Mastery Year 3: Part: 7: Samhain

Happy (belated) Samhain.

I always get a case of "the lasts" at this time of year--I get obsessed with the idea that I'm doing or experiencing things for the last time. It's seasonally appropriate, I suppose, and the feeling always eases up a bit after the holiday. I guess I get over my obsession and just get on with the year actually ending. But this year, of course, it was especially bad. If all goes well--and I expect it to--my candidacy is basically over.

I was sitting in the audience, breathing in that old, familiar scent of beeswax, wool, and autumn leaves, thinking about how I'd never be a student sitting in this audience again, because at Brigid I'll be on the stage as a newly-minted master, when I suddenly realized I didn't know the actual procedure. What has to happen between now and February to ensure I am sitting on that stage?

So after the ceremony I found Charlie.

"How does the next few months go?" I asked him. "When do I interview? How will I know? Is there something weird happening before then that I need to be on campus for? I forgot to ask!" I was hurried and breathless because I didn't know exactly when they'd ring the bell, and there's never any guarantee of being able to ask questions like that after the bell rings.

Charlie looked confused for a few seconds and then smiled at me, clearly amused.

"Nothing weird, unless you make it weird yourself. Mind-games are for novices, remember? You'll interview the last week before Brigid--they'll be a schedule, we'll reach out to one of you and let you know.  Then there's a short ceremony earlier on Brigid day. None of it's secret."

"Oh."

"No, it's good you asked. You should have."

"Thanks."

"You're welcs. But Daniel?"

"Yes?"

"You have the votes of everybody on your committee, right?"

"Charlie, I don't know who everyone on my committee is. But...yes."

That earned me a smile.

"Don't take those votes for granted. That interview is not a formality."

"Way to make me anxious, Charlie."

"Hmph. I can't make you feel anything, Daniel. I expect you'll be fine, but you know what expectations are. Complacency teaches you nothing."

Great.

Anyway, the ceremony itself went very well, and since I haven't described it in any detail in a few years, I'd better do it now--meaning this whole post is somewhat inside-out. Ah, well.

Samhain (pronounced "Sah-wen") is a Day or the Dead, related to, but distinct from, both Halloween and Dia Del Muerte. There are many people who celebrate it, and the way we celebrate it on campus is probably a little different than what most people do--though honestly, I wouldn't know. We prepare for it by decorating campus with shocks of corn stalks, bales of straw, pumpkins, squash, and gourds, and, indoors, cut vines of bittersweet and grape, candles, and baskets of apples. And, in a new twist they added last year, pots of marigolds both indoors and out. Anyone who wants to is also welcome to make a poster to memorialize a dead person. Those go up on display in the Chapel several days before the event.

Usually, the 31st, the evening of which is Samhain Eve (these things begin the sunset before, like Jewish holidays) is our last day of classes, but this year it fell on a Saturday. Most of us treated it like a regular Saturday, while the janitorial team set up for the ceremony. Instead of dinner, we all dressed in our uniforms and moseyed on over to Chapel Hall across already frosty ground lit with constellations of candles, each floating in a small bowl of water.

We all found seats in the Chapel, which was lit by dozens and dozens of beeswax candles so that the whole room was dim and honey-colored and warm from the candles and the ceiling was lost in the gloom and might have been a million miles up. My stomach started to grumble; it knows what time dinner normally is and I'd skipped it.

A small bell rang from somewhere and rang again and again and the masters processed in, each carrying a lit candle. Charlie, the current Head of the masters' group, led the procession, though with his hood up I wouldn't have recognized him if I didn't know him as well as I do--the way he walks and the breadth of his shoulders are distinctive.

They climbed onto the stage, which was empty except for the tall candle-holders, deposited their candles, and then all of them except Charlie left the stage and sat in the audience with us. As Head, Charlie was master of ceremonies. He put his hood down and made a kind of semi-formal opening speech, and then he read the names. Some years they get someone other than the Head to do it, but Charlie read them himself, a long list of people who had died and were being honored. Most of the names belonged to people I never met, and while most were community members of one kind or another, but some were simply famous people we like to honor. I noticed Steve's grandfather had joined the list.

They put the list together every year, so if nobody writes a name down it just isn't on there--that's how the list does not get impossibly long with favorite cousins of former students and that sort of thing, but some people go on the list every year, and it is gradually getting longer. This year I noticed Charlie did not read the list of exist species. It appears to have been cut for space.

Then Charlie invited anyone who wanted to to eulogize community members who had died over the past year. There was only one, a former student I never met, and two people stood up at the same time. There was a bit of awkward negotiation with gestures before one sat down and the other said a few words.

Finally, we sang "Hats Off to Dead Folks," our goofy memorial song where anyone who wants to can contribute a verse. I'd expected Kit to lead it, she usually does, but Charlie never introduced her. Instead, he started off by singing a verse about his brother, which surprised me twice--once since he'd obviously, publicly, and apparently pointlessly snubbed Kit (she routinely does so to him, but he tends to act as though he's above whatever goes on between them) and another time because Mario has been dead a couple of years, now, and Charlie has not sung for him publicly before.

The song is goofy and light-hearted, but Eddie's voice still broke when he sang a verse for his dog. I sat a few rows behind him and saw hands reach up to him, almost literally supporting him as he sang. Steve sung a verse for his grandfather--and Sarah, Steve's wife, surprised us all by singing her own different verse for the same man. I suppose that's allowed--we allowed it, anyway--but I've never seen it done before. I didn't know any of the other people who got verses and I didn't sing one myself.

Then we all milled around for a while, leaving the ritual seemingly unfinished, until the bells rung and the masters suddenly absented themselves, some of thm leaving mid-sense, as they do. There is, after all, a sharpness, a suddenness to loss, however expected, that cannot be made goofy and must be acknowledged.

We all streamed out of the Chapel and out towards the fire pit where food and drink awaited us. And we old hands dropped towards the rear of the crowd, unobtrusively forcing the yearlings to the front so they wouldn't try to stop the abduction of one community member by a pack of masked miscreants--the sprouts and their friends, of course. Yearlings never know about the tradition until they see it done.

It was Alexis, Allen's youngest, who came to demand ransom for the prisoner--Ebony, as it turned out.

Predictably, everyone made a big show of weeping and wailing and pleading for her return, but Alexis, whom we were not supposed to recognize under her costume, held firm. Finally, Kit regretfully asked what the hostage-takers wanted. Normally some haggling follows over how much candy and so forth the kids will get, but I stood up and said NO in a loud voice.

"What?" said kit, momentarily startled.

