What will be happening fifty years from now that I cannot imagine? What will my great-great-grandchildren think of me when they walk in my house and read my books? When they try to piece together my life from my photographs and my legends?
                           -- Ellen Gilchrist, in Falling Through Space: The Journals of Ellen Gilchrist

The sky is still blue this morning, streaked with moving clouds and vapor trails. Just now a plane is climbing east to west, people going somewhere, traveling on New Year's Eve through the wild blue yonder, streaking into the future. I'm ready for the future, ready for change.

I'm working through this dislocated time, the ragged edge of the holiday season. Spiritually I received what I needed early on, reading in the book of Genesis about Abraham and Sarah's call to change late in their lives. . I pondered and prayed and though about hope and light and change and courage and now I'm ready to  move, ready to make progress. Time to stop dwelling in possibility and start dwelling in accomplishment.

So I set up the plans again -- read this, write that. Always be reading some fiction, some nonfiction, some autobiography or memoir, some poetry, some work on craft. This morning I picked up the book of Ellen Gilchrist's journals, bought from a remainder table in the last five years or so, theough it's copyrighted 1987. I know next to nothing about Ellen Glichrist except that in the fall of 1984 I would listen to her read from her journal on the public radio station as I drove to school. Her segment would start just as I moved along route 322 parallel to Chambers Hill Road, at the intersection with Mushroom Hill, near the beautiful house I lived in suring the loneliest, most desperate years of my life, and I'd listen to her and think, I can do this, I can write quiet detailed observations of my life. I was at a crossroads in my life then, as I am now.

I was trying to change my life then, too, but I was trying to do something besides what I really wanted to do. Ron and I had been married just over a year and I wanted to have a baby but I didn't think that was possible so I got busy being a damned fine "educator" -- I became active in the professional organizations, subscribed to academic and pedagogical journals and started expanding my lesson plans with deeper research, reading new biographies and new criticism of the authors whose works I was all too familiar with. It was good work, it was useful, it made me a better teacher, but it wasn't what I really wanted. 

So I listened to Ellen Gilchrist's voice, and started keeping a journal, and by the grace of God I was given what I truly truly wanted, and she's eighteen years old now and sleeping upstairs, dreaming about the college dorm room she wants to decorate with ducks, and it's time to change my life again.