The Return of the Cicadas

This filmmaker has made the periodical cicadas into something damn beautiful, here. It's a kickstarter campaign, and I must admit I'm tempted to donate.



I'm allowing the wonder of the event to overcome my disgust. Perhaps, in reality, this is an amazing event.

Graduation, Part 1. Before.

I'm about to graduate for the third time in my life. Well, fourth if you count preschool, which I hear was quite an event, and the graduates apparently passed out harder that day than they did 20 years later as new bachelors of arts and sciences.

But the big three graduations, once completed, will represent such vastly different chapters in a life that they can barely be compared to one another. At Linsly, graduation is a most serious business. There is absolutely. no. throwing. of. hats. Diplomas will be revoked should hats be thrown. At least, that was the threat. A similar threat was made regarding graduation attitude and behavior. The event was somber, and we were expected to remain similarly focused and serious. It's laughable, actually, because an 18-year-old is one of the worst examples of focus and the males in particular lack the developmental skill required to sit still for very long. Nevertheless, we graduated and kept our hats dutifully upon our heads and ate cake with forks and talked about higher education and academic pursuits. And it was a nice little bubble in which to exist, at the time. Had I known what college would bring--both great and terrible--I think I might have taken up a mantle of excitement and terror. But of course, the not-knowing is the deal in this lifetime. The not-knowing is the reason human beings do everything that we do. It's why we work hard and love hard and act carefully and carelessly, and it's why we have children and take risks and drink vodka and sail the Caribbean. It's why we show the best and the worst of our species on any given day.

That's a sidebar, though. It's too much abstraction and reflection for a second paragraph, particularly one that recalls a high school graduation, something that signals not an end of any kind but merely a start, as all graduations do.

When I graduated from Eckerd, I cannot remember if I threw my hat. That particular moment escapes me, because as promising as my future felt when I sat in Linsly robes, it felt entirely different as I walked in sandals in the Florida sun towards a stifling gymnasium where my family waited with pride. College was hard. Not the academics. Once I accepted that I was not meant to be a scientist and gave up pursuits like biology and statistics, I flourished. No, International Environmental Law didn't go down too smoothly either, but I found a calling in the field of Environmental Studies, a beautiful blend of politics and literature and art and science. But graduation from college had little to do with academics, for me. College was a wonderful and miserable time, and though I would look back and yearn sadly for my life in Florida for many years to come, the truth is that my life in Florida

I'm not sure how to finish that paragraph. During my four years at Eckerd College I came to know and love the dearest friends, a tiny handful of which would remain my dearest friends, who would stand beside me when I married my husband and hold my children when they were born. I would also love people who would hurt me so deeply that I would come to know sorrow and depression, who changed me so dramatically that I would never live another day without medication to control my moods. When I walked up on the stage at Eckerd College to collect my bachelor's degree, my family sat in the audience, as did a boyfriend who complained that he had to be there, who used my credit card to buy his alcohol and told me every day that I was nothing at all, that I was pathetic and helpless and weak. And by the time I did cross that stage and smiled at my favorite professor as I passed him, I truly believed I was nothing.

And so my graduation from college felt very different from my Linsly commencement. Whereas before I could envision nothing but a vast horizon, as flat and open and gentle as a midwestern plain, Eckerd College's graduation felt as though it channeled me into a deep ravine, a narrow path with walls so high as to be inescapable. Whatever lay beyond the ravine couldn't possibly be worth the journey, but deep in the grip of an alcoholic abuser, I couldn't see any path but the one I was already on, and anything that waited for me in the future was already tainted with sadness and suffering.

I wouldn't ever find what was at the end of that dark gorge, though. Somehow I found another way out; somehow I clawed up the walls and escaped that particular fate.

It feels like a lifetime ago. There are moments when the comfort and presence of my husband and children and parents living next door squash the memory of that time into little more than a page in a photo album, a page in which all of the photos are half the size they once were, edges cut at odd angles and the occasional phantom hand left on my hip or shoulder because the scissors and hole punch couldn't quite expel all of him from the picture. But I don't ever open those albums because I have so many others filled with tiny smiles and faces that look like Shawn's. And in the last 15 years, the weight of that life on my shoulders as I collected that diploma has evaporated, and now what I remember is my professor's smile and wink, and my friends hooting as my name was called, and the looks on my parents' faces that I know were there even though I couldn't see them.

