Been a while.
So, so much has changed. Shortly after I last posted, my beloved father was killed, and everything any of us had ever known came unmoored. People ask me, now that I've returned like some sort of demented homing pigeon to Pennsylvania, how I liked Wisconsin, and finally it dawned on me--I have no fucking idea. My first year there was a trial by fire (or, you know, ice, whatever) and just as I was getting my feet under me and spending the first summer planting a flower garden along the sides of my postage-stamp lawn, writing every morning in the best purchase I made out there--a big ol' hanging basket chair, and falling utterly in love with the north shore of Superior, my life became something else entirely. My mom called, exactly the way I'd known since the last time I saw my parents before I moved, and said the exact words I knew she would say (except she called him "dad" instead of "daddy," the single difference in the scenario), while I was sitting in the same place in the same room I knew I'd be when the call came. Don't ask me how I knew. I knew it the same way I knew at two separate points during my first Christmas home that it would be our final Christmas as a family of five. I remember hugging my father goodbye at the airport and forcing myself not to think about the winter years prior when I'd been terrified something would happen to him between the time I stepped on the jetway and the next time I saw him. Even as I shut my eyes against the image, I knew it was true. There's a picture I took on the way to the airport that morning. January 4, 2022. It's a half-blurry shot of one of my boots, part of my lap, and a lot of the floor of the passenger seat of his car. I must have accidentally taken it when trying not to drop my phone. Dad's not in it anywhere. But I know he's in the driver's seat next to me, getting ready to pull out of their driveway. It's the last shot I have of the two of us alive and together, even though neither of us is particularly visible.
So how did I like Wisconsin? Dead father, semi-emergent hysterectomy six weeks later as the only child still of marginally reproductive age, and the next two and a half years trying to recover from all of that while also doing all of the things I'd been brought out to Wisconsin to actually do. Beats the hell out of me how I liked it. I did, and do, find that I had an utterly lovely contingent of folks hellbent on taking care of me in true Midwest fashion--I got casseroled and everything!--and I will forever be grateful for that, but...like, holy shit.
One good thing it has undeniably done for me is make me laugh at the weather here in NEPA. And I mean laugh raucously and often, mostly in the direction of mon ami bien-aimé, who is always cold. "Aren't you from Chicago?" I say to him as he's winding a scarf round his very long neck for the walk from the door of the chapel to the door of his car, a trip he can make in about fifteen very long steps (it takes me nearly thirty to cover the same distance).
In the end, I left Wisconsin as I'd arrived--on about five weeks' notice before I had to be at a new job (whatever happened to the actual job cycle in academia? Good God.)--this time, as Robert Frost predicted, in the ice of a brand new year, rather than the fire of mid-August. All my plants froze to death in the back of my car. Solstice came home in a tiny box of ashes rather than ass-first against Wednesday Frances. He's been reincarnated as an absolute crimebag of a feline who has a name long enough to express every bit of my rage as he wreaks havoc on my life, even at almost two and a half. Partly named for my father, partly shelter name, partly mistaken identity when I went to meet him at the adoption center, and part tongue-tied fury at the fact that he was on top of the clothes rod in the closet again, allow me to present the single best thing that came out of Wisconsin (other than the possible exception of my actual job here), Actually Indigo Ignatius Marie (shades of my former colleague Amy echoing "...Henri?") in all his bashed-nose glory, a result of some injury before the shelter took him in at 8 weeks:
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This boi has both the density and the IQ of a doorstop |
There's more, of course, so much more, but for once in my life I'm managing to be circumspect. Also, I'm behind on my grading. So what else is new?
