Whew. I know there are three days left but two will be spent with friends—human and canine—stomping around in cold, wet, Eastern Kentucky quail hunting. This year I bounced between England Kentucky, back England, back to Kentucky, Charlottesville, VA, Jerusalem, back to Charlottesville, and now, for the time being, back back in Kentucky. I crossed the Atlantic six times in twelve months (not as romantic as it sounds {except for that one time Delta bumped me to first class}). My best friend and my sister proposed to, and were proposed to by, their respective SO’s within a week of each other last Christmas and married spouses I admire and adore a week apart this summer. I cried my eyes out both times. 

I moved, like for real this time unlike 2011, from Oxford to Charlottesville, VA and received my comically ugly diploma from Oxford halfway through my first term at the University of Virginia. I was, for the first time in my life, fired from a job. I published my first academic article. I learned how to survive on next to nothing and how to enjoy it. I learned to hustle for work and to trust my abilities. I ran. A lot. And read. A lot. I alternately enjoyed and despised my year between schools. But in hindsight I needed it. At the least it taught me how to be grateful for the position I now find myself in. I learned not to be afraid of failing, or at least how to avoid paralysis.

I taught my first class. I did not suck (I think? I hope?). I learned to wake board. I walked Petra and Jerusalem with my dad. I learned to bake. I learned to love getting up early. Not, like, 8am, but 330. Every day. I made new friends. I said goodbye, for now, to many old and dear ones. 2012 was a year of changes; both in my life and in the lives of many of those I love. It contained many of the happiest and hardest days I can remember.

Looking back, pieces of the past stick out. The encounter with a mentor between Oxford and Marston when gathering twigs to the cranky woodstove which provided my only heat source for January and his dawning realization of just how committed I was to my work. The satisfying crackle of that same stove when coaxed to life. The girls I kissed and the ones I didn’t. The crunch of fresh snow underfoot on long walks though the Chilterns avec boy and dog. The way Oxford greets her early risers. Watching my sister walk down the aisle and the party over the river after. The smell of incense at my best friend’s wedding and the party after. That night in the boat. The one where we almost died (read: almost shot). My first bike ride in Virginia and the thrill of discovering a new place the same way I learned the old. Early morning on Grounds. Learning a new library system.  And so many other lived moments too real for prose.

I doubt I’ll ever really understand everything that happened. It felt like five years wrapped into one. Or rather pieces of every part of my past and scattered glimpses of my future. Late this fall I re-read Andrew Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress’ as I taught Metaphysical Poetry. Sure, it’s about sex, but re-reading it in the early autumn of my youth Marvell’s pitch perfect tetrameter resonated with my year. His subtle modulation of image and language manipulate shopworn pastoral clichés to produce a poem of alarming power that speaks to so much more than sex:

‘Rather at once our time devour,


Than languish in his slow-chapp’d power.


Let us roll all our strength, and all


Our sweetness, up into one ball;


And tear our pleasures with rough strife


Thorough the iron gates of life.


Thus, though we cannot make our sun


Stand still, yet we will make him run.