Daily Archive

Struggling, and falling short. I didn’t mean it to sound as dire as I now know it did, in response to the standard question of how I’ve been lately.

Juggling, that would apply too, just doing my gol-darnedest to keep many disparate commitments in motion, knowing that gravity and/or other forces will claim each of them in its own time, but not knowing quite what else to do til then.

Took one last trip west to those Cities of Twin to say goodbye to the MN fam over the weekend. Had no specific plans in mind so it all went just about right, by my reckoning.

Lists were made and checked off, help was needed and offered and accepted, promises to my nephew kept, all in the kind of orderly, peaceable progression my sister creates like the most gentle wake. Like the wake of a mother duck, sweeping her ducklings along in tidy array.

The 3 frenzied discombobulated deadline-ruled and frustration-riddled weeks of school and clinic and so on since our Labor Day getaway, to the idyllic northernmost reaches of WI, put me in need of a reset for the semester.

And I got it by leaving Madison for a couple of sleeps, though my return was promptly greeted by a nasty sinus infection. So I’ve been sidelined for the week, only feeling halfway decent while engaged in the acts of drinking tea or sipping soup.

I keep telling myself this is my chance to catch a breath, to think and plan. To reorder my life in a more focused, coherent, adulthood-befitting manner, or get ready to.

But the letting go of what I know I don’t need, the holding on to what I do in the ways that matter most…that fine mingling evades my best efforts. What to leave in? What to leave out? as the song wonders, or maybe I just like to think it does, because I do.