expected inquisitions

I.

“No one expects the Spanish Inquisition” – but the truth is, I usually do.  And then, sometimes, like today, it isn’t what I get, not at all.  You mean you’re going to give me a PhD?  I keep wanting to ask.  You mean you’re actually going to do it?  It has been a goal for so long, and I have for so long defined myself as a failure for not having finished it, that it felt surreal to plunk hundreds of pages down on a desk this afternoon and think, Wow, some minor changes aside, that’s it.  That’s actually - basically - it.  I wrote that.

 

II.

Quite by chance, I afterwards found myself walking down a street where I'd not been since the late winter.  I was full of optimism and expectations in February, and all the spring bulbs were just coming up - just for me, I thought, happily.  I looked at the green shoots and could imagine the drifts of color.  “Botanical optimism,” I wrote then; “A reminder that good things are on their way.”  Well, they were on their way, I suppose, if not quite in the way or the season I’d predicted.  This afternoon, I considered the stretch of garden behind Silver Towers while hacking and ill, neither feeling my best nor, likely, looking it.  My body is rebelling against me.  I crouched down to search for the toad-lily flowers, delicate as origami and hidden amongst the foliage.  Someone had planted pink turtlehead (Chelone lyonii 'Hot Lips,' probably), euphorbia, mallow and bee balm.  Blush-pink anemone, its buds pursed, sought admiration from the sidewalk.  Most plants were a little bit past their peak, probably confused by the cool nights which have skipped ahead of Ferragosto to late September.  But even now, I noticed, the garden's job is not done: bees flew so frantically from one flower to the next that I could hardly focus my camera to capture them. 

III.

People keep saying, You're going to feel so good when this is done.  You will feel different.  It will be a weight off.  Or: you're almost there, you must feel great.  I don't know how I'll feel when I'm done, but right now it feels surreal: everyone has been acting as though this will happen, but today was the first day that I let myself believe it, like a gift you don't unwrap, or a complement you don't let yourself accept.  What I feel right now is mostly surprise - not gratitude for impersonal luck, not the shock of trauma and loss, not the sur-PRISE! surprise of birthday parties and lotteries.  It's a strange and quiet surprise – a surprise to find that there’s something left in me, something still producing, so late in this season.