Change and Waiting

We are so nearly finished with Year 2 that I can taste the fresh air on the other side. I have to complete two class plans in the next 72 hours in order to get there, however. A year and a half ago, I would have said "Impossible!" A year ago, "It'll take a miracle." Today, "Just let me stay up all night and don't tell me anything that's going on with the forum or the Year 3 booklist." I have to chuckle. How times do change!

Speaking of change, a dear friend from college called today to tell me that she got engaged last night. Ah, Domina---how good it was to hear your voice, and how beautiful your ring is!

Yes change: Fortuna with her wheel, constant only in that her changes change her changes evermore. Honestly, though, I'm ready for a little change. The pace this year has been.... difficult. I told the Domina that it has been like a perpetual PHC finals week for the past twelve (actually fifteen, counting all the madness that started last October) months. That's the best I can do to sum it up.

So, I'm ready for changes, and they are slowly finding me. Some have been months and months in preparation, others weeks, still others days. My maple bookshelves, for example, were delivered this week after four months of waiting. My pocket watch (see picture below) arrived from England at last---a belated birthday present from my family.




In February I am due to go to Florida for what will be my first consecutive three days off in eight months. Yay! And there is no prettier change of scenery than Florida, my dear, when you are in Maryland in February. Last time I was there I took a river cruise and saw alligators and had lunch at a strange, picturesque restaurant covered---if memory serves---with white iron scrollwork. This time I go to see my Auntie, and to pick up a gift that renders me speechless with pleasure: five boxes of brand new Easton Press books. "What is Easton Press?" you ask...

The picture doesn't do it justice, but basically Easton Press are the most beautifully bound books in the world. I say this largely without hyperbole. They are leatherbound, hardback, 14 carat gold edged, moire-lined, satin-ribboned books. They are the kind of book, simply, that you would never buy for yourself. At least, not unless you could find one on ebay. But if someone gives one to you... never mind gives you five boxes... well... you're treading on air. Just watch out for the illustrations---some of them are modern art or that awful blocky smudgy stuff, which has no business being set up beside beautiful words.

These books have been a longer wait than the bookshelves. I've been waiting for them, I think, for about five years. And I'm now in my fourth week of waiting for my amaryllis bulb to bloom. Brittainia gave it to me for my birthday, and it's going to be a scarlet beauty among all the brown leather and wood of my study. Someday, when I finally get the floor redone and no longer live with the horror of pink carpet, I will take pictures of my study. So far it has been two years a-making. We'll see how long it is before the room is finished.

Meanwhile, I am plotting to take a trip to Chincoteague this spring, for a little time with my dear love, the Atlantic. I will take my sisters and a few close friends with me, if possible. We might let the boys come too, but only if they get their own house. Chincoteague is the dullest place you can imagine as a tourist spot, especially in March or April. But if you bring your books and writing, your friends and food and movies and music, it becomes an enchanted (and inexpensive!) sea-side escape. I'm going to see if I can talk the girls into renting this place for a week:

Meanwhile, Charity and Marjorie and I are teasing each other about our round-the-world cruise (102 days on the Princess Lines cruise ship) that we plan to take... sometime. Meanwhile, Sarah Camille and I are more assiduously planning a four-month tour of Europe for 2010. The girls "intend" to join us for our month in England. :-) Maybe we'll stay here...

All of which is to say, gentle reader, that I don't want you to get the wrong impression about my life. It's not drudgery, drudgery, drudgery, world without end amen. Even if I had no books or vacations to look forward to, it wouldn't be that, because my job involves beautiful language, stories, poems, and plays. I mean to say, come on! What's not gorgeous about that? It's only when that is compressed into too little time with too little sleep and R&R that a problem arises. And that is when you begin to plan your trip around the world.

But it all requires waiting, my dear, and faithful, quiet, patient, hard-working waiting at that. Changes come, pleasant or terrible as God wills. All that I have or have to look forward to might be swept away in any instant. Yet I fear nothing, because one change and one thing that I am waiting for are inevitable---the change into a glorified body, and the expectation of Heaven.

What have we not been given?