There’s nothing like a brush with death (the physical one, not the existential poem-reading kind) to clarify life. After an uncomfortable and lucky week in the hospital last
December, I waited for my bucket list to emerge.
Without Jack Nicholson’s money, my list couldn’t include world travel and gazillion-star hotels. But as I lay in my bed over the new year, I wondered what scintillating and unexpected goals might reveal themselves once I recovered.
Except first there was the business of going back to work, of memorizing 100 new faces and linking them to the messy, exhilarating process of students writing their thoughts and hearts into graceful prose. The household required literal buckets, for scrubbing neglected floors and bailing out the rising waters of the basement during our very wet spring. There was catching up to do, as friends changed jobs, feared losing jobs, prepared for empty nests.
And then there was the sky.
It kept shifting, like a changeling magic show, building up terrifying gorgeous thunderheads that threatened but never availed us of their fury; mackerel skies that played with pinks and oranges while manic swallows trailed lines of metallic blue at sunset.
Under the light show a biblical horde of teeny tiny frogs hopped about the asphalt path at Circleville Park, which in the post-rain mist gave the hallucinatory effect of an undulating road, alive.
Still, the bucket list failed to emerge.
On June 21, the first day of summer, a traditional day of celebration for my light-loving family, we came
Coming soon!
Stylized Salon, owned by Michelle Mannino, a stylist of 20 years with continued education in color and cuts certified from New york and Philadelphia.
Stylized will offer an ammonia, thioglycolate, plastic and paraben free Organic product line.
Call to learn more about this salon at 814-280-2637.
Stylized Salon, Northland Center, State College
across a confident, waddling skunk during our twilight walk in the park.
We watched the effect this low-lying striped thing had on dogs and people; when skunk turned around and headed in our direction, everyone took three big steps back. The power of reputation prevailed for this deceptively silly looking creature.
Back at the house, watching the backlit mating dance of fireflies in the yard and listening to crickets sing the song that stretched back to every happy summer of my childhood, the bucket list fell away.
It is enough, I decided, to simply pay attention. To life.
Judith McKelvey is a senior lecturer in the Penn State department of English. She can be contacted at jlm24@psu.edu.