Eckerd College graduation caps were decorated with words and glitter and googly attenae. People wore bathing suits under their robes and passed out that night almost as hard as the 4-year-olds. I would like to go back and enjoy that time, to see an open plain instead of a cold, one-way trudge.

~

Now, at 37, as I graduate from Chatham University with an MFA, the landscape of the horizon looks unfamiliar but inviting. It's not flat; I've no longer got a vague world of choices ahead of me. The purpose of graduate school is to narrow the focus, to choose one's field. Still, the road is by no means cloistered or tight. One might say I've picked the region into which I will walk, but the terrain will vary over time, and I look forward to what I will see and do. And, as a late 30-something with two graduations and two kids under her belt, I've learned enough about life to know that great and terrible things await me out there, and after each challenge will come blessings.

It's not like me to abandon humor when I write. I feel like we should take a break so someone can slip on a banana peel. This is uncomfortable.

Nevertheless, this graduation (though it has yet to happen) is my favorite. It's the one that I paid for myself, the one where I earned nothing but A's, the one where I alone pushed myself into success every morning at 5am. It's the one when I get to envision my parents' faces as well as the face of my husband as I walk across the stage. It's the one when I get to listen for a tiny voice shouting, "Yay, Mommy!" And it's the one where I know where I want to go when I take off my hood and gown, and whether or not I've thrown my cap doesn't matter, because I have work to do. The work I want to do. And however that shakes out, I've got five faces in the crowd.

Lesson from the Lake: Soggy Dogs and Smelly Fish

I went to the lake yesterday. I wish I could say that with more enthusiasm. Actually, since this is type you have no idea how much enthusiasm might be going into my typing; my fingers could literally be bouncing off the keys with zest and verve. However, the distinct absence of exclamation points should clue you in.

As an aside: I hate exclamation points. I have a friend from childhood who peppers her writing--she's not a writer, but in emails and letters and posts--with exclamation points. Everything deserves one! She's always terribly excited to tell you that she picked up some new shoelaces and a head of cabbage! Things are looking up!!! And the more exclamation points she includes, the more vividly I envision myself beating her senseless with her own keyboard. Er, with her own fucking keyboard!!!!!!!!

Anyway, weekday lake trips buoyed this blog into existence during my second semester of graduate school. (I still cannot believe I'm writing about it in the past tense, now.) I went out there in the snow, and in the frost, and eventually, in the warmth and sunshine. I hiked and sat and wrote and ice-walked and kayaked. It was great. But in all that time, I never once went to the lake in the rain.

Now wait a minute, you say. The rain isn't a bad thing to a nature-lover. The world feels different in the rain. It's quiet and wonderfully solitary. Provided you have the right clothing, a hike in the rain can introduce you to things you won't ordinarily see. The forest smells peatier; tiny creeks form, giving you hints of where ravines will someday turn into foothills and gulches. (Gulch is far and away my favorite word in the English language. I'm going to name my next cat Gulch.) The rain reveals a little-seen world in the woods if you've packed the right shoes. And even if you haven't, as the cantankerous bag-lady at Kroger once sniped at me when I frowned at a downpour, "You're not made of sugar; you won't melt."

You know, I'd really like to stick that bitch in the mouth. I had a pie with me. Meringue.

But for whatever reason, Piedmont Lake has never been a place I want to be in the rain. I'm ashamed to say that it has something to do with the fact that I'm unplugged out there. Even with the world's biggest pile of books, I sometimes need to feel connected. Now, not often. I usually go to Piedmont to get away. But when it rains, I'm forced into the house, and when I'm forced into the house, I'm also forced into sitting with myself in the silence. And myself and I have trouble when it's just the two (one) of us. We start thinking about the rejection email we got from McSweeney's (again), and the fact that we just spent $40k on a degree that offers rejection emails rather than paychecks. And then we decide to open the fridge and dig out last summer's s'mores kit, which by now is just a bag of sugar-rocks and broken graham crackers that taste like freon. And we gnaw on them and gag at the taste and our self-pity, and I tell myself I can't stand her presence because she brings me down.

