Mitzvah

Monday, October 03, 2016

What's up?

Here? Not much, you know. Beginning of school tumult. Massive research project launch in which I run around with 4 year olds who are all wearing mic's and I photograph and document in my research journal like a crazy woman for 3 or 4 days a week, while still teaching a full 12 credit load.

And have a senior in high school who is applying for college and who just had her senior portraits done yesterday.

And edits are due on a journal article that *must* be finished because I have others waiting but I seem to have pulled a metric ton of committee service this semester meaning that I am at research of work from 7 am to 6 pm every. blessed. day.

(note: I have fallen to the "curse of competence" insomuch as when people want something done they start tagging me to the committee because I am a workhorse. )

My 20th wedding anniversary is this week and I have nothing. I can barely keep my eyes open in the evening.  More than one glass of wine will find me face down in whatever dish is before me.

Some days I genuinely have no idea what day of the week it might be. My always tenuous grasp of time is slipping away into the abyss.

***

I spent my summer in the community garden and now that it is fall, I work. On the weekends I walk in graveyards and photograph graves. I walk miles and miles.

Last weekend, Terrance asked me if I planned to go grave robbing.

I responded: "Grave walking? Because grave robbing is a very different activity and and not one I particularly have planned for a Saturday afternoon, if ever."

This leads my overactive imagination to wonder what would be in modern graves to rob, exactly? Polyester? The powdered remains of the 1919 influenza outbreak?

I don't know. But I walk the graves and call out "Hi friends!" My reading the names of people long dead brings them back to life, a tiny mitzvah,  if but for a moment.  Sometimes I read a particularly spectacular name and address the individual to let them know that - Wow. I hoped they lived a life to match that amazing name.

I slap at the last mosquitos and biting gnats of the season. I do not mourn their passing.
 
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