"No," I repeated. "We can't give in to terrorists! Come on, I can't believe you people are even considering it! You know how this works--if we pay one ransom, none of us will be safe!"

A short pause, then, as the others came up to speed, a vociferous argument broke out, some of us in favor of paying, others joining my side of it. Alexis stood there, obviously unsure of what to do. Gradually, more and more people came over to my side until, with a nervous glance at each other at our temerity, we made a united front ant told the bandits they could do their worst--we wouldn't pay.

"NO!" cried another voice, this time June's.

We turned to look at her and found her standing, gun-shaped stick in hand, covering us all with a kind of unhinged nervousness.

"No," she said again. "We're paying, I don't care.I'll pay myself, if I have to. I'll, I'll, I'll shoot anyone who gets in my way."

"June," I cried, aghast, staring down the barrel of my wife's imaginary gun, "why?"

"Because, because--I'm in love with her!" She said this with enough melodrama for three day-time-TV stars, and someone sang "dun-dun-dun!" in approximation of suitable music.

Of course, June's elaboration blew our negotiating power to hell, and the sprouts ended up with more candy and other goodies than I think they've ever gotten before. Ebony was returned unharmed, and I was pleased to see they'd blindfolded her just like they would have any other abductee.  She doesn't like special treatment.

"I'd always wondered what being abducted felt like," she said, quite merrily, once we'd gotten her freed from her restraints. She disappeared into a knot of well-wishers bearing warm drinks.

"Well," said Kit to me in mock anger, once the others were too far away, up near the fire, to pay attention. "I hope you're satisfied. Next year they'll expect twice as much."

"What?" I replied, all innocence. "If I'm going to be a master soon, I figured I'd better start acting it and try changing something.

Mastery Year 3: Part 3: Post 3: Baseline

I’ve been on the island with Steve Bees for over a week, now. We’ll head home, soon. I do so like it here.

I served again as Charlie’s assistant, though not alone, and not quite as before. Traditionally, Charlie divides the yearlings into two groups because the workshop he leads involves a lot of hiking over mountains, including over some sensitive terrain, and larger groups are much harder to corral into Leave No Trace habits if those habits aren’t ingrained yet. He takes one group and his assistant takes the other, but for the intertidal portion of the program, the groups combine and he leads the whole thing himself. The group is so big this year, though, that he actually divided it into thirds for the mountain hike—the man he uses when I’m not available took the third group—and in half for the intertidal exploration. I led the other half for intertidal, so my role was much greater than it has been in the past.

In fact, we left it up to the students to decide which group they would join, and to my astonishment some chose me for both the hike and intertidal, so they never had Charlie at all. It’s not that they made a mistake, either, because some of my loyalists had attended workshops I led on campus. They knew me. And liked me, I guess.

And I can actually sort of see why. I hadn’t assisted Charlie on the Island since I was a novice, and I’ve been to grad school since. I’ve also done a lot of reading on natural history, including that of this island (I do like this place), and I have a lot more experience teaching. I feel less like a fraud reciting somebody else’s lecture, and more like an actual adjunct college professor with something to offer. It was nice.

Steve, meanwhile, was doing nothing at all. I mean, he did a lot of hiking, I made sure of that, and while I was busy leading the workshops (that took two days), David, Allen’s son, took him adventuring. But he wasn’t responsible for learning anything or doing anything in particular, and when it rained for three days and Steve got too cold to enjoy much, I let him spend that third day in a coffee shop in town reading and drinking coffee.

There was method to my madness. I’ve only recently really articulated to myself what I’m doing with him, and what it is is that I’m teaching Steve to leave his work behind when he’s not working by taking refuge in field and forest—eventually, I hope he’ll learn to bring field and forest with him to work. So my plan was to give him a week and a half, mostly outdoors, with no responsibility at all—no clients, no causes, no baby, no sick wife—so he could wholly decompress and use the way he feels at the end of it as a kind of internal baseline, so he knows what being relaxed actually feels like.

The only assignment I gave him was the same one Charlie gave me some years ago—to identify a favorite place on the Island. Once he’s discovered it, we’ll spend our final full day on the Island there.

I don’t know why Charlie gave me that assignment, but I gave it to Steve because I want him self-aware, paying attention to how he feels in each place we go.

It’s no good establishing a baseline if he doesn’t remember it.

Mastery Year 3: Part 3: Post 2: Needs

So, last week I walked up to Steve Bees and told him to pack his bags because we were going to the Island. I figure if I am acting in some sense as his master—under the supervision of Charlie, his actual master—I’m entitled to make abrupt, inscrutable demands. You know, do the whole Yoda thing.

My resolve lasted only as long as it took Steve to ask “what the hell?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I made arrangements for us to join the Island trip. Because you need a vacation in the woods. Charlie agrees. It’s really last-minute for me, too.”

“Was this you’re idea or his?”

“Both. I had the idea, ran it by Charlie, and he said he’d already thought about it.”

“Huh,” said Steve.

“Is it OK? I know you work, and there’s your baby, and everything….”

“Oh, yeah, it’s fine,” he assured me. “I cleared my schedule, I talked to Sarah, she says the Joes can help her with Sean for the week, and I’m already packed.”

“Charlie told you?”

“No, I knew you were going to ask me. You’re getting so much like the masters, you’re predictable in the same way.”

Well, then.

When I was a yearling, we traveled to the Island in two veggie-diesel-adapted vans. But the yearling group was 29 people, then. Now, it’s 41. It’s not that the school is trending larger—its size fluctuates, and this is simply a big year—but it does make travel difficult. Perhaps fortuitously, though, one of the other vans is starting to show signs of needing replacement soon, so the masters decided to go ahead and buy the replacement preemptively. We might get another year or two out of the old one, but we’ll be ready when it goes, and in the meantime we’ve got three vans, enough to getting everybody to the Island.

Which is all a long-winded way of explaining why Steve and I found ourselves riding in a 17-passenger van with Allen’s family (they join him for the trip), Allen himself, Charlie, Karen, and seven yearlings, instead of catching a ride in the Chapman’s minivan like I did in the past. Allen and Karen took turns driving. Charlie is a terrible driver. When it was Karen’s turn to drive, Charlie and Allen sat next to each other and chatted and joked or pointed at things out the window and laughed like boys.

The thing to remember is that this Island trip isn’t just a retreat for the students—an organized group bonding experience for the yearlings—it’s also a retreat for the faculty. All of them but Greg go, and except for the day or two each of them spends with the yearlings, they pretty much ignore and avoid the students the whole time. Charlie and Allen were on vacation.

