Oh, Robert Bly, thank you for the words I will live by this year.

Each of us deserves to be forgiven, if only for
Our persistance in keeping our small boat afloat
When so many have gone down in the storm.

*

I had a fantastic weekend in Albertville, and it was good to leave Hutchinson, and it was heartbreaking and sickening to come back to this place full of boxes.

I was getting used to Hutchinson last week, but then the week got so long I felt lost at sea, kicking my legs to stay up, clutching onto driftwood and crying so hard I forgot what hungry was.

I cried at school, not in front of the students, but at school, in the hallway, in front of another teacher who I ran up to and commanded you have to tell me something positive, or I am going to absolutely lose it. A disaster on Wednesday, a kid who threw his arms up in protest and decided he couldn't learn about the Puritans because they were against everything he believed in, even though we of course are just studying Puritanism and I am not instigating a new Puritan movement in West Central Minnesota.

And I went back to class with puffy eyes, leaving only suspicion to the students, and I sniffled a couple of extra times and fake-coughed so we all could pretend it was illness.

That student is no longer in my class. He has been kicked out three times, and he has failed. I have already failed a student.

*

The school week exhausts me to the point that I feel made of rubber, that I feel like I even have the stink of hard rubber on my skin. There were days I stayed at school until 6:00 this week (school is over at 2:15) and instead of coming home to relax, I come home to not unpack but instead grade papers for three hours. Until 9:00. I work for the weekend like a song should be written about it. And when the weekend comes, I just need a solid two days to plug myself in, to re-energize--but instead I have to work for the entire weekend. On school. On calendars and lessons. And so I have to start the weekend with only a half-charged battery and just pray it doesn't run out on me. It's like being the last roommate to take a shower in the morning and praying that the water doesn't turn cold. I just need the warm water to last until Friday.

I went running one day last week.

I went home this weekend and I ran on Saturday and Sunday, in 45 degrees and tall socks and calf-length sweatpants and it was magnificent.

Oh, the weekend was so glorious. Oh, the weekend.

I hinted to it on my last post--but something wonderful has happened with my family, with going home, that I haven't been able to identify. But I went shopping with my mom for groceries, and it was fun, and I remembered that sometimes she and I identify, and I suggested the family go out to dinner, and we all had pizza and we played hangman at the table with crayons, and my hangman clue was: Travis eats poop and his was Jean is a bad teacher.

And today I watched the Twins and I cheered, and for a little while after I watched the tribute to the Metrodome and their last game there, and I got a little choked up all about it--because, well, the Metrodome was born the same year I was, and well, I just spent a lot of my young-Jean days connecting with Rich over baseball. He'd get tickets from work, Craig and I would take turns fighting over who got to go because he only had two tickets behind home plate. I just had some good American father-daughter baseball times in that Dome. And we can't forget the Dome dogs. Nor the malt ice cream eaten with wooden sticks.

It was just good to be home, and I can't remember the last time I said it was just good to be home, and now I have to wonder what all of this is about. The nostalgia from this weekend has made me physically sick, ill with memory. My gut feels empty, or it feels like I've lost something. Leaving home today was the same feeling as bad news.

But, as Orwell said: You have learned something. That always feels as first as though you have lost something. Maybe living at home for that month and a half finally forced me to grow up, to move on, to get over it. To get over all of it, perhaps. Maybe I needed my family--again--to get me through a shitty part of my life, and they helped in their weird family way, and my gut is telling me to be thankful for it. Or maybe I'm scared because I'm growing up, because I'm an adult now, and I see change, and I see what won't last. And I think I've figured out that the reason it was so hard to come back to Hutchinson, to this town that still needs to decide what it's going to mean to me. Because the image of the tree-lined streets I was glowing about earlier? Well, I realized all those thick branches and heavy leaves are surrounding the Oakwood Cemetery. I ran by it on a cold, gray last Tuesday. The only color that day was the circle of red from the stoplight and the white pixels from the light of the tiny man letting me, finally, walk.

*

Two favorite images from the week include:

1) The Shoe Inn. I dropped off a pair of heels to get re-capped, and I discovered that the shoe repair place in Hutchinson is run by an old man who wears his pants above his waist, thus confirming his old manness. The Shoe Inn has an old cash register from the 40s or 50s, and it is a tiny room with shoes and shoe parts everywhere in drawers and tall piles. Tools. It costs $8 to fix a $60 pair of shoes, but the most magnificent aspect of the Shoe Inn, aside from the old man who is repairing my heels, is the fact that he listens to marching band music and blares it from his radio while he does work. The trombones, the brass, the brass.

2) Let myself have an hour and a half this weekend and Saw A Serious Man. And was convinved that Darren and I were the only gentiles in the entire theater for the 2:15 show; and on the way out of Utptown, in the 50 degrees and overcast, saw the line for the next show, people in trench coats winding around the corner of the building and down the block. Sometimes a line at the movies--in the gray below the flashing bulbs and the old-fashioned marquee--is a humbling kind of image.

I don't want to go to school tomorrow. I want my mom to make me breakfast, and then I want it to rain all day while I read and read and read.