The Melting World

I just spent a steady hour with a red pen (I don’t usually use a red pen, but I felt a bit peevish) dancing, sliding and hopping through two English Literature students’ graduate theses on Midsummer Night’s Dream and something by D.H. Lawrence I have never read.

The smell of coffee grounds scooped into an unused filter lured me forward to the last pages and it held its lovely scent in front of my nostrils as a reward. Now I have the cup brewed and a snowstorm outside the window to lull me back into blissful solitude.

As it is an official work holiday, I would have had rather been at home, but it is my job to help these students and I can’t refuse to help them…I haven’t the heart to be so cold (or is it bold?). Now that I am here, however, I can feel at peace.

The two informed me that a drone of fourth-year students would be flying to visit me in January as the deadline approaches…something I am not too excited about, but I am also well aware how few college students are good at doing their work ahead of schedule: procrastinators reign supreme.

Yesterday:

My son and I visited a woman and her two children whom we met at the shopping mall. They are from Tehran. She is lonely and cold in this city; her husband is an artist and instructor for Tokai University, so she spends her days with her one year old while her husband and older daughter, age 9, are away at school. She misses her parents and her very big house and her maid and the inexpensive fruits and vegetables of Iran. She will return home in February with her children for a 2-3 month visit.

She had her veil off at home and she had a thick shock of lovely brown hair, something one would never imagine being tucked underneath her calico blue and white cotton head-scarf. Her daughters are bright red cheeks and smiles. We ate pistachios that had been soaked in some sort of reddish sticky spice and my son chewed like a beaver through the skin of an apple, creating a superficial spiral design with his front teeth. Luckily I had brought them four new apples (an apple in Japan is over a dollar each!), so I could feel less guilty over his baby beaver antics.

Well, I had hoped to use these “days off” to write and read, but I have yet to act on the first of these goals….am I the same as those students who put writing off until it’s too late? I hope not! Here I sign off to dip my toes into imagination lake.