Steve and I couldn’t stay with the yearlings (they’re on a private retreat), and I had anticipated that. We couldn’t stay with the masters (they’re on a private retreat, too), and I had anticipated that, also. What I hadn’t anticipated was that Steve would be invited to camp illegally with Charlie, while I stay with Lo and the kids again. During the day, I show Steve the Island, and at night he receives wisdom by osmosis from Charlie, or something. I camped with Charlie once, years ago, and it’s an education, though it’s hard to say what it’s an education in, exactly. I’ve never known anyone else o be invited to camp with him, but this year Steve was and I wasn’t. I am insanely jealous. I am trying not to let Charlie or Steve know.

Not that I’m unhappy to stay with the Chapmans. I feel as welcomed by them as ever, and I love it. I’ve missed them.

Allen camps with the other masters, not with us, but spends quite a bit of time with his family—more than the last time I camped with them, actually. Usually they all stay on together and have a family vacation afterwards, but I guess this year they’re not doing that, because of the van thing. It’s funny seeing him, then, because he’s totally out of teacher-mode, and he’s still friendly with me, but he’s friendly in a different way.

The other night he came up to me as I lay in my hammock, reading. Steve had gone off to join Charlie at their illegal camp, and I was huddled in my sleeping bag (May can be quite cold, here) with my book, trying to decide whether to get my flashlight out or just go sleep. I was feeling kind of morose and...stretched, somehow. I can’t explain it. Maybe the feeling is a kind of loneliness. Anyway, Allen came to stand beside me. I looked up at him to see what he would say.

“You miss him, don’t you?”

“Am I that obvious?” I asked. There was no need to ask who he was talking about.

“I have no idea, I’m a psychologist, not a mind reader. Why are you trying to hide it?”

“I don’t know. I feel stupid, I guess. I know I’m not being slighted. I know Charlie can’t pay attention to me all the time, he has other students. But I’m like a needy little kid anyway.”

“Needy is a funny word,” Allen asserted. “Almost a pejorative. If Charlie has noticed, I don’t imagine he thinks less of you for it.”

“I guess not.”

“The impracticality of getting a thing does not invalidate the need. You can need without pursuit. There can just be need. It’s OK.” And then he was gone, off to join the other masters, off to join his wife in her tent, off somewhere, but gone as though he had evaporated into the air.

Of course, Allen is the magician.

Mastery Year 1: Samhain

Happy Samhain!

These last few months, I've basically gotten used to being back. There have been times--beginning very soon after June and I arrived--when it seemed as though I'd never been away and the world outside was not, and had never been, real. But now, at Samhain*, I'm once again struck by how long I was away and how good it is to be back.

I did not celebrate Samhain the whole time I was away. I could have, but I didn't know how to celebrate it alone, and most of the time I was gone my attention was wrapped up in grad school, and I really wasn't thinking about anything else. But there is something important, something vital, about celebrating the dead, and I have missed it. I did not realize how much I had missed it until just now.

I had a hard time explaining it to June. She's heard of Samhain, of course, but she hadn't celebrated it before, and had trouble understanding how it relates to Hallowe'en on the one hand and Dia del Muertes on the other. And she thought it rather morbid to end the school year on the same day, and had trouble understanding why we take the winter off to begin with--I think she's sad that her classes are over, since she only gets the one year as a novice--until I reminded her how cold the Chapel was back at Brigid and asked if she really wanted to take classes in those temperatures all winter. That building leaks heat like the proverbial sieve.

In any case, once again I sat and hung out with some of my dorm-mates as late afternoon turned into evening, and once again I looked out a window over campus grown dark and saw the central field illuminated by hundreds of flickering candles. The sky was clear and dark and spangled, the temperature falling rapidly into the first truly cold night of the year, and I thought that this moment, which doesn't happen every year, when I look out and first see all those candles, is my favorite part of the holiday. It's like that moment on Christmas morning when you're a kid, when you wake up, before the presents, before the candy, before everything, and you know for sure it's going to happen.

I met June in the landing above the central stairway down into the Great Hall--which is itself decorated with pumpkins and squashes of all kinds and sizes, and shocks of corn all bundled together, and creepy vines all twisted and dried and twining across the ceiling, and the Thank You Doll, now all shriveled and old, still sitting in state and ready for its own internment, and we and the rest of our crowed put on our shoes and our cowls and cloaks, and walked out through the Green Room towards the Chapel, my wife and I holding hands.

When we got to the Chapel, of course the room was full of light, lit candles in the aisles and in the holders along the walls and on the stage, and already the room almost half full of people. We found our seats.

"I'm excited," June confessed. "I don't know what's going to happen."
"That's the idea," I told her. "You're a novice."

The bells began, and the masters processed in, looking strange and mysterious as they always do, with their hoods up and almost covering their faces, like so many enchanters. That some of them actually are witches, or alchemists, or magicians is an entirely prosaic fact around here, as normal as being able to play the guitar or write poetry, but being a witch, or an alchemist, or a magician, or whatever it is Charlie is (a Troll King? An Ent, one of the shepherds of trees?) ought not to be prosaic, and there are certain days when they dress up and remind us that something extraordinary is going on. Samhain is one of those days. They took the stage, and the ceremony began.

We read the names of the Beloved Dead (I recognized one name as belonging to someone I'd met--Charlie's brother. I'd known he had died, but not what Charlie felt about it. I looked over at my teacher and he seemed attentive but impassive. Some questions don't have answers), recited some dozen short eulogies, and sang Hats Off to Dead Folks. The masters came down off the stage and we all milled around, talking, until the bell summoned them and they left, mid-sentence, taking their candles with them, leaving us with that much less light. And the rest of us streamed out onto the already freezing grass, headed towards the bonfire and dinner and s'mores.

And just as I realized June was not beside me in the crowd anymore, I heard a strange sound in a familiar voice. I turned back to investigate.

The sprouts, costumed for the holiday and lying in wait, had captured their grown-up, as they do every year. Usually it's one of the masters, one year it was me. They hold the grown-up ransom for candy and expanded privileges, and everybody pretends they don't know the ruffians are children playing a game. But this time, they'd caught June.

"Ahoy, there, pirate!" I called. "I would parley with ye!"

A rough-clad figure in a dreadlocked wig, who I suspected of being Adelee Grimm, detached herself from the group and came over to talk to me.

"You're supposed to pretend you don't know it's us," she said, sullenly.

"Me? Know who you are?" In the still-distant firelight, identification really was difficult. "All I know is you're a fearsome pirate--and you've kidnapped my wife." I let my voice sound suddenly stern and irate.