On a dismal day, Piedmont Lake throws off nothing but gray and self-pity. And I hate self-pity. It's an unattractive quality and a bad habit. Today, though, I just couldn't shake it.

Some days, I just feel like a jacked-up dock in a cold drizzle.

I went out to clean the cabin in preparation for the summer season and tackled the filthy beast until every dead millipede and every live roach (especially the one I found skulking under my pillow) had been swept away. The dogs waited as patiently as they possibly could for me to finish so they could trot down to the lake, where the scene was quite dreary. As there was no wind, the rain fell straight down onto a mirrored surface. One miserable fisherman puttered along the shoreline past the dock, and I wondered if he felt as cranky as I did. The fish rarely bite in the rain.

To my surprise, Nugget and Maya reacted with an initial lack of enthusiasm too. The one thing I've learned from 37 years of owning dogs is that they like the rain about as much as I do. They'll allow their bladders to fill to the point of rupture before they'll pee in a heavy downpour, and if she can sneak away from the humans, Nugget will happily leave a steamy pile in the foyer rather than get her girly paws wet. Down by the lake, both girls picked their way through the long grass, which was overdue for a mow, and looked about as happy as I felt.

But of course, dogs impart teachable moments to us wherever they go, if we're receptive. When you're a dog, something always comes along to perk you up. Rather than mope and pity themselves, they keep their noses to the ground, always seeking treasure, ever-confident that it will appear. Dogs' opportunistic nature should be a lesson to all of us; something great lies just around the bend at any given time. For my girls, something great did indeed lie around the bend. Something great and dead and decomposing.

What can we learn from the dog?

First and foremost, we too must keep our noses to the ground so we don't miss whatever wonderful, smelly, desiccated corpse happens to be lying on the shore of the lake. And when we find it, we should roll in it with abandon, digging our shoulders into the acrid, rotting scales because these rare jewels come along infrequently in life.

Follow me through the guts of this metaphor, if you will.

Yes, I'm telling you to roll in the dead fish like a dog. Carpe carpem: seize the fish. Roll until the stink of joy covers you, because that joy, that stink, is fleeting, and all too soon some higher power will come along and lure you out onto the end of the dock and throw you into the lake.

Poor Nugget never saw it coming. She was so happy to reek and so stunned when I tossed her in the drink. Yet, like any dog, she bore me no ill will and came right back onto the dock with a sodden, wagging tail, never once imagining that I might do it again. I didn't. And while I apologized to her, and wrung out her dripping beard, Maya found the fish and plucked it from the wet grass in her jaws, carrying both it and her tail high. A most precious treasure.

I admit I didn't see it this way at the time. Possibly, I yelled, "Oh my gawd put that down you dirty dog!" Possibly, I ended the excursion and went back inside, wet and resentful and appalled. Possibly, I'm now only realizing that I stripped them of their beloved prize in a predictably human way.

I mean, it was a rotting carp. The girls stunk. And I despise the lemons-into-lemonade cliche. But, perhaps we should all look for the dead fish on dreary days. Otherwise, it's just a soggy walk in the rain.

Yesterday's Blog

Already I've fallen off the wagon on my 30-day blog-a-thon. I'm going to try to double up today, but it'll be difficult. We've got a road trip planned. Perhaps I can allow room for one day away from the blog each week. During grad school I always gave myself a day off.

That's not true, actually. When I realized, suddenly in November, that I only had six months left to write the thesis, I panicked. It sounds utterly ridiculous, doesn't it? Six months and you panicked? You freak of nature. I know. And I am a freak of nature. But recall, if you'll permit me some slack, that I have OCD (without the C) and an anxiety disorder, and those voices are far louder than those of reason.

But at the same time, I don't think I can possibly be the only thesis-writer to have sat up on Thankgiving night and said, "Holy shit, I have to turn this thing in six months from now! I'll never get it done." When I started the thesis in early August on my own, before the semester had started, I felt like I had plenty of time. The better part of a year. And it was only required to be 125 pages, and I had one solid essay written and chunks of others that would eventually morph into thesis components. But once I started assembling these bits, and writing more bits, word by agonizing word, I realized why it takes people years to write a book.

