Spring and the Interior Year

I'm really enjoying my students this semester. So many of them are full of ideas and questions and opinions and energy. They are supportive of each other's writing, and they are gelling as a group.

I've taught classes in the past that I've dreaded attending (yes, students aren't the only ones who dread going to class sometimes)--but I don't feel that way at all this semester about either of my groups. I feel lucky.

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Spring break is next week. Lots of writing time. I think it's possible I might be able to do a lot of work on a memoir piece I'm working on. The memoir is about the phenomenon of "caretaking" for ill and elderly people. I write about the long-term illness and death of my father, followed almost immediately by my mother's Alzheimer's diagnosis (as well as other "caretaking" stories, such as Annie's caring for her ill mother, and my mom's caring for her parents and my father).

My working title is: Seams of Our Interior Year: A Memoir of Caretaking.

The title comes from a line by Rilke's Duino Elegies:

We wasters of sorrows!
How we stare away into sad endurance beyond them
trying to force their end! Whereas they are nothing else
than our winter foliage, our sombre evergreen, one of the seams of our
interior year—not only season—they’re also place, settlement camp,
soil, dwelling.