"That's how the game works," she said, rolling her eyes like the teenager she'd recently become. She won't be a sprout much longer. "Come on, you're ruining it for the littles."

Behind her, I could see Paul and Ruthie, my niece and nephew, looking at me in frightened confusion. I knew them in the dark by their small size and by something in their postures. Lo had picked them up when she brought Alexis to campus earlier in the day. That Chris wasn't with them proved we'd known exactly what the plan was. Only kids four years old and older can play this trick for treats.

"How the game works is you're supposed to take a master or a senior student, not a novice!" I let myself get even more stern. I was not play-acting. June was lying, half-tied-up, under a restraining pile of children, probably getting cold, and she didn't know what was going on.

"Aw, but she's Mrs. Kretzman," protested Billie. I know his voice. He meant that she was a staff-member. And of course, she had been the director of the summer camp they had all attended. But that wasn't the point.

"She's a novice," I reiterated. "You have to go tell her the rules and ask her if she wants to play. If she doesn't, I'll take her place."

So, Adelee went back to her group and conferred briefly with the prisoner, who thought about things for a few seconds, then nodded. Adelee reported back, still sullen. I had little sympathy.

"She said yes."

"Ok, give me a little time to go tell the masters she said yes. And when you do come out, negotiate hard. Make this worth it." Ok, I had a little sympathy, and I didn't want to ruin their fun, or have June think she had ruined it.

"Ok."

I found the masters and almost everyone else already at the bonfire. I whispered my news in Kit's ear. She nodded and then let the others know, subtly, without calling attention to themselves. When the costumed sprouts showed up and announced they'd taken June, I was suitably distraught, really camping it up, offering them anything, anything, for the safe return of my wife, while Kit and Greg held firm, insisting that we do not give in to criminals. Eventually, the kids got half a pound of candy each, plus a shopping trip to a certain favored toy store, to be funded collectively by the masters and parents. It was somewhat less than they've gotten in other years, but there's always some variation so I'm not sure that their choice of target hurt them. I didn't think it should.

June was released, none the worse for wear, and yes, a little cold from having lain on the ground. I wrapped my cloak around both of us and warmed her as best as I could.

"You know," I told her, "It's really a compliment."

"Oh?"

"They thought you counted as one of the masters. It's a good sign that you will be."




*I'm posting this on October 30th, although Samhain begins at sundown on October 31st and extends through November 1st.

Mastery Year 1: Part 6: Post 1: Mabon

Happy belated Mabon.

It’s curious, we call our autumnal equinox party “Mabon,” but we never talk about who or what a mabon is. Where does the name come from? Why do we use it? Kit told a story once about a quest to find a man named Mabon, who was the only person able to kill a magical boar who needed to be killed as part of a long, multi-stage process without which one of King Arthur’s knights would have been unable to wed the woman he loved. But what that Mabon has to do with Fall, I do not know.

In any case, happy Autumn. The leaves have definitely begun to turn here, although we are still at least a week or two away from peak color, and the goldenrods and asters are in full flower in the fields—everything still has the look of fullness, of growth, although the insect song has changed radically—the cicadas are done for the year, as are some others I can’t name, all we have left in the thin, pulsing music of the crickets. They’ll go until frost.

I enjoyed the celebration. I always do. This year was a little different because for once I didn’t have to choose between the Gratitude Circle and the Thankyou Doll build, which normally happen at the same time, but this year Allen had to move the Circle up two hours because of an appointment he had with a therapy client that could not be scheduled at any other time. That put it opposite Greg’s Higan observance, which was unfortunate, because Karen normally attends the Circle and of course she helps with the Higan service. But the good news is that people who always attend the Thankyou Doll build—Charlie, Sarah, and most of the sprouts—were free to attend the Circle. Of course, Charlie didn’t come. I’d hoped he would, but Kit attends the Circle and they are still allergic to each other.

Anyway, the Gratitude Circle meets in the grassy area behind Chapel Hall, near the outdoor grill where we have Philosopher’s Stone Soup. It’s almost enclosed by the Hall on one side, the Main Greenhouse on another, and by a partial and broken ring of tall hickory trees. They’re only beginning to turn, and the place still looked very green and lush, with plenty of room in the middle for fifty or sixty people to stand in a ring, me and June included.

The way it works is that there is a big basket of balls of yarn, rejects from student spinners, and someone takes a ball, gives it to someone else, thanks them for something, and keeps the end of the yarn so that a strand of yarn connects thanker and thankee. The next person gives it to someone else, and on and on, until everyone is connected by a visible web of gratitude and yarn. Once the web starts filling in, it becomes impossible to cross the circle to give the ball of yarn away, so a child ferries it around, tying on new balls of yarn when the old ones finish. For three years Alexis had that honor, but I’ve heard that two years ago she gave it to Aidan, since she was getting too big to run under the yarn. Aidan is still little, but this year he decided he didn’t want to attend the Circle, so he passed it on to my nephew, Paul.

I’m proud to see a family member of mine getting involved in that way.

Allen always starts the Circle, since it’s his show, and he always thanks a member of his family first, in this case, Alexis, whom he adores. She handed it back to him, to thank him for getting the pet ferrets (whom she adores and actually had with her inside her shirt), so he had to find someone else to thank. To my surprise, he picked me.

“Thank you for becoming my friend,” he said. “And for coming back. We need you.”

“It’s good to be back,” I said. I could have thanked him in return, but there was someone else I had to hand the yarn to, first. That early in the proceedings, I didn’t have to use Paul as a go-between (and Allen hadn’t). I strode across the circle to my wife.

I handed her the yarn, and I kissed her. And I mean I really kissed her. Everyone else hooted and hollered, which of course was part of the point, and when I let her come up for air she said “woa!” and everybody laughed and hooted again.

So, who did June give her yarn to? She gave it to me, of course, and kissed me. And I mean she really kissed me. Grabbed my ears for leverage and everything (scratched one of them too, by accident, but I ignored that). More hooting and hollering. So, when she let me come up for air, I gave the yarn back to her and kissed her again.

“I could get used to this!” I said, to make everybody laugh.

“Get a room!” someone shouted. More laughter.

“We can’t until February, she’s a novice!” I shouted back.

“Screw February,” June said, with feeling, “I’m getting you alone tonight!” She spoke loudly enough for everyone to hear her, and triggered more laughter.

She made as if she were going to give me the yarn again, just for effect, then pushed me away, gently, and said “tonight.” That was for laughter, too of course, but it wasn’t only for laughter—she kept her promise.

