Darwiniana

 Sometimes I wonder, "Why don't I write, when I have so many ideas I want to chew on and hash through and meditate on? Why is it so difficult to dedicate the time to distill some of these musings into coherent lines so that you, my friends, can also think about these things with me?" -- which is, for me, the purpose of writing.

And then I consider my afternoon yesterday, in which, confidently prepped for my evening blocking rehearsal of A Midsummer Night's Dream at 7:00, I went to church at 4:00 to drop off my boys at Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, then dropped my 12yo daughter off at Confirmation class and started teaching the 7th grade Bible Study, at 4:30, and how five minutes into class I received a call from my 5yo's teacher, saying he'd thrown up, and how I had to call Darwin with all my students agog, and how, in a first in my experience, when I stabbed at his number from my contacts, Siri (which I never use) had slipped in a suggested number from some message that was one digit off from his phone number, and so I had an awkward conversation with a wrong number -- that I dialed from contacts! With my students agog! And then I had a full hour and a half between the end of classes (because the boys got out of their class half an hour early, although it was just the one boy now), so I made dinner while Darwin ran to the store (after bathing the cheerful, vomit-crusted boy), and we arranged which older child would babysit the boy because everyone else was called in some capacity to rehearsal, or had to be at the theater for production meetings. And how, when I got home from rehearsal at 9:15 (because I ended rehearsal right on time at 9:00! but had to talk to various people and then shut up the theater), the boys were up late on the computer because everyone was too dragged out to put them right to bed, and there was a bit of fuss, and then I came into the kitchen to talk to Darwin and was followed by three older children, who all spoke to me at the same time, each chattering cheerfully about whatever was on his or her mind (and wholly unconnected to anything their siblings were saying), to which I needed to attend and make individual reply. And how, at 11:00, I sat in bed with my laptop, thinking about writing, and determined not to scroll down social media or pick up Gaudy Night which I suddenly had the strong urge to re-read, so instead I fell asleep reading a scholarly article I dearly wanted to finish and talk about. 

So the main reason I have time to write at this moment is because I called a sick day, ignoring the constant murmur of episode after episode of Lost Cities of the Andes or Mysteries of the Dead Sea or whatever documentary series my 9yo is binging.

And these are all good things, important things because they are so small and so make up the very foundation that everything else is built upon. We are in no crisis right now (except for the slight underlying dread that the other shoe is going to drop with the one child out of the three younger ones who hasn't thrown up this week), and all the many projects that we have in hand are moving forward, if glacially at times. 

The most immediate of these projects is A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I'm directing and Darwin is tech directing. We are in blocking rehearsals (which I love), which require me to do a lot of time-consuming preparation (which I love). We perform March 30-April 2. That's eight weeks away -- not so far away.

Darwin and I spent a weekend away from the family at the preserved Victorian house of a 19th century industrialist that he found listed on Vrbo. It was a revelatory, refreshing weekend of delight, which functioned as a writers' retreat once we decompressed enough to get used to people not talking to us all the time. And on the second day, I started revising Stillwater. I wrote and wrote, surrounded by beautiful woodwork, with no one but Darwin in my immediate vicinity. And now I've sent the first half of the manuscript to a copy editor, and am plugging away resolutely at my own edits for second half, and have spoken to my cover designer, with an eye to having the thing published in time for Christmas this year.

I do want to tell you all about this marvelous house, and show you the pictures I took so that everyone can understand how the rooms flowed together and where the back corridors were, because I know that your eyes will not glaze over like my children's did as I explained each of the 60 photos. But here, a photo of tilework to whet your appetite. Ignore the wallpaper and that one modern patch, and contemplate the original toilet that flushes when you pull up on that that lever under the tank. 

Friends, I could have looked at the vintage towel bar and toilet paper holder all day long. Bliss.

(But MrsDarwin, you say, you have umpteen boxes of subway tile stacked in your daughters' bedroom, waiting to for the gutted upstairs bathroom to be put into a state to receive them. Hush, I say. Hush.)

I shall go, and contemplate what I will feed a houseful of delicate appetites on a Friday in Ordinary Time when we've only done the Aldi's run and not the Kroger shopping, and find my cleaning cloth so that I can degrease my kitchen, and vacuum the dining room table (best cleaning hack ever -- try it yourself), and then I might sit down with a cup of tea and sigh over the last chapter of Gaudy Night. And then I'll start in on next's week blocking. Those young lovers in the forest aren't going to choreograph their own thematic slapstick.