Morning Sun Notes 0

A second day working at my desk in our new house. The windows look out on a small garden of rocks and moss, awash with sun until lunchtime. We are below street level on this side of the house, so there’s a retaining wall covered with a tangle of jasmine vines. Did you know jasmine leaves turned yellow in fall?

There is also a whispy tree covered in fronds which join the balcony to frame the morning sky.

At the root of the tree, shadows gather as the morning wears on. I sit and work on a dissertation year fellowship application (I’m doing 4 this fall), struggling with how to make it different from last year’s application.

This takes me through documents of random writing from last fall, which surprisingly or not, are about many of the same things still on my mind a year later: wanting children, dreaming about writing children’s books, and struggling to find creativity in my dissertation project.

A large, black, neighborhood cat poked its head through the open window as I read, startling me with its wide green eyes and plaintive meow.

It is all making me wonder, how much do we really change in one year?