Emily Brisse

Little child, this morning you woke me when the sky was still black, milky with low clouds and fog, and in the darkness I laid my hands over the places where you like to move.  I thought: soon, the sun. I thought: a new day. I thought: you are already so alive that it frightens and thrills me, you who I know but do not know, you who I feel but cannot see.  I have watched the seasons change all my life. I have anticipated the tightening, the clean coat of snow, the turning over. I have waited for signs, and they have come, every time, in the form of something I have words for.  But you, child, are hidden: I close my eyes and sense you behind a tree trunk, between a row of pumpkins, below the surface of a summer lake.  Your face is the peaks and valleys and plains of the earth, given new sounds, new names, that I've not yet learned how to say.

Listen: after a long day's work the land is stretching its body exhaling toward sleep and white dreams  

I said I'd fill you in on how my presentation at The Loft's Nature and Environmental Writing Conference went. What I meant was: I'll tell you everything! I'll make you feel as if you we're there! Because it was wonderful and inspiring and refreshing, and who doesn't need a little bit of all that? What I can offer, though, is a much more truncated version of the story I intended to share. It is mid-October, people. Is any one else amazed by that? And October means midterm grading and stacks of student essays and the arrival of the German exchange students (and Carolin and Annette ) and a trip west to Washington to visit the first child who has made me an aunt. There have also been road trips and late afternoon walks and squash soup. But those details will come later. Maybe. Let it be enough, friends, to say that these two years of blogging have led to opportunities and people that I never would have had and never would have met had it not been for this space