subside

I was sitting in the public library struggling with the intricacies of the Central Limit Theorem, when there was a slight shudder of shelves and then a rolling buck underneath my desk. No books fell, but the movement was followed by a moment of eerie silence as the patrons around me registered the earthquake and waited to see if it would continue or subside. No aftershocks forthcoming, the entire event passed on into the day without comment. I went back to my statistics work, and Fairbanks went back to what was left of her Monday afternoon.

I have been here for nearly three weeks, and my routines are as established as they are probably going to get. I wake and bundle up to go outside to pee, accompanied by the dog who must do her perimeter check before we can go back inside, then listen to NPR as the coffee brews. I drive into town, Ersta asleep in the passenger seat, already so bored with the commute that she is sacked out before we reach the highway. Some days, I hit the gym before parking at the university, other days we go straight there so I can check e-mail and take care of my own tasks before I’m needed in class. Then I run wet-behind-the-ears EMT students through their paces, checking the accuracy of the blood pressures and pulse readings they take, walking them carefully through a scene size up and initial assessment over and over again until it begins to coalesce in their minds, a solid, logical progression replacing pages of disparate steps to be memorized. In the afternoon, there is fetch with the now ten-month-old puppy, and then obedience exercises that go better some days than others. In the afternoon, I park myself at the public library, where there is my own online and largely unguided statistics class to struggle through. I find myself attempting to supplement the esoteric textbook with youtube videos and google searches. Again, some days more successfully than others. Some evenings, there is another class, airway mannequins to be ventilated and AEDs to be applied and oxygen bottles to be safely assembled and disassembled and assembled again. Other nights, we are back at the cabin before dark, chopping wood, building a fire, reading or writing as the cabin warms too slowly, then heats nearly to discomfort, then cools again as I fall asleep.

I am content. I miss Peter, and with his relentless schedule and the time difference we do not talk nearly enough, but I do not want to be anywhere else but here. I have seen and connected with friends, visited old haunts, taken a long walk in the woods with my old sled dogs running free and blissful, sniffing out moose tracks in the early season snow. I’ve spent a day at Jodi’s kennel with many more of those long, exhausting and blissful interludes to look forward to each week. There is still drama around work, though not as much. There is still a restlessness at night in the cabin, alone with the silence, sometimes without the energy or drive to do anything much once NPR retires to musical programming for the evening and I am left with myself. But somehow what I’ve said remains true. It is better here, somehow. I am better here. The discontent and restlessness has a different edge to it, it is not as desperate, not as sharp. I am more capable of sitting with it, with a woodstove to stoke, water to be hauled, woods and trails outside. I still don’t understand how this is so true, but I know now that it is. It was not my imagination, during all this time away. In Iowa, there was the same ennui, the same evenings sitting pointlessly on the couch, staring at the ceiling, waiting for enough time to pass to justify bed time. Yet somehow here it is different. Somehow here, I am OK to sit with myself and ride out the moments of panic or discontent. They hit just as hard, but the landing is softer. They can pass without comment, fade into the background, an aberrancy instead of the constant upheaval I’ve been riding out for a while now.