Tuesday, January 20, 2015

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I am back at Sherwood Cottage after a short trip to the Texas Hill Country where I was raised, under the kindly hot sun and in the thin and stony soil of which I grew amid oak and cedar and the occasional brilliant bloom. My wife and Ms. 8 remain there, visiting other family as I do what I need to do to be ready to face the week ahead of me and the weeks that will come. For there is much I would have done over the past days, had I remained where I now am, and which I could not get done because I did not have with me what I would need to do them. But I do now, or I am close to it, and so I can do such things as set up a quiz against my students having not heeded my warnings and prepare some kind of lecture for them whether or not they did. And I can write again, which I have (obviously) been neglecting over the last few days.

There are rewards to visiting family. Environments conducive to writing--at least not for my writing--are not among them. And in some sense, they ought not to be. The point of the trip is to visit, to see people and talk with them, to do things with them such as take trips to nearby cities and visit craft shows. When I write, whether in the early morning when I really should or at such times as this, I tend to do so in solitude and, if not silence, quiet. I need a place to do it, too, and a van traveling the Texan highways is not a good one for the work. Nor yet is the shuttlepod as it flies from Sherwood Cottage to where the river makes a smile--particularly when, as yesterday, I pilot it (and am amazed, as ever, at how gas-stingy the thing is, with one tank taking me from the Hill Country into Oklahoma and perhaps half of another getting me the rest of the way home).

But that visit is done, now, and it will be some time before I have another--my schedule and that of the Mrs. will not permit it for some months. Now, it is for me to return to the daily life to which my choices have led me, the work of teaching and preparing for it, the work of The Work in which I try to tease out of the current corpus of human knowledge something new and capture some part of it in such a way that others can use it to tease out just a little more of their own in what one hopes is an unending cycle that leads ineluctably towards The Truth. Now, it is time for me to make Sherwood Cottage ready once again for those who live in it and who will return tomorrow--and now is the time to take advantage of their not being here yet to do so.

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