The day when I sit in my basement University office working furiously for the 40th hour on my weekly homework, and hear Anthony sighing, and read (correctly) that he is tired of graduate school and needs to think carefully about why he’s in it, and know that the reason I understand that from a mere sigh is that of course I’ve sighed that sigh for nearly 20 years, not just his one.

The day when I realize that Spring is here, and it’s thus the time when loved ones die. My last aunt, who died this weekend while recovering from a fall and showing every sign of recuperating better than before. Her grandson, who at age 17 keeled over for no reason beyond a silent congenital heart defect. My friend Nancy, who downsized her household and promised me she’d help me sell the 50 boxes of beloved antiques she consigned to me, but who then succumbed in four short months to non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and whose packed boxes still sit stacked in our house a year later, speaking of her short sharp fall and the things I can now never learn about their contents. My uncle, my grandmother, my Dad. Spring is hard on us, the gone and left both.

The day the garage roof leaked all over the valuable antique crap stored in the garage. The day we drove at 8 o’clock through a thunderstorm to discover the doctor appointments were next week, not today. The day we realized the lovely graduate student health insurance poops out in five weeks.

The day we chatted in class, and it was seen in the midst of conversation that neither the promising tenure-track academic nor the wannabe returnee will ever be sufficiently well-regarded or rewarded to compensate for the shit they and their peers have put each other through.

The day a grad school colleague asks me, “How do you know all these cool people?” and I realize the right answer is nothing to do with me now, but rather with the fact that I once had a life outside, beyond the ivy-covered walls — they are all people I knew from Before, from life. Of course you cannot be expected to have them; you are Inside.

The day I manage to dig out from Winter and see just how many ideas have to wait, projects languish, simple solutions sit undone, because I need to catch up on the homework and the grants and the other projects that have been sloughed aside since first snowfall.

It is a day one thinks hard about values, and society, and age. A day one takes stock, and builds a number of lists with two columns, weighing left against right. It is a rebalancing day, a day of contrasts, and deficit calculations.

And luckily, the first day you could drive with the windows open.

Otherwise, it’d be pretty damned depressing.