Dowsing: out of the cocoon

Been a while since I've blogged here, for various reasons. I've been teaching, grading, working on Bronx Voices, mentoring a student in poetry, reading fiction for other writers, doing some editing, baking, cooking, wasting time on Facebook, hanging out with friends who've missed me and basically having a very busy social life. I'm catching up on "Babylon 5" with Eva and Vinnie, and took myself off to see the new X-Men movie on Thursday, and have a date for the new Star Trek movie with Gretl some time this week too. I finally saw Emilie for the first time in three years (since I left AKRF, and I can hardly believe it's been that long). And I have still more catching up with friends new and old to do.

But I feel like I'm missing something essential, however much I love my friends (and I do!). I'm missing time to write, time to make things, time to post here. I haven't written anything for this blog, or Blogorrhea, or Cocktail Party Physics in far too long. I haven't written any fiction, fan- or otherwise in what feels like ages. I have, however, written a pile of poetry, i.e., one a day for the month of April, which I'm now going back and editing and parceling out to various collections. I'm itchy and anxious and wanting to get back to my own work this summer. My grades are due on the 18th, and between then and now, I have a mountain of grading to do.

But today, I took a me day and went off to the greenmarket at Union Square for the first time in ages, at least when the whole complement of booths is there. It was jam packed, full of flowers, people, early greens, bread, cheese, new potatoes, rhubarb, and winter apples. I bought ramps, and asparagus, and pomegranate ginger lamb sausage, and eggs and fresh pasta and spinach, and at the Garden of Eden up the street, Asiago cheese, morels, and grape tomatoes. Oh, and these:

The market was full of lilacs today, and I've been drunk on their scent since I got there at noon. I bought a big bunch of dark purple ones and carried them around with me as I walked up Broadway through the first street fair I've been to in ages (which was crammed with all kinds of food too: burritos, crepes, Italian sausage, smoothies, corn fritters, funnel cakes, gyros), through Madison Square Park, where the line for the Shake Shack was absurdly long, like a movie premiere, and over to Third Avenue to Oren's to buy another pound of Celebes Kalossi beans for my coffee-drinking friends. I got an iced cappuccino because I was flagging a bit by then and staggered into the subway at 33rd St, all the while smelling the lilacs. Now they're sitting on my work table beside me, filling the room with heavenly scent. The only thing comparable is lavender. The odd thing about them is that you can't really smell them if you bury your face in them, but the smell diffuses throughout the room. It smells like spring, like hope, like renewal.

Like vacation.

I came home and cooked scrambled eggs with ramps, asparagus, and morels. Tomorrow I'm going to make risotto with ramps, sausage and asparagus. And the morels I'm going to eat all by themselves. It's been years since I had them, and though it galls me to pay $45/lb. for them when I used to get them for free, I bought an ounce of them (which is quite a lot, since they're hollow) because I've been craving them. I'm over my rhubarb craving, and the asparagus craving is running out. Now I want peas.

And time. But in the meanwhile, back to grading, editing, etc. until the 18th.