Sometimes

My senior year of college, I lived in a grey house on the corner of Sherman and Gladstone in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It had a great big yard we used once for a graduation party, a kitchen with enough room to prepare ramen and brew coffee, plus sit around a wooden kitchen table, our books open for studying but it was talking my roommates and I would do instead.

Upstairs were three bedrooms, one of which was probably more of a nook, but my one roommate turned into the cutest bedroom with cement block bookshelves, cinnamon smelling candles, and DIY picture frames.

She had a window in her room that faced the street and a tree whose leaves turned the most brilliant yellow I can ever remember seeing. Almost every day in the fall of 1997, I would walk upstairs to my bedroom and think the lights were on in her room as I observed the literal glow beaming into our hallway. I’d peek my head in and she’d look up from a book she was reading and say, “It’s the tree!”

“Goodness,” I’d say because there was nothing else to say about leaves that could show off like that.

Just one fall I got to witness the glittery light those leaves sent through my friend’s window.  Soon, it was 1998 and we were in the burly, wear-all-the-layers Michigan cold. Mornings were dark, afternoons were murky and they turned into dark evenings, and all the leaves on our tree were gone, sunk into the ground.

My friend liked to play Sarah McLaughlin’s “Full of Grace” during this time of year: “The winter here’s cold, and bitter. It chills us to the bone. We haven’t seen the sun in weeks, too long, too far from home.” She’d play it over and over while she applied to med schools, filled her journal with her neat penmanship, scratch the wax of her candles towards their wicks so they’d continue to burn. I think the song named something for my friend so she could keep working. Even if the thing that was named was homesickness, the dreariness of winter, the mounds of work we all had to do.  Something about knowing someone else knew about these things soothed her.

Me, I ran away. I remember the day well. I was in a counselor’s office going over my Meyers-Briggs (that damn test). The counselor felt concerned about my pursuing a career in teaching given my “extreme introvert and planning” tendencies.

It was a Thursday afternoon when he tried to define who I was and who I might become. I thanked him, threw the test in the trash, got in the car and drove to South Bend to see Jesse. The entire ride I sang along to “Closer to Fine” by the Indigo Girls. “The less I seek my source for some definitive,” I bellowed as I crossed the St Joseph River, “closer I am to fine.”

I was thinking about that tree outside my friend’s window recently as I sat in the carpool line waiting for Hadley and Harper. Normally I get to school about ten minutes after school is over due to the time it takes for me to travel from my school and get to theirs. But on this day, I got out early and all I wanted to do was drink Starbucks, sit in the car, and read a book while I waited for the girls to come bustling out of school.

What I should’ve been doing is grading papers, answering emails, using those extra minutes to maybe prep dinner, clean the house, do something productive. But I wasn’t in a “Full of Grace” mood. I was in  “Closer to Fine” mood.  It happens every winter: I get sick of the work. I get sick of all the things to do. I get sick of all the have to dos.

Sometimes, even though I just treated myself to coffee, I want some ice-cream.

And after eating ice-cream I want to go to 5-Below.

And while I never want to go to the pet store next to 5 Below, sometimes Hadley and Harper do, so why not?

 

No searching for definitives right now. Just a little mindlessness, thank you very much. Even though I probably won’t see them, those leaves will shed their light again. I’ll look for that kind of light elsewhere. There’s a tree outside my window where I write. A cardinal visits it now, and in the fall it’s a pretty outstanding red. I think that’ll do.