I returned to my place in the ring, carefully trailing all three strands of yarn between us, and she gave the yarn to Kit and thanked her “for introducing me to the other kind of magic.” June is learning stage magic from Allen, but recently she’s started studying Wicca with Kit.

“What, no kiss?” asked Kit, and everyone laughed, and June kissed her on the cheek. “Oo, I can see why he likes you!” she said, afterwards, as though that chaste peck had been something else, and the laughter kept going, while June giggled, embarrassed, into the back of her wrist. From then on, though, Paul had to take up his duty as Yarn Ferry (Yarn Fairy?) and kissing did not become a theme of the whole Circle.

Anywhere else but here, on campus, such kissing and joking would have been out of place, especially with children present, but there is a kind of innocence to sex here. It’s an innocence very carefully maintained; Kit would never have joked about kissing me, for example, because it would not have been a joke to me, and she knows it, and her respect for that boundary is absolute.

A year ago, I don’t think June would have joked that way, not with me in public, and certainly not with a woman. She has learned that innocence. She has become of this place.

After the Gratitude Circle, we went right over to the Thankyou Doll Build, which June found utterly charming. This year, the Doll was made mostly of parsnips, with stalks of Setaria grass as hair and a couple of bright orange, pre-maturely fallen sugar maple leaves as a skirt. Two blue potatoes served as breasts, very long green beans for arms, and the thin tip of a parsnip made for a very long nose.

“Those potatoes aren’t the same size,” remarked a young yearling named Brad, as though the disparity were a comical design flaw. And indeed, we had tried to find a matching pair and done the best with what we had.

“Someone hasn’t seen enough women,” muttered Charlie, busily affixing a pair of tiny, round chilies to the face with broken toothpicks. They would be eyes. He wasn’t joking.  Charlie is celibate, but he’s not sexless, and he has no patience for straight men who maintain unrealistic ideas about women’s bodies. Nobody laughed. Brad blushed.

Later, after we had woken the Thankyou Doll (Joyce Anne did the honors, being a few months younger than my other nephew, Chris. The twins, Janus and James were both there, so technically James was the youngest one present, but the twins are late talkers), and given it the traditional tour, we sat down to the Paleolithic Feast.

Charlie sat down next to me. 

“I heard you had quite the Gratitude Circle today,” he said.

I blushed.

“I’m not criticizing,” he added, responding to my blush.

I relaxed a little.

“I heard you talked to Allen.”

He meant, I think, the conversation I had with Allen a week or so ago about my status as a student.

“Welcome back,” he said.

Mastery Year 1: Part 5: Post 2: Deep Dive

Allen organizes his day around swimming, as far as I can tell.

I don't know what he does when he's at home (I could ask Ollie, but haven't), but when he's here...at least in the summer, his hair is often wet.

He comes in by bike on Tuesday morning. He doesn't have to attend breakfast on Tuesday, because the rule is you have to go to breakfast if you spent the night before, and in the winter he often comes in only at the end, just in time to hear announcements. If he's running late, he'll still be wearing his cycling clothes, carrying his helmet. But in the summer, if Ollie and I go for a run in the morning, we'll often see him coming in when we come back to the Mansion to shower before breakfast--that's around seven. I don't know if he's trying to beat the heat of the day, or if he just likes getting up before dawn, as he must do summer and winter, to maintain that schedule.

Usually, he'll have Alexis with him, if she's not in camp. A lot of the Sprouts spend most of the summer on campus, whether they're in camp or not (Charlie used to have a pile. This year he has only Julius, because Janus and James are still toddlers and the others aged out of Sproutdom). When I was a novice, Allen would come in with Julie and David behind him on their own bikes and Alexis in a carrier. Now Alexis has her own bike and follows her father alone. David is in college. Julie is working a summer job. The carrier isn't even on Allen's bike, anymore. Instead, he has pannier bags.

Anyway, at lunch, Allen disappears from campus again. I see him coming in to eat just before classes are due to start, his black hair wet, his shirt--always a professional-looking short-sleeved button-down, never a t-shirt--damp from being put on just after he got out of the lake. This year I've gone with him a few times. It's just a short bike-ride away. The cool water feels good. I splash around a bit, swim a few laps along the shore. Allen disappears. From the minute he steps in the lake, he spends as much time under water as he can, hyperventilating before he submerges so he can stay down even longer. He surfaces like a seal, to breathe, when he has to.

He stays the week on campus, but I still see him bike in before breakfast, because he goes for a swim first thing, while the air is still chilly. But he doesn't feel the cold.

Every day, it's his ritual. He even goes when it's raining. "Why wouldn't I swim when it's raining?" he asks. "I'm going to get wet, anyway." And he has a point.

I once asked him why he likes swimming so much.

"Why does anybody like anything?" he answered, and I waited for him to give me a real answer. We were eating lunch, just after he'd gotten back. He does look happier, more energized and more relaxed, after he has come from the water. "I feel calmer under there," he said. "I feel at home."

"Water is the emotional element," said Kit, who was eating with us. "You are a psychologist."

"I'm not sure I feel at home in emotions, though," he said. "That's why I'm a psychologist."

"Nobody is totally at home in water," she replied. "We can't breathe in it. To stay fully immersed, we have to bring some air down with us." Metaphysically, as you may know, water is associated with emotions, air with the intellect.

"Intellectually, I agree with you," said Allen. "I am a psychologist--I study emotions intellectually. I have snorkled and SCUBA-dived, and I like both. But what I like best is going down, just me, and exhaling to make myself less buoyant, and just exist down there, wholly of the water, not breathing. I like to get away from air, when I can."

Mastery Year 1: Part 4: Post 3: Welcome to the Club

June and I didn't really have a honeymoon, nor did we expect to get one. That's what getting married in the middle of the school year means. Not only did we each have classes to attend, but June is the director of the children's summer camp, so she's insanely busy right now. The summer solstice was on Thursday, we married on Friday, and the campers arrived on Saturday.

The only advantage to all of this is that June got lots of practice introducing herself as "June Kretzman" to parents (she decided to take my name because she says she's marrying into my family more than I'm marrying into hers, but the decision surprised me. I'd expected her to keep her name).

We did have a week in which we were encouraged to see each other freely, instead of our usual distance designed to give her space to move through the school's program on her own. So there's that. But our week is over now.  Back to the grind, as they say.

Before our week was over, we did have one more event. It wasn't our idea--I think it was Allen's, possibly Kit's, a sort of post-wedding reception for married people only. So, last night,* June and I and a group of our fellow married people took our dinner and few extra chairs out into the formal garden to talk with one another about marriage, drink wine, and swat mosquitoes.