Writing is hard. It's tedious. And there are many, many days when the words just aren't coming. Now, in "real" life, when you're writing a book on your own terms, you can say, "Eh, today's not my day," and piddle around or just abandon the effort altogether. It doesn't make for writerly discipline, of course. It's frowned upon by uber-hard workers and the super prolific. And I can make the argument that even if you're writing garbage, at least you're writing, and that from the pile of crap you produce you may just dig up a diamond. (By that I mean a single decent sentence out of 4 shitty pages, or a salient idea worth pursuing.) In school, however, there's a deadline. You've got to write. If you write crap today, you damn well better not write crap tomorrow, because there are only so many tomorrows in a semester. The point is to get it done, and to do so largely on your own. Nobody pushes you in grad school; they just expect results on the appointed date.

One of the most valuable things I learned about myself in the last two years is that I function really well with a deadline. I'd never have thought that about myself, but it turns out that when I have no expectations placed upon me, I just fart around and dally in the daffodils and dream half-assed writer dreams that never come to fruition. This is possibly the most important thing I could have learned about myself with regards to a future career. I will never get anything done unless someone is expecting work by a certain date. Doesn't matter who. I just need a date by which a piece of writing must be ready, and then I'll be efficient and studious and hard-working. I need a second entity in my writing life, someone who's waiting for me to write. I alone am not enough to push myself to success.

That seems kind of wimpy, kind of weak. Perhaps, but it's what I know to be true. It's how and who I am. And I'm so glad I learned it.

When I realized I only had six months, I panicked. And I think plenty of thesis students have done this. Writing a book-length work in under a year is impossible, really. No thesis is book-ready. I could edit and rewrite mine for another year, and I fully expect to, for more than a year. And sadly, the manuscript will no longer be the laser focus of my existence. (Damn kids, always needing food.) It'll be a side project, one that gets my attention when I have time, when the stars align properly. That's a huge bummer, and a huge relief. The thesis and I need some time away from each other. I'm happy to devote myself to the pieces individually, but as a whole, it's starting to feel like a houseguest that won't leave and has been feeding my dogs table scraps and teaching my kids obscene gestures.

With that said, I'll cut this blog shorter than I'd like to (I can do that because nobody is reading it or checking it or expecting it) and go rouse my menfolk. We have moutains to find today!

17-Year Horrors

We're about to undergo an event here in West Virginia. It's a miracle of nature that happens only once per generation, a much-studied, much-anticipated entymological occurrence that makes the news and water-cooler conversations: the arrival of the periodical cicadas, a.k.a. the 17-year-locusts.

They aren't locusts, technically. We refer to them as such out of habit around here. But these are cicadas, the same insects that arrive in August to drone on for a month. The regular summer bugs are what's known as the "dog day cicadas"; what's about to arise from the ground after 17 years of underground dwelling are the periodical cicadas. They come in 17- and 13-year versions and they spend their lives under the earth, chewing on tree roots and undergoing various metamorphoses, from what I've read. Then, when the 17th spring has arrived and the soil reaches 64 degrees, they all emerge in one giant horde, a display of the awesome power of nature and the wonder of evolution.

And it's fucking disgusting.

I dread this emergence with every fiber of my being. In fact, I dread it so much that I've actually begun to concentrate my dread within my third eye in the hopes that if I resist their arrival with enough vehemence I may actually will it not to happen. And in so doing I will spare West Virginians the agony of Brood V's wretched swarming.

It's hard to consider myself a nature writer and admit that I despise the cicadas. I feel as though I really do my part to educate my kids when it comes to the creepy-crawlies. Every year Ben enjoys the arrival of the tent caterpillars (he calls them bagworms). We break open their nests and hundreds of squirming bodies plop out onto the ground. And I let them crawl on my arms so he can see that nature is not to be feared or choked down with a shiver and a gag. (This lesson wouldn't apply if we lived in rattlesnake country, would it?) We also spend lots of time fondling earthworms and kissing crappie when we catch them. We dig up Florida Fighting Conch down at the condo in Fort Myers Beach, and poke at their slimy, tongue-like feet.

