I am an editing queen. I happily spent yesterday afternoon and most of the morning sitting at this computer despite my cold. Here I made editing recommendations to Nick’s best friend about his English paper as I watched the early fall movements of a spider that was productively trapped between my window and its screen. Bug carcasses and gray webs have accumulated between the window and its screen. I should be horrified, but she fascinates me and since there’s a pane of glass between us, I feel fine. She never once moved while I was looking directly at her when I paused before typing my next note to Nick’s friend.
I imagined him hearing my voice as I inserted comments into his paper. By the way, I always made suggestions instead of doing the work for him. If I said the same thing over and over and over again, I knew he would eventually hear my voice in his head to check his verb tense, be specific, and make sure he could copy and paste web addresses into Google and actually arrive at the articles he cited. When he is fifty years old, he might still hear my voice reminding him to stay in past tense though I’ll be long dead by then.
It’s a great thing to know that someone will hear your voice in the future whenever they conjugate their verbs.
“Use the words today, tomorrow, and yesterday at the beginning of every sentence to make sure your verb is in the right time.” I have said this over and over to my students.
“Be specific,” I repeat. I tell students that I want to know if her nail polish was a jasmine yellow or mustard because a character who wears jasmine is quite different than one who wears mustard, right? It is so much more telling than just yellow. Life flourishes in the details.
In my eulogy, I want someone to say that I reminded him to be specific.
No, I’m not dying just yet, but this stupid cold made me feel like going in that direction. I’m glad Nick’s friend’s English paper got me off the couch for a while. It was boring on the couch.
It was so boring on the couch that I was replaying games of Solitaire to get a better score. Solitaire is aptly named, but I am more lonely when I play Solitaire than when I’m experiencing solitude. I was grateful for the excuse to get up and edit.
A hummingbird just flew up over my roof and into my back yard. She examined leaves from the azalea, the geranium though I know they aren’t as sweet, the pot that reverted to moss, and the primrose. She’s so hungry and nothing, not even the buttercup and the stinky Bob, weeds I should have pulled a long time ago, are blooming.
She looked like a female Rufous. Was she lost? Did she miss the migration?
The Internet told me she could have been an Anna’s hummingbird, one of the ones that don’t migrate. I need to put fresh sugar water in my feeder. I need to buy blooming flowers! . I’ll buy flower the color of jasmine.
Yeah, jasmine yellow.
Thank you for listening, jules
Nothing to see here.