five-sense Friday

I am sitting in front of a box fan nestled (safely) against a window frame, my laptop resting on a radiator coated in peeling paint, and I am thinking about how surreal my life is. Last night as I walked home from picking up a bag full of farm produce, I was overcome by these realizations, which I almost said aloud:

I am walking home down a Chicago street in late summer carrying a heavy bag of vegetables.

I have lived in Chicago more than four years.

I am working on a doctoral dissertation.

I am in my seventh year of marriage.

I am preparing a sermon for Sunday.

I will be twenty-seven in a week.


Sometimes articulating the basic facts makes their reality more real. Last night, I had a hard time wrapping my brain around this list of Real. Today I am still struggling with it. How have we moved from A to B? How do all the pieces fit together? How am I suddenly so close to thirty? And if this much has changed in life so far, what on earth will happen in the next five years, and the five years after that?

What I am sensing, now, is the subtle sweep of change. I am smelling a neighbor's bacon-frying dragged in by the fan. I am feeling its hot air on my face. I am seeing a very full calendar and a pile of painted papers, the rapid dimming of descent into night. I am hearing cicadas, insistent and nearby. I am tasting the last tang of a Michigan-grown apple. I am feeling the whirlwind, the dance and drift of time.