I can still hear his voice, a fellow teacher from my rookie days. He hated February, and as it drew near he would curse it as "twenty-eight dark, dull, depressing, unnecessary days." Leap year seemed to add six weeks rather than just a day. I've had bouts of depression when the weak light of February seemed to be the only triggering factor. During the period in my life when I experienced my worst emotional state, daylight saving time was imposed year round, so February of 1974 and 1975 were darker (for us early risers) than they had to be.

Thus it surprises me to say that I am looking forward eagerly to February, because that means that January is over. I was to five funerals in January, only one of them for an elderly person whose death was a blessed release. I don't care if every single day in February is dark, windy, and below freezing, as long as nobody dies.

I'll be beginning February away from home. This is being written (on my laptop for uploading later) on a mountaintop of the Kittatinny Ridge in northeastern Pennsylvania. I'm at Kirkridge, a retreat and study center where I am an occasional guest, for the annual "Light to Read By" weekend. It's led by Charles Rice, a theologian and pastor who recently retired from the faculty of Drew University, who each year chooses for discussion some fiction and poetry in which faith is made manifest without its being overtly religious literature. This year we are considering The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, God: Stories, a collection edited by C. Michael Curtis, and the poetry of Wendell Berry and R.S. Thomas.

This is the seventeenth year for this event, but I've been to it only once, in 1992, and now I'm wondering why it took me eleven years to come back. Two women who come every year actually remembered me from back then. Being remembered is extremely important to me, and that these two women called me by name touched me deeply and means that the weekend has already had a healing effect.

I was at a crossroads in my life in 1992, but I didn't know it then. I can't even remember now what drew me to the weekend. I remember that we read Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome and John Updike's Rabbit books, and although I deeply appreciate that work, I can't recall why I thought going away for a weekend to discuss it was worth the cost in time and money.

During that weekend someone gave me a brochure about summer fellowships for teachers offered by the National Endowment for the Humanities. One concerning Willa Cather (to be held in Nebraska) attracted me, and I applied. Not surprisingly, I did not get an award, but the process taught me that there was a big hole in my resume left by the master's degree I failed to complete in 1974 (see above reference to "worst emotional state"). By the spring I had gained admission to the Master's in American Studies program at Penn State, and in the fall I began writing seriously again.

I think I am at a crossroads again, especially in terms of my writing. I know I can write personal essays. Last July, at the "Share Your Research" session at the Emily Dickinson International Society meeting, I heard myself say that I was working on a novel about 19th century Pennsylvania German domestic life in Berks County, and I realized I'd said the same thing at the same session in 1999, and that I'd been saying some version of it for twenty years. I promised myself then that I wouldn't say the same thing when the conference came back to Amherst in 2005. I'd either have the thing finished or abandoned.

The mail came before I left home this afternoon. In it was a notice from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts informing me that I have not been awarded a grant for 2003. This was especially disappointing since I'd sent them a short story I completed last spring which I thought represented an advance in my talents as a fiction writer. When I applied for 2001 I sent a personal essay and an excerpt from the stalled historical novel mentioned above, and although I didn't get a grant then either, I at least won an "honorable mention," a place in the "special opportunities pool." (I did not, however, apply for a special opportunity grant.) That what I consider better work has been completely overlooked is a great disappointment.

When this conference ends on Sunday I won't be going directly home. Instead, I'll be going to Berks County with my fiction crate and my exercise books and all my assorted fragments, to spend three days at a different retreat center, without the distractions of home. This is the year I move forward as a fiction writer, or get off the road.