Here’s hoping Aron and Ellen don’t wander over to my site and discover this blog. The two have them have been charged with a special task (Ellen filling in for when Aron is out of reach) and have been doing it well: every time I say to one of them, “I think I should take on this new thing” or “I should pause and write a short essay about that,” they say, “Or, you should not, and just finish the book.”
They’ve been doing their jobs so well, various people have been writing to ask if I’m dead. No, I’m not dead yet. I’m putting up lots of new pictures here to prove it.
The book is just very much alive. Pixie has been working her tail off, which she’s good at when I unplug the internet, and it’s going really well. But doing Nothing But the Book means I’ve been pretty invisible, even to our local friends who probably think I’m mad at them for some mysterious reason, it’s been so long since I’ve invited them over to dinner. I have still be managing an occasional coffee with my friend Danny, shown at right. (Danny was taking my picture in this picture, because he’d just figured out that the sweatshirt I was wearing—given to me recently by my mom—had the exact purple-blue color and gold stitching of a Crown Royal bag, something that led to us both laughing much more loudly than the coffee shop setting called for.)
Writing as intensely as I did at the end of my dissertation is even more exhausting than it was way back then, no doubt because I’m older and busier. I feel sorry for my mate, who has a spouse who currently sleeps upwards of eleven hours a day. (Pixie needs a lot of time with me asleep, so she can work out snags without me talking back at her.) Aron’s also taken on a lot more cooking, and it’s not like he isn’t busy himself! But we can’t eat out easily—now that I’m milk AND gluten intolerant, it’s nearly impossible.
I’m just so tired by the end of the writing day, cooking feels physically challenging. I was inspired, nonetheless, by a recent sudden one-time reappearance of our local farmers’ market at our town’s one-day winter festival. I grabbed acorn squash, broccoli, kale, and Brussels sprouts, plus more grass-fed, humanely-raised, family-farmed beef. Tackling the cleaning of the Brussels sprouts required my reading glasses—a side effect, I think, of the intensity with which I’ve been working. The crone look made Aron laugh, and he took that picture to the right. (If you’re wondering why I look so much neater in the top picture, that’s because I cleaned myself up one day for a new professional set of portraits, before the snows came.)
I’m not as chubby as that apron makes me look. In fact, working on the book does make me eat more, but it also seems to require a lot more exercise. Every now and then, usually around the middle of the day, Pixie stops me and yells: GO TO THE POOL. She does this when she has too many ideas all at once and doesn’t know how they fit. I throw on my bathing suit, run 2 blocks over to the community center (a great pool with low southern sun streaming in during winter months), and swim a half mile. At that point, she has typically figured out what it is she wants to do next. (Yesterday I snapped that picture of myself after my half-mile, mostly to document for my friends just how tired my eyes look, even without the goggle marks.)
The good thing—besides the book coming together in a way that really excites me—is that I’ve been reminded how much I really enjoy taking on a major work of writing. Since I started the book, I’ve written two related major historical articles, each the result of over a year of research. One was the “Darkness” paper, published in Human Nature, and the other is on prenatal dexamethasone for CAH. (That one will come out next year.) And both of those were so, so satisfying to produce. When I do papers like that—meticulous compilations of a thousand interesting data points—I imagine Pixie wearing a snazzy suit, with her blond hair in an up-do. She likes that kind of work. There’s something delicious in managing to make a major work of scholarship really readable.
But what Pixie does best is the book we’re writing now. We hang out in the cottage together, talking, making tea, brainstorming, looking things up. it’s the kind of work she was born to write, and I was born to edit for her. When we get in the groove, every neuron in my body feels like it just woke up.
Last week, the sky dropped 10 inches of snow, on top of a layer of ice, and then the sun came out. And it was hard not to feel that feeling again, of being in exactly the right place, perfectly suited for survival and generation.