restless

i'm feeling restless today, a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none dancing the fine line between discontent and dreaming forward. it's a friday night; by this point in the week teachers are usually too tired to do anything really interesting but alive enough not to want to do nothing at all. and the options! it's a toss-up between grading literature papers or fixing the toilet.

while playing rock, paper, scissors with myself over this wondrous choice, i decide instead to read the letter from my mother. i fix dinner (popcorn and milk, bachelorette style) and roll the leftover kernels around my teeth like i do when i'm really thinking.

so many interests make for an interesting life, to be sure. and, at 36, do i really have to pick just one thing to be when i grow up?

a photo falls from between the papers to the floor. it is of my mother, grandmother and great grandmother. i stare at them as if the answer might be found in their faces, photographed as noted on the back, "sometime in the 1950's". it helps to look there and see my mother as just a young girl with dreams of her own bobbing with her auburn curls. did they have options?

two things come to mind. we are all creative and we all liked to write. these four generations alone brought changes from pencil to manual typewriter; word processor to laptop. nettie's days would have been filled with family chores for survival. ruth's much the same and raising children. my mother was the first to work outside the home at all and i am the first to work full-time, with no children of my own. all of us, however, infinitely more than the sum of our roles.

i look around my small, tidy loft. a guitar leans against the piano. in the art corner is a catalog for the encaustics class i will take in the spring. grading waits in my teacher's bag (even there i teach more than one subject). and a stack of books and journals take up the space between my night stand and reading lamp. neither fully musician, nor artist nor writer but some blend of all three like one coffee comprised of beans from different countries.

i feel a product of these women, like they are looking forward into the shutter at the speed of expectation. what will i do with these hands, so much like theirs?