It is a fact of this place that mosquitoes are never considered a reason to not be outside. We cultivate liking to be outside, and that cultivation bears fruit in long, lovely purple June evenings and less than lovely little red welts.

I don't think it being the end of our first week married was exactly planned out deliberately, though we all decided we liked it that way. It's just that every day this week at least one person on the guest list had some other commitment. Monday was the only evening really open on the schedule, and neither Kit nor Allen are on campus on Mondays. They're both with their respective spouses. Tuesday is Philosopher's Stone Soup and it's the Joes' date night. Wednesday is group therapy, so not only is Allen otherwise committed, but so is June, and Friday is Dorm Dinner and Faculty Dinner. Thursday is still Thursday Night Jam, but Kit decided to leave someone else in charge of that and join us instead, which I really appreciated.

The group was me and June, Allen and Lo, Kit and Kevin (her husband), Security Joe and Cuppa Joe, Ollie and Willa, and my brother John and his wife. We'd invited Sarah and her husband, but they politely declined, citing the press of childcare and farm work, though I suspect they also weren't sure their opinions on marriage would really be wanted. And I hate to say it, but they might be right. I've heard they're not really sure whether marriages that aren't Catholic count.

"So, how do you like being married?" asked Allen. I've been getting that question a lot, and there's no real answer. It's like asking someone on their birthday what it's like to be a year older. It's just something they say. But Allen doesn't just say things.

"I'm not sure I know yet," I told him. "Nothing's really different. We don't live together, everything's busy, we don't...." I ran out of words.

"So, basically, you're saying you haven't had sex yet," interjected Willa.

"Willa!" scolded Kit, pretending to be scandalized, "Don't voice such...probably quite accurate assumptions!"

"It's not that we never have," said June, trying to cut through the laughter to defend our honor. Remember, this is a crowd that, except for Ollie, regards premarital abstinence as strange at best.

"Just not recently," I confessed. "You try getting amorous in a hammock full of mosquitoes."

"And ants. Don't forget the ants," added June.

"And it was hot," I added to her adding. "Choose between being in a sleeping bag and too hot to breathe, or being outside of a sleeping bag and chewed by mosquitoes and walked on by ants, and then try to have sex."

"I'd rather not," said Allen.

"I imagine it's different though," said Ollie.

"What's different?" I asked.

"Sex after getting married as opposed to before. I mean, I'm not the only one here who was raised to believe premarital sex is wrong, or at least...naughty. I'm not saying it is wrong, but can you ever really get rid of that voice of doubt, once it's implanted? Now, there's no doubt."

"I never had any doubt," asserted Willa. "But married sex is different because it's with you." She wrapped her arms around her husband's bicep, cooed in his general direction, and turned him pink with embarrassment.

"I had to get rid of a lot of voices of doubt, just to stay alive," said Security Joe.

"Is this what you really want to be talking about?" asked Kit, of June and I. "Sex?"

"No," I admitted. June shook her head slightly.

"Do you really think nothing's different?" asked Allen.

"No," I admitted. "I feel..more solid." I couldn't explain what that meant, though I knew Allen would likely ask, as "solid" isn't itself a feeling. "It's like this. June has always seemed like the most important person in the world to me, since that day in grad school." She took my hand. "But I never expected anyone else to take that seriously. Like, yeah, Daniel's going on about his new girlfriend again, or whatever. But now, she's my wife. No one can question that." I squeezed her hand back.

"Well, they can," interjected Cuppa Joe. "But that's what clocking people is for."

"I'm not your wife, I'm your husband," corrected Security Joe.

"Same diff, lover mine."

"Do any of you have any advice for us?" asked June. "I mean, this is new territory for us. Tell us about the view. What can we expect?"

"Expect it to be hard," said Kit, without hesitation.

"At least in the mornings," added Kevin, and Kit swatted him one.

"I'm trying to tell them things they don't already know," she said. "Anyway, there will be days when you want to get divorced--don't panic, that's normal. Wait a few days, you'll like each other again."

"I'd say don't forget you're married," said Allen, with slow thoughtfulness. "The way you are feeling right now--it's because you're thinking about being married. A year from now, you'll be thinking bout other things--"

"Oh, man, poopy diapers," put in Security Joe. "There is nothing so un-romantic as poopy diapers."

"I was thinking about ferret puke, personally," said Allen.

"I don't think they'll have pet ferrets," said Lo.

"Why not?" said Allen. "Ferrets are fine animals. Except one of ours has a puking problem lately. We'll probably have to take him to the vet...My point is that when you're thinking about ferret puke, your emotions are about ferret puke. It's not that love fades, it's that people think about it less and less, so they feel it less and less. You have to remember to think about love."

"I love you for cleaning up the ferret puke," said Lo. And Allen leaned his head on her shoulder for a moment.

"Does your both being psychologists make it easier?" June asked.

"It means we know bigger words to blame each other with," volunteered Allen.

"Complexes and syndromes and isms," explained Lo. "At least our fights are entertaining."

I asked Ollie what he thought.

"Oh, we haven't been married long enough, yet," he said. "I don't have any real insight. Except that thing about divorce is spot on."

"I didn't know you were thinking about divorce," said Willa, sounding surprised but not concerned.

"Aren't you?"

"Not today. Two days ago, I was."

"Well, that's because two days ago you were crazy."

"Two days ago you were crazy."

"Are either of you thinking about divorce today?" I asked, expecting the answer I got.

"No, today she's the best thing that ever happened to me."

"Yes, I am. Ad you deserve every ounce of me because you're cute."

And on and on. It felt very much like being given the secrets of some club, some initiatory event, though there was no particular ritual to it, just a group of people sitting around, drinking wine, eating, and swatting mosquitoes--we did have a couple of citronella candles burning, and they helped a little. It was nice.

I kept thinking, though, that there was someone missing. Charlie. He woudn't likely attend a party with Kit, nor she with him, and most people would point out that he's not married. He's not in the club. Except he is married. And he's the one who taught me how to love in the first place.




*The "now" of this post is 29th of June, 2007, a Friday, one week after our wedding. So,"last night" is Thursday the 28th. -D.

Mastery Year 1: Part 2: Note 2

So, yesterday I forgot it was Friday. I am very surprised that I did this, partly because I do not normally forget the day of the week, and partly because I didn't neglect any of my commitments except for writing this week's post, which I said I'd do on Friday because I had no time or energy for it on Monday. I don't know how this happened.

