I am in Chattanooga right now, on my sister’s couch in my PJ’s, sleepily eating a buttered bagel. Hello.

Tomorrow we drive up to Nashville and on Friday we ride up to the fabled and much-loved Brookfield, MO with my aunt and uncle. I’ll spend a few weeks with my grandparents and then I’ll fly out to San Francisco because we’re having a family vacation at Lake Tahoe (and other places.) Then I come back to Cleveland for a wedding. Then to western PA to see a few friends, and, in mid-July, home at last. (It’s okay. You don’t have to remember all that.)

Aside from all those plans, I don’t have much to write about, but I very much want to write anyway. Which is, perhaps, dangerous. I keep a folder of all these entries and beneath them are notes for posts that never made it. There is one called “Courage, Compassion, and Documentary Films,” which contains only a long and odd list for documentaries I wanted to see and no courage or compassion whatsoever. There’s one called “Helvetica,” which is blank (I guess because I don’t have Helvetica?) There’s one called “Independence Day” (in which I seemed to want to write about Monica Lewinsky? No, thanks,) and one called “Thursday’s Children on Game Night.” There’s even an old one called “Unrequited Love,” which, though it has some positively heart-wrenching lines and everything, I think we can all agree is best kept off the world wide web.

I am, however, determined to for this little entry to make it. I suppose I am simply at loose ends. Because I am done with school and not yet begun teaching, there is not much for me to be doing except keeping myself clean and pleasant and helping out where I’m needed. I don’t even know enough yet about what I’ll be teaching in the fall to start reading up. I am without particular purpose. 

After a very full year of “doing the next thing” there are suddenly not many next things to do. This, I suppose, means that (once  I become a little less preoccupied with sleep,) I’ll fill my time with learning again to read, learning again to take barefoot walks by myself, learning again to write letters and long emails, to pray as I go. My heart is steadying itself to this slower pace. I’ll let you know what it finds.