Returning/Moving Forward

With Aunt Robin in Pgh

8/29/07

Every time my life changes I have to figure out how to blog again. In the space of a year I went from a full-time grad student/teaching fellow roaming Pitt’s campus and having coffee and lunch with colleagues to a sweltering pregnant woman working full-time for an investment firm in Iowa to a SAHM of a lovely infant struggling to dissertate to a group-home worker on weekends, dissertator on weekdays, mother on weeknights and Sundays. I used to want to process it all on the blog but then I got worried about my online persona and professionalism and shied away from it altogether.

It’s gorgeous here in Cedar Rapids for the first time this hot, sticky summer: the storms that rocked and rumbled through the midwest last night have cleared to a merely warm, sunny, dry day. I am grateful to be here in this wide open place where the children are happier than they are on the East Coast and where I can get a haircut for $25 and NOT worry that the hairdresser needs welfare.

9/3/07

When the Snapper and I emerged from the Fort Pitt Tunnel to take in Pittsburgh’s lovely, busy skyline I felt like I’d never left. Here’s Pittsburgh, I said to him: here’s where you began. We spent half the trip all hectified and strung out and the other half playing in the sunshine of late summer in Western PA with friends and family. It was so comfortably right and familiar, more so with the Snapper woven in.

Then when the mountains below started stretching out to hills and then into taut, flat fields, and the trees gave way to corn, and the plane seemed to float rather than zoom, we were back in Iowa and then, too, I felt as if I’d never left. The quality of light and of life is different here. The sky will swallow you whole if you don’t stand up straight and walk tall. And that’s what we’re doing here, finally, after all that struggling.

You’re an Iowan, little man.

About these ads