Old Nonsense

I’ve paywalled my entire archive, and every new post after this one will have a paywall for the next few months, until I’m back in Maine. I really appreciate the support that comes through paid subscriptions, but I understand that not everyone can acknowledge writers in this way, so if you’d like a paid sub, just subscribe for free, let me know, and I’ll comp you. Reads, likes, shares – these all mean a lot to me, too; thank you for all the different kinds of support.

I’m shifting the focus of No Half-Measures a bit to teaching and writing and academia, ahead of returning to Colby this fall to resume my position there. As I won’t have a fixed abode for some time yet, though, No Half-Measures will still be a travelogue of sorts, as well. I’ll continue to share what I see and experience and what moving about the world makes me think about.

As I wrote last weekend, the most significant thing about these last couple of years has been a growing understanding of who I am outside of teaching, which is to say that I finally began to understand how much a part of me teaching had become. I was deep into it for so long, and I was doing it while raising children and publishing in traditional outlets, growing a lot of food and volunteering extensively (when I really didn’t have the time), and truly, I think I was doing that very clichéd thing of just staying in constant motion so I didn’t have to slow down and consider some hard truths about my life, that there were some things that were fundamentally not okay.

I’ve been able to be still for a long while for the first time ever. When I go back, it will be without children or animals to look after; there will be a small garden to tend where I’ll be living; I can’t wait to get my hands in the dirt. I’ll have my classes to teach, friends to spend time with, hours to write in, and…that’s it. Then I’ll go find Nate wherever he is, come back, and do it all over again.

It took leaving for me to understand that there is good there, in Maine, for me, good to both have and do, because the bad had threatened to overwhelm it. I’m grateful I got the chance to know.

If you’ve followed along, though, these past couple of years, you’ll know that they haven’t exactly been without bumps, e.g. my many bouts of food poisoning, what I’m now pretty sure was heat stroke, the elephant charge that triggered a PTSD collapse, and all my usual blunders, those absurdities that invariably creep in. But I wouldn’t change any of the choices that led me here.

The only thing I think I have missed other than my children is apples. There are apples here, but they are expensive and come from far away. I brought one back from an airport lounge once but watched it slowly wrinkle in the fridge, more captivated by its promise than its reality.

Nate has taken to calling this time my “gap year” and apparently this is a thing now for middle-aged people, privileged ones, I mean, who can take some time, take stock, recalibrate, be intentional about how you’d like to live the rest of your life. And so I have, and so I will be.

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