I don't think that nature is gross at all. It's miraculous. It's nifty.

But not these fucking cicadas.

I was three when they first appeared, and I have no memory at all of the experience. My parents say it was eerie: as Dad walked his dog in the evening he became aware, suddenly, that they were all coming out of the ground, and millions of red eyes watched him. They rose like the dead in unbelievable numbers, discarding their shells as they did so at the base of every tree in piles ten inches thick. Mom recalls how they screamed all day, so loud that conversations were drowned out, and she specifically remembers the cicadas clinging to her shirt and sitting on her shoulder, singing their love songs in her ear.

I do not want this to happen. I do not want a song crooned in my ear. Especially not a cicada booty call.

They returned again in 1999, and as luck would have it, I did not return home from college that summer and missed the periodical cicadas entirely. The stories from that year are bland and uneventful; for whatever reason the bugs were not as intense as they had been 17 years prior. Nobody I've talked to can recall anything striking or significant.

In 2013, we saw what scientists call "stragglers." These are cicadas that, for whatever reason, emerge 4 years too early or 4 years too late. There were a handful in the yard, just enough for the boys to gather and organize a cicada circus. I recall the red eyes. Dog day cicadas lack the red eyes and for that I am thankful. Demon bugs belong down in hell.

Yesterday we had some leaf-rakers tend to our yard. Over the long, cold months, the leaves tend to get caught in the gardeny places, between boxwoods and lilacs and under the hemlocks. When the guys raked clean the bare soil, I saw that it was pock-marked with holes, a tell-tale sign that cicadas are here. And when Benjamin lifted a rock, there they were.

They're not yet ready to officially emerge. Still in their nymphal stage, they're just below the surface, tunneling around like ants in an ant farm. Each rock and flagstone and flower pot we lifted had cicadas under it, burrowing. Ben poked at every single one of them, trying to decide whether they were fascinating or repellant. I tried my best to imply that they are fascinating. I even picked up a nymph and let it crawl upon my hand.

But I hate them. They're going to cling to me. And rrrrrraaaaaiiiiirrrr in my ear.

Surely this is an evolutionary reaction. Somewhere in my genetic memory lies the recollection of an Egyptian plague, and the subsequent biblical trauma that ensued. It was a rough time. First, we were enslaved for 400 years. Then a plague of locusts started a big-ass coup, and everybody ended up wandering the desert for forty years. There were sunburns and lechery and a golden cow, and it really sucked.

I think I'm on to something, here.

Anyway, the El Niño has brought a warm spring and an early spring. And the bugs are awake and raring to go. Every day I wake up and wonder if they'll be out, and I stare out at my baby redbud tree knowing I have to cover its new growth to protect it from the egg-laying females who will deposit their icky little spawn in the branches and damage them.

And so, I wait.

A Tangle of Thoughts After School Begins to End

I wrote a thesis.

A lot of people write theses. Or dissertations. It's not particularly unusual. But much like childbirth, though many people have written one, we all have a different, and very personal, experience. And I'm having trouble putting mine into words, which is actually pretty standard for a writer, I've come to realize. We, perhaps more than others, have trouble finding words. That's why we piddle around with paragraphs and adjectives and descriptions--we can't quite figure out how to say what we want to say so we start weaving an essay or a story to convey what others might blurt out in a few sentences. Stupid, ironic writers.

Anyway, I passed my defense, and I turned the thesis in to the binders and the library. It's gone. I've sent it out into the world. And, as is the case with so many long-awaited deadlines, though everything has come to a grinding halt in my world, the inertia of the experience continues to propel me forward. And while I have looked to this time with eagerness and excitement and the anticipation of relief, that comfort has yet to hit me.

Many things happen when you finish graduate school. (And technically I still have a summer residency to attend, but that's a different sort of work: a hard but immersive experience, one I'll go through with other writers and friends.) The deadline that's hovered over you for two years - the ever-frightening Defense (capital D) - comes and goes. You pass, and then...what? 