Anyway, I could write a real post now--I have a little time--but I'm not going to because the past just simply isn't on my mind. Instead, I'll tell you, briefly, what I've been up to in the here and now.

I told you that last weekend, a group of us took three days and went to the Science March in DC. This weekend, a different group of us took four days and went to DC again, for the Climate March. I hadn't really meant to do that. June and I took Carly to the last one, in New York, but this time, because we'd just gone to DC--and because DC is about five hours farther away for us than DC is (one way!)--we were all set to go to a satellite march instead. That's what June and Carly did today, and I haven't yet heard how it went for them, other than that their march is over and they are both fine. But yesterday morning, Steve Bees called me up and asked if I wanted to go DC with him and David. Rick,who is living right outside of DC at the moment (and hating it) for complicated reasons involving his work, had invited us down for the march. I haven't seen him in forever (he was not able to attend the Science March), so, I called Breathwalker--he gets along well with Rick, too--and we all went down together.

As a writer, my work is somewhat portable, so I haven't had to take any time off for this trip yet. I just leave the driving to the others and use my laptop in the car (something I couldn't really do last weekend, with my young daughter on board). So, we're kind of having a guys' road trip, or something. Tomorrow, we're doing the tourist thing and spending the whole day checking out museums and such, and catching up. We'll head back on Monday, except for Steve, who has some work here to attend to for a few days.

But the primary reason for coming was the march, which was large, appealingly chaotic, as these things tend to be, and distinctly angry in a way the last climate march was not. Of course, we had a friendly and competent president, then. Today was also, quite fittingly, much too hot. I'm still all but exhausted from coping with it, and my head hurts.

We never used to do things like this, when I was a student. We were insular, as I said. Now, there is hardly a week that goes by that one or another of us isn't at a protest or a political meeting of some sort, and usually there's a whole bunch of us that go--by "us" I mean the larger community, not just the group I talk about as "characters" on this blog. Most of these events are local, of course, and most of the time we attend as members of one or another non-school related groups we happen to be members of. The school, as such, isn't involved with politics directly. But we see each other at political things as often as we do at more strictly community functions.

It's mostly David's doing, David's and Steve's. And, lately, my sister and her wife (yes, they've gotten married, so now there are three Kretzman sisters-in-law). They've been doing most of the organizing, most of the insisting that the rest of us get involved, not that we've been reluctant followers of their leadership. We started getting involved a couple of years ago--and probably the very beginning of it was Greg's public workshops after 9/11--but it's just grown exponentially since Donald Trump was elected. Activism is now one of the primary pillars of our community. The threat he and his backers pose is so great that our responsibility clearly lies in the world, not apart from it. Activism is now part of our ministry, our healing, our meditation, and our magic.

Steve calls it the social gospel. That phrase has a Christian history, but I do not think he means it in that way alone--he's never been uncomfortable with the non-Christian majority of our community. I asked him what good news he's referring to ("gospel" mean "good news").

"The good news that we can do something about any of this," he said.

Mastery Year 1: Part 2: Note

Hi, all.

I just wanted to tell you that, no, I'm not doing a real post today, and yes, everything's fine on my end. A group of us went to the Science March in DC on Saturday, which meant a three day trip--it's a long drive from where we live--so my work week got seriously disrupted. I'll post on Friday, after I've caught up.

"We," incidentally, was June and I and Carly, Allen, Lo, and David, and Breathwalker, whom I haven't told you about. He was a student at the school several years before I arrived and has recently gotten involved with the community again. He was another student of Charlie's. It's a different group than the contingent that came to the climate march a few years ago (and will attend the climate march next week), but it was a different kind of march. It felt different. I've been trying to put my finger on exactly how--here's part of it. The people asked questions. That is, when people at the march chatted with each other, they usually started by asking questions, not by making statements. About what you could expect from scientists, I suppose. What does your sign mean? What does your costume signify? What kind of scientist are you?

We had an answer for that one; David is an ecologist, Allen and Lo are psychologists, June and I are science educators, and Breathwalker and Carly aren't scientists at all, but science is important to them. By the end of the march, Carly was giving that answer herself. It's funny, I never thought of Allen and Lo as scientists, but I guess they are.

We could have gone to one of the satellite marches, several were much more convenient for us, but we figured the bigger the DC march was, the more impact it would have, and anyway we figured it was time for us to show Carly our nation's capital. Any kid her age should get to have astronaut ice cream at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

My favorite part of the whole march experience was probably the sign--and I saw it several times--that said "science is like magic, but real."

That sounds about right to me.

Year 4: Part 8: Post 8: June in February

In my last post I talked about being in graduate school and realizing that Allen had a point--I had utterly forgotten to take care of myself as a whole person just as soon as I was really on my own. I had that thought after I'd been there a few months, but I didn't really do anything about it. I couldn't figure out what to do. I was very busy with school work, and it seemed I hardly had time for anything else. I'd "wake up" every few weeks or months and sort of notice myself, and then I'd be driven again by deadlines and daydreams and my leaps at occasional opportunities to socialize....

And yet, on the whole, I enjoyed grad school. I liked the intellectual challenge of it. I liked how it was transforming me. And, while most of my friendships there were superficial and transient, I got along well with everyone. I usually do. Somehow, many of the people I fell in with were writers, as well as being educators or scientists, or whatever. I had never thought of myself as a writer, but I've written poetry privately, just for myself, since I was a kid, and I always enjoyed and did well at writing assignments in school. Listening to my friends talk about their work, I started to wonder if maybe writing could be a thing for me. Through some of my friends, I got a short-term job co-editing a single issue of a literary journal--I don't really know how that happened, I don't think I was the most qualified person available, but it did happen and I blossomed or something in that job. I mean, I really got into it. In my second year, I also got some work tutoring other students in the school's writing center. Learn by teaching, I suppose.

I was able to finish all my research for my thesis in my first summer (I'm not going to talk about my research topic--first, it's irrelevant to this blog, and second, my thesis is a public document and could conceivably be found and traced back to me, and that would be bad for the secrecy I'm trying to maintain, which is not for myself alone), so that left my second summer (after I had finished all my coursework) for writing and editing. I officially got my masters' degree in November of 2006.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I said most of my friendships from grad school were superficial and transient. One of them was not. It began one night early in my first spring semester I'd stayed on campus late so I could use some specialized software on one of the computer labs--which I was not supposed to do, the campus had closed hours earlier, but several of us had discovered that if we locked ourselves into either the computer lab or the herbarium (which also had a computer and was a quiet place to do homework), the maintenance staff would not bother to check if the rooms were empty.

