Sunshine, Lollipops...Sigh

I had a Cranky Doodle Day this week, which is pretty rare for me (Buddhism, yoga, deep breathing), connected to an awkward Zoom meeting and (mostly*) undone by a pleasant Zoom meeting the next day, with a wise and charming person, plus steady, productive work, which cures a lot of things for me. Along with reading.

*I say “mostly” because evidently I am writing about it here in connection to crankiness, so its effects may be lingering still. 

In the meantime, I was so happy with myself for starting the year off right, and getting three submissions out in January, the last right on January 31. That submission was rejected two days letter with a cheerful suggestion that I subscribe via discount. There was a brief moment then, too, of laugh-out-loud-crankiness-slash-recognition, as I said to myself, “Oh, yeah! That’s why I stopped submitting to that journal!” 

Auugghh. I actually write notes to myself in my non-Excel recordkeeping system, “Do not submit here again” or “NEVER submit here again,” and, sadly, I don’t always heed my own advice, or I forget, after I have moved those notes to the archived recordkeeping files. Anyhoo…! 

But, on February 1, I doggedly resumed my chalkboard poem a day on Facebook. Oops, I just realized I forgot the Instagram simulcast….OK, done. Double sigh… 

Today’s poem was drafted yesterday evening, as it happened, and revised this morning, before posting: 

February 3, 2021 

Yesterday evening   

briefly, in the shift of light,
      I was gone,
nameless, part of the night
     now fallen. 

I’ve been reading Russian short stories in the book by George Saunders, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. The stories and his commentary make me want to stop everything and write fiction again. (I did a little of that, longhand in a journal.) As it says in the poem above, I did feel nameless, gone, at one with the universe, at dusk, and I sense that at times in the Russians. My husband feels at-one-ment much of the time. In a comic version of all this, I forgot who I was in an email, when someone referred to “Kathy,” and I thought she meant me, but, to her, I am only “Kathleen.” We got it sorted out. 

It’s been very sunny here lately, but a deep, deep cold is coming soon. Thanks, Groundhog.