Then, silly fool, life returns to normal. But normal isn't something you know, now. It's an unfamiliar life, one that has slipped through the cracks for two years while you were so busy working your weary ass off. You realize that your husband has been doing the laundry for 25 months, and that nobody has filed any papers or taken the dogs to get their heartworm medicine. You notice that the number of friends you had before you began school has shrunk considerably; they're still out there, but you've kinda sorta vaguely lost touch, and all they know is that every time they see you at the grocery store you utter the word "thesis" with a preoccupied look in your eyes and express an interest in getting together that never goes any further than the bread section. And you know they don't get what you've been through at all. They don't know the exhaustive marathons and the crammed reading sessions and the obsession over commas and themes and forms. They don't know you've rearranged doctor appointments and missed at least one or two of the kids' field trips and that your butt, which was just starting to get firm when you were accepted to the program, has returned to its former tomato shape and has been joined by abs that have let go and neck muscles frozen at an angle that automatically directs your eyes towards the level of a screen. 

They don't know you're secretly worried that now, without a deadline or a mentor or a tuition check on the line, you might lose your momentum and grow complacent. You fear you might just get a regular job to finally make some money and promise yourself that you'll write in the mornings, but that without a group of teachers pushing you, you'll fall back into the unmotivated and unsuccessful place that drove you to an MFA in the first place. They have no idea how much is riding on your continued efforts to put words on the page, and that you've got no fucking clue at all how you're going to make it happen, or publish a book, or even how to clean up your office after two years. 

"I just passed my thesis," you'll say to your friend in the grocery story. And they'll say "Congratulations," and you'll ask them about their kids and then you'll go home and feel this silent and powerful impetus to get busy, because the deadline has melted away on paper but not in your brain; it still feels like you've got to hustle. And do you hustle, to keep the juices flowing so you don't rot away into a "regular person" place, or do you just sit down and breathe for the first time since September 1, 2014?

I don't know the answer. That's why I'm writing, or rather, dancing around with myself in a circle on a blog that nobody reads. 

When we give birth to our children, the work really begins after the test. Childbirth is that test, and once the final has been passed, then we set about learning and working. It's the opposite of school. (Of course, the whole, frightening, you-can't-ever-quit-and-your-failure-means-the-complete-ruination-of-multiple-lives thing makes it intense, too. No pressure.)

But here and now, I've finished the hard work. The test came last, and I passed it. But the caveat is that, when you have a baby, you get to practice on them. You have years to get it right. Babies are pretty flexible. They bounce when you drop them (so sorry, Andy), and they accept apologies when you wrong them. With writing, I've already done the practice. Now I need to step up. But of course, I have no more clue than I did on the first day at home with Andy, and it's all jabberwocky. All I know is that I have to put into use all of that practice, all of those tentative test-runs. 

Graduate school was a goal I set for myself, and one I shared with nobody else. It was just me and this thing, this desire to be a writer and to educate myself in that pursuit. Now I've achieved the goal, but it doesn't feel solid. Somehow I thought I'd have something physical, something of this world, to wrap my hands around, a hunk of proof that I was in this place I'd sought for 15 years. Instead, I'm stepping off the train into a world both familiar and unfamiliar. I've been here before; it's my life that I'm recognizing, but like the sweaters that Shawn always shrinks, it fits differently now.

Rather than a tangible reward for my efforts, I've got only life lessons and intense memories. Here is the week I worked through an auto-immune attack. Here is the day I decided to switch my thesis from nonfiction to humor. Here is the time I read an essay to my husband and he laughed and laughed. I've got a pile of things behind me, now, and nothing on the horizon, yet.

Yet. There's a lot of walking to do. I need to start.

I Wrote a Thesis

I wrote a thesis.

I have said the words "thesis" a thousand times this year. A thousand. The number screams enormity, but mere words don't really convey what I've been up to for the last nine months. My last blog entry is dated September 1, 2015. That's the last time I found the strength, time, or wherewithal to blog. And I love to blog. I love to go to naturey places and come home with photos and thoughts.

But I wrote a thesis, and it consumed me.