Anyway, when I finished up, I noticed that half the lights in the building were still on--I don't just mean the hallway lights--a maintenance man was still there, cleaning--I mean classrooms. Drove me nuts. I'd always go around and shut them off when I found them like that.

So, I went around. But that night, as I went around, I started to get the feeling I was turning out the same lights twice. A little longer, and I was sure of it. Someone was turning the lights back on again. The maintenance guy wouldn't bother, and all the faculty had long since gone home, so it must have been a student who'd been working in the herbarium.

The way the building there is structured, the hallways on the second floor make a loop--the library is only a single story, but it has an extremely high ceiling with a skylight, and the hallways on the second floor wrap around the open space like a kind of courtyard. You can look look through from the windows of a classroom on one side to the windows of the classroom of the other. Eventually I got smart and started going around that loop, looking through the windows to the classrooms on the other side--and indeed, I saw the lights going back on again, but I never saw the person doing the switching. Whoever it was was hiding from me.

So I switched directions, hoping to catch the miscreant, but my opponent was to clever for me and switched directions, too. Pretty soon we were chaining each other through the building, turning lights off and on again, having a great time, until a voice shouted  YOU KIDS CUT THAT OUT!!!

The maintenance guy on that night was the mean one, not that he'd ever do anything to us, but he seemed to dislike grad students the same way some adults dislike kids. I quit playing and ran, making my escape through a side door that I knew would lock behind me--but someone else came out, too, almost on my heals. It was a woman. She was breathing hard and still trying not to laugh, her eyes shining.

"You!" I said.
"You!" she echoed, and then she did laugh and so did I. I knew her face, she was an environmental education student a year ahead of me, but of course we had no classes together. I'm not sure we'd ever spoken before. When we'd finished laughing and going on about our recent exploits, I asked her name.

"June," she told me.
"Juneberry," I said, almost reflexively. "Amelanchier." That's the genus that contains Juneberries. She laughed again.
"At your sarvis," she told me. Sarvis is one of the other names for Juneberries, along with service, serviceberry, and shadblow. I'd never met a woman who got one of my plant-geek jokes before--let alone one who could joke back in the same vein (but, really, funnier). I stared at her for a few seconds and she giggled at me, her cheeks still pink from running around the building with me.
"There has got to be someplace still open where we can get a drink," I said.

But we never found any place to get a drink. We never tried. Instead we walked the town's bike paths for hours, dodging patches of black, breathing out clouds of frozen fog that caught the light of the occasional street-light, talking about everything in the world under the crystalline stars. The temperature had to have been close to zero--one of the coldest nights of the year, but we did not care.

When we finally separated so each of us could walk home and go to bed, it must have been around four in the morning. I went home, crawled in bed, and spent several hours shivering there, recovering from a mild case of hypothermia, but inside I felt as warm as I ever had.

We found a reason to get together once or twice a week after that, at first by happy accident, later on purpose. By spring break, we belatedly admitted we were "a thing." That summer, I moved all my stuff into her place, though we were careful to say we weren't really moving in together--I planned to spend the summer at a paid internship elsewhere, gathering data, and since I only had a ten-month lease anyway, stashing my stuff at her place meant I didn't have to pay rent while I was out of town.

That fall, I crashed at her place for a while, ostensibly until I could find somewhere with decent rent, until we realized we were being silly.

That winter, just over a year after we met, we were walking towards campus to print some things out, when we stopped on a bridge overlooking a creek. We both liked to stare down in to the water, and usually took a few moments whenever we came that way--alone or with each other.

"Do you suppose that's why they call them silver maples?" she asked, after a bit. Maples and elms arched over the creek and everything was white, white snow on the ground and in the trees, everything except the water at the middle of the stream, still unfrozen, fast-flowing, almost black in comparison, and breathing out great billows of fog into the frigid air. The fog caught and crystallized in the branches of the overhanging trees, hence my girl-friend's question.

"I don't know," I told her. "We could ask."

We were silent again for a bit. Everything was, except the cars on the road behind us, which we ignored.

"June," I began. "I have a confession to make."
"I thought you're Methodist?" she joked.
"No, I'm serious, I have to tell you this."

She stiffened.

"What?"
"It's nothing bad," I hurried to explain. "It's not even anything I did. I'm keeping a secret for some friends. But if I'm going to spend my life with, you, I don't want us to have those kinds of secrets from each other."
"'Spend your life with,' Daniel?" She asked. "Aren't you forgetting something?"

I apologized.

I did not get down on one knee. I didn't have a ring to give her. I had honestly thought she knew how I felt, and I didn't feel the need of a big production. I just turned to her, there on the bridge, and asked.

"June, will you marry me?"

He smile told me everything I needed to know, but her actual words were "that depends on the secret."

"The college program I attended was a non-denominational pagan seminary. We keep its true nature secret from outsiders because the entrance exam is you have to be intuitive enough to find the place. If you turn up, tell them you know it's a pagan seminary, or a magic school, or something, and that you want to enroll, they'll say yes."

"Non-denominational pagan seminary?" she echoed. "That's different. So, you're like a priest? And not Methodist?"

"I never said I'm only Methodist. I don't really put a label on myself. My parents raised me Methodist, is all. Yeah, I guess I'm a priest. I have the training to be a priest, anyway."

"What does that even mean?"

So, I told her. It took a long time. We got very cold walking around again (with a brief break to print out our stuff). And when I was done, she asked if she could think about it for a while. I had never thought anyone would have to think about a marriage proposal to me--I never thought anyone would really want to marry me, but I'd thought that if they did, they'd know right away. But I admitted it was a lot to take in. I could see her wondering if she'd stumbled into a cult.

I suggested that she contact the school and talk to them herself. I explained about how she couldn't carry any messages from me or two me, about how Absence works, and I gave her the number. She had already graduated by that time and was working an extremely part-time job, so she took a few days and actually visited campus. I suggested she try to talk to Lo, since she'd married into the community, too. She and Allen actually met in grad school, while he was in Absence.

I waited breathlessly until she got back.

"Well?" I said, when she returned. I was jumping out of my skin.
"I passed," she told me, casually, getting her stuff out of her car.
"Passed what?"
"The entrance exam. I'll start when you go back. They think I'll be a one-hit wonder, actually."
"What?" 

She stood and faced me, shoulders square.

"I passed the entrance exam. I know it's a magic school, and I want to enroll, and I said so. I figure, from the way you talk, marrying you means marrying this school, so I'd better get to know it. That's a yes, by the way."

I don't think I had ever been as happy, until that moment. And I'm a pretty happy guy.