I feel as if this blog has turned into a rather haphazard space over the past few months and for that I apologize. If you want to know what I’ve been busy doing, particularly for the past couple weeks, my main occupation has been going around and telling people how tired I am. I have quite a nice little speech about it now: I begin by talking about emotional exhaustion and end with a few glistening little tears. Very affecting, I’m sure. And it is true. I do always strive to mean what I say. If I tell someone that I am tired, or I say that I am alright in that staunch, plaintive way, I will feel tired and alright for the rest of that day and possibly most of the next, because I have said that it is so.

But I am other things besides tired. Tired is not the only thing. So I will tell you the rest of those things now. I will say them, and help myself along the road to meaning them.

I am amused. I am amused by this semester’s eclectic “Things Done” list. I am amused by Dr. Brown’s excitement that she knows someone who has seen T.S. Eliot. I am amused by the inexplicable ways some people indent their emails. I am amused that last night at two o’clock I found myself sitting on our table complacently eating sweet potato and rutabaga because I could not sleep.

I am hopeful. I am hopeful for my little novel. I am hopeful for the midterm essays I have due tomorrow and that perhaps I will do laundry soon. I am hopeful for my friends, for their courage and their patience. I am hopeful for coming spring.

I am awed. I am awed to write and to breathe and to sometimes sing. I am awed not only to have found a friend in Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O’Conner, but in Ralph Ellison and even occasionally William Faulkner. I am awed that sometime recently I seem to have stumbled into a venerability which allows me to call myself a woman, and not merely a girl.

And I am certain. I am certain that my God is good. I am certain that I am His. I am certain that He means all this: the long cold spells, the singing birds in the still-bare trees, the rising sun in the clouded sky. I am certain that my God always and eternally means what He says.