Maybe that's not the way graduate school is supposed to be. After all, this wasn't a PhD. It wasn't supposed to be my entire life. But it quickly became so. I worked every day on the thesis, taking fewer than 20 days off all year. I did stop on Thanksgiving, at the program director's urging, and a 14-ish days at Christmas, at my thesis director's urging. And one day I had the stomach flu.

I do not recommend this strategy. It nearly killed me, and I say that facetiously, but not 100% facetiously.

Writing the thesis took everything out of me. And perhaps it would not have done so for a "normal" person, a person without mental health issues, without physical health issues. Perhaps a 23-year-old would have written for a few hours in each day and then closed the laptop and gone out to find herself a life. I have allowed myself none, and have been like a monk who can think of nothing but his manuscript, or his chants, or whatever monks focus on in their monkly existence.

I'm not 23. I'm a 36-year-old mom who abandoned her chance to follow her heart's passion when I moved away from Florida. The manatees were right there; the Everglades Restoration Project was just kicking off. And I followed a stupid, abusive alcoholic back to West Virginia and gave up my shot at being a wetlands ecologist. A measurable part of me still mourns that decision in quiet, reflective moments. When I return to Florida, I feel a physical pain of regret when I walk through a wetland or estuary. But the universe knows better. In fact, the universe knows how bad I am at pure science, and it waved it in my face during college like a deer flagging its tail. Hey idiot, you're no good at science. See that D? Stick to the humanities.

But of course I have Shawn and my kids and wouldn't change my life's path. But until recently, there were lingering questions in my mind about my future and the potential for me to leave any legacy at all in this world after I am gone. Because I think about that often. And I'm not saying that a 121-page thesis called Varmints is my legacy. Not by a long shot. But it's the first thing I've created all by myself (with tremendous assistance from my director, to be sure). It's proof that when I followed that jerky fiance up to West Virginia and abandoned what I once hoped would be my life's plan, I didn't do it in vain. Whoever was in the driver's seat knew exactly where I was going.

Enough existential baloney. I wrote a thesis, and I think it almost killed me.

The difference between becoming a writer at 36 and doing it at 23 is almost laughable to me. What does a twenty-year-old write about? More importantly, does a twenty-year-old grasp the magnitude of what they are undertaking? I paid $36,000 for this education. I paid it myself, and those were not easy checks to write. I left my children to watch television and play alone while I spent my daily hours in my office. I did not volunteer in their classrooms. I did not attend field trips. I wrote.

In these last few months, at the end when time seemed to compress into a wretched little hourglass, I stopped going to yoga. I stopped seeing friends (not that I have many here in my home town). And slowly they began to forget about me. And those who did check in couldn't understand how deeply I had fallen into my final semester. They couldn't understand how the brain of an obsessive-compulsive finds itself unable to disengage from the pursuit of absolute perfection. And, without meaning to at all, they moved on.

My thesis is not perfection, make no mistake. Yet I tried harder at this than I have ever done at anything. Because this is my thing. My life's thing. I'm here to create two beautiful little boys--which I've done--and to write. I'm keenly aware that I've found the pen I will hold for the rest of my life, and that I now have to decide where and how to use it.

The handful of people who stuck beside me during this process know how it has changed me. They know that my body has given in to auto-immune disorders made worse by stress, that I have little immunological protection against germs now, and that my lungs don't work as well as they used to. That's not the fault of the thesis; it's bad luck and it came, perhaps, a little faster than it would have were I a relaxed person with no stressors. I'm not.

The handful of people who stuck beside me know that I accepted nothing less than 100% effort from myself, that nothing was ever quite right, and that a few more hours at the computer when I was already sick were the price I was willing to pay to work harder. They know they haven't seen me in months, and I hope they forgive my absence and my obsessions.

Now, as I prepare for my defense, I find it hard to come down from this heightened emotional place. The work is done; I must still defend it, but that process will not be as difficult as the writing and the revision. And when my semester ends, when I have attended my final summer residency, I have new beginnings to anticipate, more decisions and more hard work.

I wrote a thesis, and nobody knows how much of me it has taken, how much of me bled out onto the page and cannot be replaced. If it's not in me, then it's out there, and I understand that this is the legacy I worry about leaving. I needn't worry; it's already been left.