting we did, too, as we tweaked patterns, chose yarn, and knitted with our very personal tension, so that my stitches and hers would be different.

I came home wanting to write, to knit, to paint some more, and soon.  What I needed to do was to sit down at the kitchen counter to grade a paper.  The next morning, I had to teach, and to give feedback on a couple of dozen drafts.  And that was okay.  The delight and inspiration from my evening lightened the work I had to do, and I went in to campus the next day reminded that my students were creating, too.  

The cardigan I have been knitting and hope to finish before the winter is done.  I had to take apart over forty rows of over six hundred stitches and start the cardigan over in October, when I discovered I had twisted it when I joined it in the round,  but I haven't become discouraged yet.  

I finished knitting this hat last night.  I began it during one of the pauses in knitting the cardigan, when I had to wait to get advice about a next step.  

My favorite chair, where I often read and write and where I am writing this.  The red notebook is my journal.  I went through about half a dozen notebooks last year.  

At Home Now on This Flatland

I had lived for seven years in a Pennsylvania valley before I moved here to east central Illinois in 1997.  In those seven years I remember watching a sunset once: I was somewhere near the mall at a point high enough that I could see the sun go down behind the mountains.  I don't know if I could have seen the sunrise; besides,  I don't think I woke up early enough very often.

When I moved here for my first (and current) full-time faculty job, I lived in a townhouse that had windows facing east and west.  I lived on the southern edge of town, and from the window of my second-floor study, I would watch the sun rise across a cornfield as I got ready for my long day of teaching.  

Watching the sun come up in that big sky, I felt like a child who had recently been swaddled but was now all limbs.  I missed the embrace of the mountains and felt exposed on this flatland. 

As the years passed, my relationship with the big sky changed.  I became used to the openness and began to think of the sky with its changing clouds and colors as the mountains of the Midwest: a formation of white clouds in the winter might look like snowcapped mountains. The sunsets I often watch as I leave work are part of the familiar delight of the end of the day. 

Earlier this month, on my first day back after the winter break, I noticed the brilliant sunset once again and had to stop and take photos as I left the campus. The campus and the landscape are now home to me.