Around Here

Around here the pool is open and did you know Jesse is the President of the club this year? I told him, “Don’t do it,” and he said, “OK,” and a week later I receive an email from the GTCC President, Jesse Feyen, telling me the golf course will open soon.

“Are you serious?” I said.

“It’s in my skill set,” he replied.

So now I am the President’s wife. Please look for upcoming GTCC Book Festival news. It will take place on the golf course yes it will Jesse it is in my skill set.

Around here I stopped training for the Dexter/A2 half marathon and decided not to run it. I am disappointed, and I was very disappointed the morning of the race, but I’m not disappointed to have stopped training for it. I live my life slowly. Or, I want to. I’m a slow writer, a slow trainer, I transition slowly into the seasons. I do not like to rush. When I am rushed, I get very mean. So much has happened – so much change – and I’ve needed to rest. So I am riding my bike and running the arb hospital steps. I signed up for ballet and jazz. I take walks around Concordia sometimes during my lunch break.

Around here the girls are almost finished with school and this will be the first summer of motherhood when I will work. Gone are the days when the three of us left the house before 8am so the girls could play at the park before the equipment got too hot for their chubby little legs to slide down. We don’t ride bikes together looking for frogs and turtles and ice-cream, and we don’t go to all the library branches knocking through all their scavenger hunts. I’m not slicing pears and drizzling chocolate on them, or apples with a dusting of cinnamon. But these are good days, too. We sing along to Taylor Swift and One Direction in the car between conversations about everything that comes up – no topic is off limits, and I love that. They wave to me from the pool deck and the soccer field and the band stage. We laugh – hard – at dinner because the two of them mastered the art of sarcasm and wit mixed in with potty humor. They are more nuanced but they are not yet tainted and outside my writing room window is a tree whose leaves left a vacancy in the shape of a heart. I saw it early in the spring before the leaves had fully grown and thought, “That’s nice, but it’ll fill in soon,” but it hasn’t.

No matter what the wind does, the heart keeps its shape.